Last Snow - Eric van Lustbader [62]
She shuddered so deeply that her torso came off the bed as if through a bolt of electricity. She felt the familiar, horrific nausea rising in her, and she fought to stay where she was, held at bay the urge to flee to the bathroom and kneel beside the porcelain bowl to puke up her guts.
No, she told herself in a remarkably steady voice, you no longer need to do that. Morgan Herr is dead, there’s nothing more he can do to you. Whatever is happening, you’re doing it to yourself.
And yet, once again, as she’d felt in Milla Tamirova’s dungeon, she was paralyzed, completely powerless, as if she had once again been stripped of conscious volition.
“Whoever did this to you, whoever abused you will have won.” Milla Tamirova had smiled. “We can’t have that, child, can we?”
But Milla Tamirova didn’t know, because Alli didn’t dare tell her, the other reason for her feeling powerless. The urge to cut herself open, to have the secret spill out with her guts, left her shaking and drenched in cold sweat. She could feel the bed vibrating beneath her, or was it her own body that was making the bed quiver?
“You’re a coward,” Morgan Herr’s voice echoed in her head. “You’re a little, sniveling bitch, and who paid for your cowardice? Tell me, who paid?”
Racked with sobs, she lay back down on the bed and, turning on her side, pulled the coverlet over her. Sometime later she was plunged into a sleep where, in dreams, she strode across the leafy campus of Langley Fields. Emma, whispering beside her, had the sun on her face, so her eyes, usually as transparent as lake water, were hidden in the glare. Then Alli passed into the cloud of shade thrown by a pear tree, and as she turned to Emma, she screamed and screamed, and could not stop screaming.
JACK PUSHED Annika off him, not roughly but firmly, so that there would be no question of his intent.
Part of him felt as if he should be thinking of Sharon, but Sharon was far away in every manner imaginable; she was lost to him in the way he’d been afraid he’d lost Emma. He realized now that from the moment he’d first met Sharon, from the instant of their first incandescent coupling, they were headed toward dissolution, like a body that sinks beneath the waves and, in a split instant, becomes nothing more than a reflection, a reminder of what was or, possibly, what might have been. But, in any event, it was losing its coherence, if it had any to begin with, as it plunged headlong into oblivion.
Emma had been their only chance to stay together, but, really, that was a false hope. For a moment he forced himself to imagine his life had Emma not died, and the inescapable conclusion was that as far as he and Sharon were concerned nothing would be different. From the moment Emma was born, they disagreed on everything concerning their daughter, a dangerously scattershot method of child-rearing, but they were both blinded by their immaturity. It was the wrong moment for them to become parents, and they didn’t handle it well, taking their fundamental differences into a more public arena.
The other part of him was both hard and on fire. Though he fought against it, his breath came in short, hot pants, as if he were nearing the end of a long, grueling race. He knew the thoughts of Sharon and dissolution were meant as a distraction from his current situation, but his mind refused to stay thrust back in time, returning again and again to the seductive stimuli his five senses brought in.
He drank in Annika’s scent, felt the warmth of her body, heard the soft soughing of her breath, like wind through the treetops. He could not help but savor the taste her lips had left on his, the first bite into a fresh peach.
He turned his head to see her lying on her right side,