Bargains and Betrayals Read Online Free PDF Page A

around Junction, I knew seeing and believing didn’t equate. “Mom?” My bedsheets fluttered and I caught the scent of sunlit summer fields. Although the air stilled as quickly as it had stirred, flopping back down on the bed, I didn’t feel quite as alone.
    When my guards gave up on me going out again and eventually brought my lunch, I ignored them.
    When they returned a few hours later with my dinner and a small notebook, a pen tucked in its spiraling spine, I still ignored them .
    But ignoring the notebook was impossible.
    Inside there were no instructions, just page after page of beautifully blank, lined paper.
    I poked at the cube of gelatin glimmering cheerily beside a carton of milk. The journal was far more enticing to a would-be writer than food would ever be.
    Tapping the pen on its cover, I enjoyed the echoing sound.
    But I got the feeling I was missing something. Like the thing I’d forgotten was so important it should have been impossible to forget.
    A question that begged— begged  … I paused. A question that begged asking.
    It felt as if somehow I’d woken up to find an arm or a leg missing. Only it went deeper, like someone had carved into my chest and left a hollow spot where my heart should have been.
    What question had frustrated me so much I needed sedation?
    Rolling over on my mattress, my hand landed on my elbow and I looked at the pink-and-tan puncture marks there. Counted them. If I’d been dosed once a day …
    I’d been sedated—blind to experience and blunted to emotion—for … one, two … three days. I rubbed at my eyes. What happened four days ago? What should I remember that I couldn’t?
    And as the world outside my room’s thickly glassed window grew dark I heard it: the undulating call of an animal in the woods beyond the rolling, manicured lawns of Pecan Place.
    Something inside me unfurled and fluttered, remembering and filling the empty space behind my ribs.
    My heart pounded, restarting in recognition.
    Pietr .
    And everything came crashing back to me: the question I should have still wanted an answer to, the reason I’d let myself be locked away …
    Pietr .
    I rushed to the window to catch a glimpse of him and heard the camera, high on the wall and safe in its cage, turn to follow me.
    Yes, everything came back to me then—but the last four days of my life. But I’d gladly bargain them away knowing Pietr was alive—and free.
    An alarm sounded and the noise of dogs—hunting hounds—rose to me. A flash of movement blurred across the gathering gray of nightfall and I knew Pietr was on the run.
    More importantly, I knew there was still hope.
    Jessie
    When the next day dawned I was aware enough to notice. I tugged the journal out and paused before jotting down my thoughts. I wanted to use it—I was desperate to write—but I didn’t want my writing used against me later.
    I wouldn’t write about werewolves. Or the Mafia. Or the CIA.
    I’d write about the farm. About my horse Rio and my dogs, Maggie and Hunter. I’d try some fiction: poems and short stories like I used to write before Pietr showed up and made all fiction pale against a few amazing facts.
    Gone was my desire to write about vampires; now my head was full of Pietr, of wolves and darkness, danger, blue-eyed Russian boys and—
    If I only wrote about Pietr in his human skin …
    My door swung open and my guards stepped in.
    I closed the journal and got ready to drag myself to breakfast. It was on the horrendously normal trek to the common room that I heard the request.
    “I’m here to see Jess Gillmansen.”
    My head snapped up at the sound of his voice, every nerve in my body jangling in response to the richness of his faintly Russian purr. I froze. My pulse jumped, heart stuttering.
    In unison, my guards turned, identifying Pietr.
    A threat.
    I grabbed at their arms, but they didn’t notice.
    The nurse flipped through some papers, unaware of the tension rising in the hall behind her. “I’m