All the screaming was about the bone in my ankle. Brandon told me repeatedly that the information they sought from Christian’s heart was specifically related to getting the ring around my ankle through the bone. If I would stop being so difficult and go to the heart, I would find the information, and then any chains placed around me now, or in the future, would be meaningless. According to Brandon, I’d learn how to escape from anywhere, even the castle that surrounded me.

Aside from escaping their awful castle, I had no idea why they wanted me to gain that ability. Brandon didn’t explain anything. He just sought to persuade me to go to the heart.

“Go to his heart.”

“Beat the door down.”

“Burrow inside.”

“Eat what’s there.”

“It’s your heart now.” 

I felt sick.

As I mentioned, I celebrated my twenty-second birthday alone in the castle. At least, I guessed I’d had my birthday. I wasn’t overly interested in what day it was anymore. Brandon didn’t mention it and it didn’t matter much. 

Even without going to Christian’s heart, I gained piles of knowledge from the Red Forest. Since I realized my power over my body, I changed anything about it I didn’t like. Moles disappeared, hair fell out or grew more plentifully, as I desired. Muscles grew and fat disappeared. While I made modifications, I found it was actually impossible to hit the nail on the head. I had been given perfect control over my body and I couldn’t decide what was actually perfect when I looked in the mirror. I fiddled with my appearance constantly, especially my upper arms. What looked good when I looked down at them was a lot different than what looked good when I looked at myself in a mirror. 

Aside from fiddling in the Red Forest, there wasn’t much to do in the castle. There was a bathtub with a skylight over it, so I often filled the tub with hot soapy water, turned off the lights, and gazed into outer space.

Of all the rooms I could access in the castle without moving stone, the kitchen was the least thrilling. It wasn’t because it wasn’t beautiful. It was. It was just that it had been stocked with food that did not make anyone’s mouth water. There was powdered milk, condensed milk in cans, rice, flour, and other canned food. The canned food was as exciting as canned food got, meaning I ate olives out of the bottle, mandarin oranges, and pie filling. I supposed I had the ingredients to make a pie. If I had known how to make a pie, that probably would have been the best thing I could have made.

Except I didn’t know how to make anything with the ingredients they supplied with no recipe books, so I watched the snow fall and ate pickled beets from the jar. 

I was very bored. I would have started writing on the walls in blood if the walls hadn’t been hewn out of rough stone. It wouldn’t have had any effect on Brandon or Pricina anyway. Pricina could change anything she wanted.

That morning I had cream of wheat, made with water and I really hated it. I ended up opening a can of pears that I had been saving because it depressed me so much. 

When I was finished, I tugged my chain, dragging it noisily across the polished marble, and got back into bed. I wrapped the blankets around me cocoon-style and closed my eyes. I wasn’t going to sleep. I was going to try again with my ankle in the Red Forest.

I went there every day without fail. I closed my eyes and disappeared into the place behind my eyelids. It was a place where the sky was brown. The trees grew with slick red bark and no leaves. I wore a black dress that fell over my shape as comfortably as a nightgown. It was the place I went for a split second before I died, and because I was willing to make sense of what I saw, I was able to stop a bullet from killing me—the Red Forest. 

At the spot where the ring pierced my ankle, I sat on the chrome ring. I swung on it like it was a circus swing and pounded my figurative fists against the ivory wall that was my ankle bone like it was a door that would not open. I asked blood insects that floated by what they knew, but they only knew what I knew: bones were not blood. Bones were blood factories. 

That was the problem I had been contemplating when I went to sleep and dreamed of the dearest man in the world, Christian, asking me to undress for him. The dream had not been inspiring. That was not the way Christian ever treated me. My subconscious made him that way because I had been trapped for so long.

What was Christian like again? Could I remember? Sometimes he felt like something I had imagined because everything in the real world sucked. 

When I tried to ask the Christian in my memory what he would do about Brandon, he didn’t say a word. He only looked at me levelly with that look in his eyes as if to ask me if there was anything he wouldn’t do.

That was the crux. Christian would do anything. Cut off his hand? Cut out his heart? He would do absolutely anything. He had no limits. 

If I was going to be like him, would I have to give away my limits too?

I often thought about escaping the castle. It was probably possible… to a certain degree. I could break my ankle to get the ring off. Perhaps breaking the chain the ring was connected to was a better way, but I had every reason to believe that if a link was broken, it would bring Pricina down on me. Breaking my ankle would probably work better, but would I be able to heal it, escape the castle, and make it to safety before Pricina caught me? My chances were poor.

The terrain outside the castle was the harshest on the planet. A bullet to the head was one thing, but hundreds of miles of snow-capped mountains were something else. I couldn’t open a window and the outside temperature was a mystery. It could be the sort of weather wherein people lost fingers and ears.

Brandon and Pricina had orchestrated this scenario so that I had no other way forward, like a mouse in a tunnel instead of a maze.

If I continued to resist going to Christian’s heart, what end would there be? 

This was damnation. As long as I was in the castle, I was damned. 

When I looked at the remaining roads ahead of me, I saw three paths. Christian might try to rescue me. Without the secrets he hid in his heart, there was no part of him that was as powerful as Pricina. If he had once had power like that at his disposal, he wouldn’t have needed me to help him retrieve Brandon’s head from the compound. He would have been able to do that himself without losing a hand. He wasn’t strong enough to rescue me. 

Secondly, Brandon might give up on me and let me go. I snorted. He wasn’t going to get tired. He wasn’t going to think it wasn’t worth his effort to keep working on me. He was immortal. He had time to spare and he’d steal all of my time if I let him keep me locked up.

Thirdly, there was chaos. Something unexpected might set me free. 

When I thought that, I realized that I had reached the end of possibilities, except the one Brandon suggested.

I had to do what Brandon said without letting him know. I had to sneak into Christian’s heart and when I was free, I’d chop off Brandon’s head again. It turned out that I liked him better without it. Rolling my eyes, I amended my thought. Perhaps taking his whole head was overkill. I’d cut his tongue out at least. I wasn’t a barbarian.

I swung up and leaped off the ring. Gravity was like a dream in the Red Forest, and I floated until I landed on the pads of my unchained feet on the bone bridge. Swinging my steps like a little girl who wasn’t in a hurry, I walked the long way through the Red Forest, all the way from my ankle to Christian’s heart. The walk, though imaginary, did me good. It gave me time to think.