Patricia's POV...
They brought me back to my mansion in the same unmarked car, the same silent guards.
The whole ride was a blur—the skeletal branches of winter trees whipping past like claws, the occasional smear of city lights, my own ghostly reflection in the tinted window looking like someone I didn't recognize. A stranger with hollow eyes and a trembling mouth.
My lip was still split. A fat, tender wound. Dried blood had cracked and caked in the delicate corner of my mouth, a rusty brown badge of his violence. I didn't wipe it off.
It didn't matter.
Nothing mattered. Not the ache in my cheekbone. Not the phantom chill of the gun barrel still pressed to my temple. Not the echo of his voice—There will be no family.
Nothing.
The foyer was a cavern of marble and silence, lit by a single, monstrous chandelier. I was shivering, my thin dress no match for the chill that had seeped into my bones out there in the woods.
Then I heard it.
