King of Stars (The Next Generation #2)

2. Stella

Chapter 2

Stella

E ven though I’d been sheltered— chained —I still knew the basics of life. Like…when it was cold outside, I’d shiver. Or when it was hot, I’d sweat. Both of those things were brought on by the weather, but when it felt like a cold hand had touched my hot skin, I knew it was a visceral reaction to where I was headed. Even Régine’s lingering perfume felt like an angry ghost passing against my skin.

Honestly, even though I experienced natural reactions, beyond that, I wondered how I even functioned like a normal human being.

Like a girl.

Or a woman.

I’d been locked up in this French dungeon so long, I was only used to cleaning, dancing, and being bossed around. Who was going to stop it? Maybe me, if I decided not to dance, but the wicked witch of France and her army would find ways to make me move. I’d tried to fight it once—only once. I ended up trapped underground, no light at all, with rats nipping at my toes.

It hit me in the gut, as it usually did when the truth came, that I didn’t function like a normal human being . Not really.

How could I when the wicked witch of France, Régine Nemours , held the keys to my freedom?

I pushed all that aside, though. Thinking about where I was and why only brought my mom back to me, and in certain company, it felt unsafe. Like the witch might be able to claw through memories and shred them on me. If I ever lost them, I’d be lost. Whatever connection I had to my mom kept me surviving.

Push the thoughts, the yearning, aside, Estella. Keep your focus on things of this world. Mind blank. Eyes straight. One foot in front of the other. Keep moving forward.

The voice in my head sounded like my mom’s. She was the only person who ever called me Estella. I’d decided early on that only people who were special to me had the right to call me Estella. People who had earned their place in my life. Stella was for everyone, special or not. The other name, étoile, was for people who would never have a place in my life, like Régine, her people, and the Russians who were in tight with her.

The man walking me, just one in her huge army, stopped when we came to the massive oak door. He turned to me, and his eyes slowly took me in. A robe covered me, but it was old, the itchy material thin, and the chateau held a chill. The curves of my body could easily be made out, my nipples almost poking through the threadbare fabric. I’d had it for years, and I was pretty sure it was made from an ancient potato sack.

My eyes were in place to meet his head-on when he finally made it back to my face. He said something in Russian, and I had no idea what the words meant, but I knew it was lewd. I’d learned early on that tone was everything when communicating with people who didn’t speak my native language—English.

The solider, a man who would become a faceless memory once our second was over, was just one of many who tried to make me feel smaller by looking at me in a way that told me he wanted my body, but the rest of me was to toss like trash. It was always about the momentary want and nothing else.

This was no knight in shining armor, but a dud without even a horse.

Long ago, I programmed my head to forget these encounters. The moment was only that. A moment. In sixty seconds or so, he would follow in many others’ footsteps. He would take me in, a sickening smile coming to his face. Then he would sigh, or make a noise of frustration, and turn to knock on the door. A few seconds later, the wicked witch would tell the man to enter, and that…that would be my time spent with the revolving man.

If he dared to touch me, to touch what didn’t belong to him, he’d find himself without a hand, or even worse, his breath. She’d have him killed, no questions asked. I’d seen her do it before.

Sometimes it was because she was in a bad mood and didn’t seem to have the patience to deal with the stupidité . Or sometimes she did it because she was clever. If a man seemed like he was going to be a problem, she got rid of him. If it was life or death circumstances, and I was forced to say something nice about Régine Nemours to save my life, or someone I loved, that would be what I would say. She was smart. She never let any of these men get over on her. When she walked into the room, even the most dangerous man standing in it would be leery of her. She’d stick a knife, literally, in his back before he could get to the door.

In that regard, Régine Nemours was a bad bitch.

Too bad she was just overall a rotten human being, and she sent chills, the bad kind, over me when I even smelled her perfume. The revolving solider must have felt the same way. After he finished his perusal and knocked on the door, an invisible hand seemed to shake his entire body for a split second when she answered.

His body did the same when he stepped in before me, and she turned to him from her desk. Two well-fed rats with fat tails sat on each of her shoulders, cleaning her ears. Those rats didn’t bother me. It was the rats starving underground that did the damage. Those mistook a shivering girl for a cold corpse in the darkness.

As Revolving Man was dismissed with a wave of Régine’s hand, I could see his shoulders visibly relax.

My entire body did the same. It had to, or else.

She waved her hand at me, and that was my cue. I removed the sack and, gracefully, laid it over the plush sofa in her office. The sofa looked so soft, it almost made me whimper. I wasn’t sure what year my bed was made, but it was made from stuffing.

For her prized dancer, she said the state of my things only made me hungry for better. I could dream about all the luxuries I would one day have. For the first fifteen years I was here, I did. I dreamed about clothes that would fit, other than my costumes. I dreamed of a mattress and fabrics that wouldn’t itch. I dreamed of hands that wouldn’t crack from cleaning supplies, and feet that wouldn’t ache and bleed from rigorous dancing routines. I yearned and hoped for water warm enough to sooth the pulses that came from dancing in shoes that tore my skin open. If the doctor said the splits were not infected, and he gave me something to stop them from becoming that way, it was back to work as usual for me.

I’d learned to move past all the hurt and…keep hoping. Sometimes I felt like my mental and spiritual muscles were stronger than the ones in my legs.

As strong as my will was, that hope still died one day, and in its place, I started concocting stories in my head about a knight in shining armor riding a majestic steed, who would one day storm the castle’s gates and steal me away to a land where women were revered, where he would love me until the day I died.

Not the time or place, Estella, the voice in my head shrieked. Right. Mind blank. Face and eyes forward. Be a space cadet.

Régine said nothing to me as I stepped up on the scale and she watched the numbers. I couldn’t be too skinny or a pound over my goal weight. That part of my life was the only one she was obsessed with getting right. If I didn’t meet her goals for my body, one , she’d have to pay more money to get the costumes she put me in remade, and two , her main attraction was supposed to look a certain way. I couldn’t change, in any way, or one of her patrons might notice and accuse me of being real .

Yeah, I was a fantasy that she’d caged. She created an illusion, and those people in her circle paid large amounts of money to believe the deception.

The guidable people with too much money to burn believed I’d traveled light years to get here, the soul of a fallen star that had somehow crashed into a body. With one touch, the toucher would be propelled into the sky, as if they were touching the cold burn of a star. The Nemours were known for creating these types of delusions, I’d heard, and were quite good at it. I believed the rumors.

Why else would they still have me chained if I couldn’t pull off the deception? Ivan Blinkov, Régine’s husband—well, he was, before he was murdered, and his heart was eaten by a wolf—made the mistake of underestimating me and would talk in front of me and to me at times. He’d once said that I was a draw, a money maker, one of the biggest Sub Rosa had ever had besides Scarlett Rose Poésy. There was an entire story there, one I’d learned bits and pieces of over the years, but I had no clue what had happened to her. Did she break free of the chains, or had she succumbed to them?

Régine pinched my hip, and I blinked at her, coming back to myself. It was important to drift at times in front of Régine, give her an almost drugged-up look, so she didn’t think I was breaking character too often.

“You are two pounds down,” she said in broken English. French was her first language. She would have preferred to speak French to me if I had been able to understand and speak it.

For as long as I’d been with her, and around the French, even the Russians, I had very little of both languages. It frustrated her. She called me stupid on many occasions, or implied it, but I was pretty sure it was a small, spiteful thing on my part. My brain was like, nope, not today, not after everything else you put us through. I refuse to learn because you want me to.

Régine never did anything to me in retaliation, so it seemed like a win on my part. An inconsequential victory that really made no difference, but somehow did to me.

She sighed, and one of the rats played with the end of her hair. The creature seemed like it was brushing it, collecting the dark strands, maybe to make a nest. “Sasha will be alerted of the change in weight and will adjust your diet.”

Sasha was the dietician who Régine hired to keep me at a certain weight. Sasha was the keeper of my diet. She decided on all my meals and was the boss of my personal chef. It sounded fancy, and maybe under other circumstances, it would be nice to have one. And compared to my lowly room in the help’s corner, with the bed made of straw and the clothes made of potato sacks, it was a comically rich thing to have. But…given the fact that I had no say in what I ate, whether I liked the dishes or not, or if I was not hungry or feeling starved…a personal chef was nothing but another chain to me. Except it wrapped around my stomach.

The only thing I could say made my life worth living was the vanity in my room and the secrets buried in it. After Régine noticed how well I could do my own makeup, no one else touched my face. My mom had taught me how. It was something special we did. When she would be getting ready for a show, she’d sit me on her vanity and transform herself into an entirely different woman while I watched.

Sometimes she would tell me stories. My favorite one was about the dashing knight and the poor damsel. “Death couldn’t even separate the lovers,” she’d say. “It was a love born in the stars, E stella .”

So, sitting in front of the vanity in Régine’s house of torture transported me back to those times with my mom, and suddenly, it became a wonderful place to be before I was taken underground to dance.

“étoile.”

“Hah?”

Régine gave me a look. It was a look that had to be felt to understand it. Part resentment, part love, and part jealousy. The love wasn’t actual love, but a love born of what I could give to her and her family. Money. And all those things were at war with each other over me. It was like she could separate the feelings most of the time, but when she looked at me that way, it was like an internal war was taking place inside of her. She might spew arrows from her eyes, and blood might drip from her lip. That look never gave me a good feeling in the pit of my stomach. Neither did the two words I’d been anticipating her to say.

“The coat.”

The coat that beautiful man gave me when we’d had a mouse and cat game in Sub Rosa.

That man.

Matteo Fausti.

Really tall-built-like-a-shield-with-the-face-of-an-avenging-angel Matteo Fausti .

His name made my heart race and my stomach fill with…some foreign substance that made me anxious. I’d encountered him the night in Sub Rosa when Ivan had been killed. Matteo tried to talk, or trick, me into coming into the light so he could ask me questions about Ivan after he’d chased me underground.

For a few seconds, I had considered it. Matteo was convincing, and maybe even sincere, but I didn’t take the bait. Still. I’d been thinking and dreaming of him since that night. He’d given me his coat, and I’d found his ring in the pocket. Since that night, he’d become the face of the heroic knight in my fantasies.

He was all I had left, in terms of hope, even if it was wishful thinking.

After all, the only faces I’d ever seen since my mom was the ones Régine allowed me to see, unless we were driving somewhere, and I’d get glimpses of people passing on the street. Even then, none of them were ever as handsome as Matteo. He was a…good dream while the rest of the world had become a nightmare.

It was important, though, that I did not lie to Régine. Like she’d once told me, she had more eyes than a spider. And besides not learning French, my truth was another defiance she couldn’t do anything about. I’d told her that I hated it here on, I was willing to bet, a million occasions. My misery only made her, and her daughters, chew up my truth and spit it out more.

“I told Boris that the coat was Ivan’s,” I said, my voice steady and clear. I never whispered for her benefit, and neither did I shout. “I really had no idea what was going on that night.”

“The coat is made of fine material,” she said in broken English. “I would want it too. It is better than the potato sack I give you to wear, no?”

“It is,” I said. “The sack makes me itch.”

She waved her hand. “This keeps you hungry for a better life.”

“Ha.” I made a sarcastic noise.

She took my hair and wrapped it around her hand, pulling my head back. “It has been a dream of mine to get in with the Fausti family, as a poison, and now they want what is mine. I will not make the same mistakes my foolish cousin made. I will be the woman who wins the war between our family and theirs.”

I shrugged, like I couldn’t care less, but my heart was beating so hard it felt like it might explode out of my chest. She’d never been so honest with me before about what was going on behind the scenes. Sometimes I’d catch snippets of conversations, since Régine used me as a personal maid around her haunted castle, but she’d never been so direct before.

“What will I have to do?” I hoped she didn’t hear the tightness in my voice. Even the thought of seeing Matteo, in any way, did strange things to my heart and made my throat feel like it had a lump in it.

She gave me such a wicked smile that I felt a shiver inside of my bones. “Nothing. Of course, I will use you as bait, but you will stay out of all my affairs and only do what I tell you, or else…” She pulled my hair back as she snatched scissors from her desk.

Holding my hair in her fist even tighter, she started to cut it. She was cutting it so short that I knew it wasn’t going to fall below my neck. And she was almost hacking at it with the dull sheers.

I had to force myself not to think.

Do not think, Estella!

My eyes were burning, and holding the tears back was as difficult as holding back vomit when sick. I was sick. So sick. No one had touched my hair since my mom dropped me off here. My mom would go on and on about how pretty my hair was, and like the other things she sent with me, I valued it. My mom had the same hair. I remembered running my hands through it, and her sighing at my touch. Like she just loved me so much.

Maybe I’d be sick before this was over, and the tears wouldn’t come, but Régine would be messed up, all messed up, from what she was doing to me . The acid in my stomach would stain her pristine appearance. But I was powerless here, and she knew it. She was sending me a warning.

She could easily sever the memories I had left of my mom from me, just like she was doing with my hair.

Oh. Oh. Oh. The sound came in the form of panic. Did the witch know about my hiding spot?

Don’t cry. Don’t cry. Don’t cry.

I gagged instead, and she pushed me forward, almost hard enough that I hit the floor. Gravity shifted at the last second, and I was able to stay on my feet. Gravity, however, had brought the strands of my hair to the floor. The sun sneaking through the gauzy curtains caught the gold and red in the auburn, and it seemed like the strands were on fire.

Régine waved a dismissive hand and plopped down in her chair, like what she’d done to me had taken all her energy. “Your true hair is not sitting properly. You will feel lighter. Like a star in the sky.”

Your true hair. She was talking about the stupid fucking black wig she made me wear. She even covered my irises with silver contacts so that I’d look, “not of this world.” Régine got a thrill that the natural black ring around my irises bled through, which gave me a true celestial look.

My true eye color was what Henri had called moody gray, the same color as his.

Acid burned the back of my throat as Régine turned on music. “Now it is time to do what you were born to do, étoile. Danse .”

That I understood, and with just the thought of her stealing another memory of my mom from me, she had me on my toes.