CHAPTER 92

Anastasia

I was prepared to become a woman when I was just a little girl. Childhood vanished before my eyes. That’s what happens when you rid someone of love. You open the doors to darkness without letting them realize there could ever be color. I want to say that I blamed my mother, but the only way I could do that was to also blame her mother, and then the mother of her mother.

The heat that escalated through my body only seemed to grow as I tried to ignore it. The longer I tossed and turned, the more the temperature pricked my skin. A sigh escaped my lips as I just lay there in a pit of sweat, hoping it wasn’t affecting my sister as much as it was affecting me.

“Nana,” Aria called out from the other side of the room. “Mum didn’t pay the electricity bill again, did she?”

“Stay here, I’ll figure it out,” I whispered before getting up from the mattress.

We weren’t fortunate enough to own anything to lift our bed off the ground. We were lucky enough to simply have a mattress.

I walked