Chapter 26

[Alexander]

The pain inside me didn’t stop when I locked eyes with her, the way I thought it would. Something was wrong, I could sense it, and I had no idea why the woman laying on the bed didn’t have the effect on me that she always seemed to have. I moved closer to the bed, with the rails pulled up on either side, tubes criss-crossing all around her and needles turning her skin blue where they sunk into her skin - skin that was already blue and black in patches from the attack she endured.

The face of the woman I sought, the woman I loved, was not the face I looked at now. She turned her head when she heard me calling, but when she looked at me, her brows were knit in confusion. Her eyes weren’t as bright as I had remembered, and now that I was closer, I noticed that her brown hair was too dark to belong to the woman I loved. Her face was also leaner, almost sickly so - as if life had been sucked from her cheeks.

“Who are you?” Her voic