Her Obsession (by Sheridan Hartin) novel Chapter 17

Under My Skin.

Sage Flashback

I was fourteen the first time I thought maybe there could be more than this. More than blood-soaked blades and bruised knuckles and waking up every morning wondering if today was the day Yakov decided I wasn’t worth the effort. His compound wasn’t a home. It was a war camp for children. Future killers. No birthdays. No lullabies. Just drills. Sparring. Precision. If you bled, you cleaned it up yourself. If you cried, you paid for it in bruises. But there was

feel… almost human. Nikolai. He was sixteen, fast, smart, sharp with a blade and sharper with his wit. He used to sneak me extra one boy who made protein bars from the kitchen and once broke a guard’s nose when he caught him pushing me too hard during training. We weren’t anything. Not really. We couldn’t be. But in the stolen moments between drills and missions, when we’d sneak onto the roof and stare at the stars we couldn’t touch, he’d talk like there was something better out there. For us. A life beyond the kill orders. He made me want more. Made me believe I could be something other than what Yakov carved me into. And then Yakov found out. We were lined up in the pit the next morning, boots on the dirt, breath misting in the cold air. The entire compound was there. Watching. Silent. Yakov stood in the middle, his black coat fluttering in the wind, eyes like dead coals as he dragged Nikolai into the center. “This is what weakness looks like,” he said.

I stepped forward. “It was me,” I lied. “I distracted him.”

Yakov smiled. Not kindly. Never kindly.

“That’s the problem with you. You feel too much. You care. It makes you sloppy. And it makes him…” he nodded at Nikolai, who met my eyes without blinking “dead.”

The gunshot rang out before I could move. Just one. Right between the eyes. He dropped like a marionette with its strings cut. I didn’t scream. I didn’t cry. I stood there, frozen, my nails digging into my palms until they bled. Yakov handed me the gun.

“Next time, you pull the trigger. Or someone else pulls it on you.”

At the time, I knew he had meant to kill the feelings before they spread, but when I first saw Conner…I realised, I could pull the trigger, but it didn’t have to be at him. No, I would kill Yakov next time.

It was two years after Yakov made me hold that gun in my hand and stare at the body of the first person I ever cared about. Two years of turning it all off. Of silencing the part of me that wanted to feel. I buried her…little Sage, the one who used to dream of escape and became what he wanted. A ghost. A blade in the dark. Cold. Controlled. Dead behind the eyes and I was good at it. By the time I turned sixteen, my body count was well into the hundreds. Men. Women. Sometimes even kids. If they were marked, they died. That’s how it worked. And I never flinched. Until him. The next mark on my list was Marcus Romanov. A stain on the world. A trafficker. A sadist. A monster in expensive suits and silk ties. One of Yakov’s private contractors who’d gone rogue, taken product he wasn’t authorized to move, and tried to build his own empire. Yakov didn’t like disobedience. Neither did I. I took the job without blinking. But getting to Marcus wasn’t easy. He never went anywhere alone. Never walked into a room unless he could control everything in it. He moved through cities like a wraith himself, dragging girls behind him in silence, buying loyalty and silence with money and fear. So I changed tactics. I became the bait. I studied his routes, memorized the women he took, the clubs he liked, the patterns he thought were unpredictable. It didn’t take long before I knew the kind of girl that caught his eye, young, hungry, forgotten. A ghost in her own right. I positioned myself on a cracked sidewalk outside one of his favorite nightclubs in New York. Baggy hoodie. No makeup. Bruises I painted on myself. Eyes hollowed out like I hadn’t eaten in days. He saw me. Of course he did. He pulled up in a black town car and stepped out like he owned the fucking sky.

“Hey there,” he said with that oily smile. “You lost, sweetheart?”

I played the part. Flinched. Nodded. Kept my gaze low. He offered me food. Warmth. A better life. I got into the car knowing exactly what I was doing. What I didn’t know was that Marcus took no risks. Not anymore. The second the doors locked, a needle sank into my neck. I woke up hours later. Stripped to my underwear. My mouth dry. Arms too weak to lift. Inside a steel cage surrounded by other cages. Girls all around me, some crying, some silent, some already gone behind their eyes. And Marcus? He stood at the far end of the room, watching. Hands behind his back. Smiling like a man who’d just won a game I didn’t even realize we were playing.

“You’re a pretty one,” he said, crouching in front of my cage.

I didn’t speak. Not yet. I was still calculating. Still planning. I could feel the drug burning out of my system, slow but steady. He’d made a mistake. He didn’t kill me. He would regret that.

“You don’t need to remember,” I whispered, voice hoarse. “You won’t live long enough to.”

He laughed and I spent a whole week in that dam cage. I was hoping he would let me out for a moment, all I needed was a bloody moment but it never came and I was losing hope. But he wasn’t laughing when they stormed in. I didn’t know them. Not then. Just a group of heavily armed men, Irish by the sound of them blowing the whole operation to hell. A blur of shouting, gunfire, and blood. I stayed still in my cage, watching. Assessing. One of them, lean,

1/2

Onger MY SKIT,

angry, fire in his eyes, shot Marcus in the face without hesitation. Another, youter one, unlocked the cages, guided the girls out. Tried to get names. Offered help. He got to mine.

“I can help you,” he said. “We’ve got a medic butside. We’ll take you home.”

I looked him in the ove. Not saying a word. Then I stepped over Marcus Romanov’s corpse and disappeared out the back door, barefoot, bleeding, but alive.

Because I hadn’t come to be rescued. I’d come to kill him. Someone else just got there first and that, that was the first time I ever saw him, Conner. He didn’t know it then. He didn’t even see me, really. But I saw him. And he’s been under my skin ever since.