Prologue
The human heart beats about 115 900 times a day. My heart managed this in a mere minute when he was looking at me.
I desperately tried to get some oxygen into my lungs, but that meant first having to remember how to actually breathe.
Adrenalin rushed through my vessels like crazy, alerting every hair on my body. My nerves were on alert too, sending chills down my spine into my toes. My insides twisted into one big chaotic knot.
Everything around me went blank, I didn’t even know who I was.
The sounds, so loud a minute before, suddenly stopped and the world vanished.
I stared at him, bewitched by his gaze, and every cell in my body screamed to escape.
But my brain remained blank and my muscles refused to obey.
I had never before been so frightened.
His eyes were piercing through me. I could feel them over every inch of my body. Blacker than the deepest pit of hell. He captured me with his stare and I felt as if I was trapped in a cage. Without a way out, or any chance of protecting myself. All I could do was stand there and let myself be destroyed.
Totally crushed.
As if he knew all my terrible nightmares. All the fears that had ever haunted me, even for a second. As if he had the power to get under my skin, weave all my anxieties into one big fabric and present it to me with his single excruciating gaze.
He burned me with his glowing eyes and, at that second, I believed that the Devil really existed. Not only in fairy tales and scary stories, where he would seize human souls.
Standing in front of me completely still, he didn’t need any further powers.
At that moment, when I felt the weight of his attention, I was perfectly willing to lay my soul at his feet.
Hypnotized, defenseless, fully exposed, empty. And helpless to do anything about it.
Not until he himself would set me free.
I wasn’t able to pull myself together after that accidental meeting, not even after I opened the door and ran to my car in the parking lot. All I wanted was to go home.
Not just to Jim’s home.
Well, Lara, I sighed, pulling the keys out of my pocket: welcome to your new school.
