Avrora.
The house is beautifully decorated with a look of an old world meeting the modern, but nothing is coming to me. We head upstairs and look around the rooms before then we go back downstairs doing the same thing.
Other than feeling like I should kick my shoes off, light up the fireplace, and relax in front of it with a steaming mug of something hot, I feel nothing more than that sensation of familiarity.
Anatoli opens the back door, and we go outside, heading toward the lake.
When I look toward the wood, something catches my attention and I stop. It's two twisted-looking oak trees standing opposite each other. Thick vines wrap around the branches, which grow high and wide like they're reaching for the sky.
I turn, and so does Anatoli.
"What is it?" he asks.
"There." I point. "There's something about those trees."
I'm walking toward them before he answers. He follows, falling in step with me.
The closer I get, the stranger I feel. No longer feeling that sense of familiarity, but something else.
As I get closer, something pierces through my mind along with the flash of... An image?
I close my eyes briefly and see a face. It's the terrified face of a woman. The image is there for a breath and gone the next.
When I open my eyes and my brain processes the face, I realize it's Vittoria Butyrskaya.
My God...
"Something happened here." My voice comes out in a hurried rasp.
"What happened?"
"I don't know yet."
I keep following the path, walking through the thicket of trees. The path continues, ending at a little shed ahead.
The sight jolts my brain. I stop again as a burst of memory pushes into my mind, forcing me to remember, and it's like I've stepped through the veil covering my eyes. I can see and hear, as if someone injected me into the action scene of a film.
The thud of heavy boots echoes on the ground along with the ferocious voices of men. Then Vittoria and Pavel run through the woods with terror marring their faces in the moonlight.
A tall, lanky guy runs next to Pavel, and Vittoria is carrying a little girl.
Little girl?
No...
That's me.
It's me she's carrying. She is my real mother.
And the guy next to us is my brother, Elmier.
We rush through the dark, formidable woods. Branches breaking beneath our feet as the men chase us.
Pavel-Father-raises his gun and shoots behind us, but the men keep coming. There were so many of them.
I see us running past the barn and going deeper into the woods, where the oaks turn to giant sequoias, looking like sentinels. But the men catch up with us, and more come.
They shoot Pavel in the head, and Vittoria's screams rip through me even now.
The men get closer, looking like monsters in the shadows. But in the moonlight, I meet the face of a man with a mean-looking knife scar running from his left eye to the edge of his jaw.
The man I would come to know as my father-Uther Galitze.
He shoots Vittoria, and she falls to the ground holding me. Then, in rage, he pulls out a knife and stabs her in her neck again and again and again.
Blood splashes everywhere, like it's pouring from the sky. When Elmier tries to help, Uther shoots him in his heart.
"Bury the bodies here where no one will ever find them and take the girl to the car." Is all I hear. It's Dad talking, but it's like his lips aren't moving.
I remember screaming and crying when someone picked me up.
Men come with shovels, and they start digging the earth.
I scream harder when they make me watch them throw the bodies of my family into the earth. All three of them. My mother, my father, my brother.
As the dirt is being thrown on their bodies in the shallow grave, I manage to kick the man holding me and bite his hands. When he loosens his grip on me, I wiggle out of his grasp and run just like I've always been told to do in danger.
The man chases me, calling after me by name. But I don't stop. I run for the road, and just as I step onto it, a car hits me.
I scream and fall to the ground, falling back to the present.
Warm hands pull me deeper to the here and now, but I'm still crying.
"Avrora." Anatoli says my name, but he sounds so far away.
"Shovel. I need a shovel," I mutter through my tears.
Leif and Lucca have now come to join us.
"I need a shovel!" Anatoli shouts.
Moments later, Lucca returns with a shovel and hands it to Anatoli.
"Where, Avrora? Where do we need to go?"
Summoning my last ounce of strength, I get up and follow the path that will lead me to what I know will be one last nightmare.
But I'll be awake for this one.
My mind takes me right to the spot by the giant sequoias where I was nearly ten years ago.
It looks the same, except the clearing of earth has a thin layer of grass covering it.
"It's here. They're here."
Anatoli stares back at me for a moment, hesitation in his eyes, before he starts digging.
Lucca and Leif join him with more shovels. The three of them dig and dig and dig until they unearth the first sighting of bones.
And I see what remains of my family.
Another scream pours out of my lungs, and I faint.