Chapter 1
I try to remember how I got here. But the icy cold spread all over my body in seconds. The last thing I promised myself before even the fuzzy, round lights of the world faded to black, was that I’d remember the way, that I’d fight unconsciousness and know where he took me.
Instead, I woke up lying on a thin, bumpy mattress, its twisted and bent coils poking me in the back and legs. My head is resting on a hard, thin pillow, which is already making the back of my head and neck ache. I’ve been here a while. The drugs are wearing off.
But I can’t move.
My wrists and my ankles are tied to the edges of the bed, the bindings soft against my flesh, but unrelenting to my attempts at breaking free.
I see nothing either.
The blindfold is thick, wide, and soft, its edges tickling the bridge of my nose.
Smell and hearing are the only two senses left to me.
And they’re not telling me much.
A faint scent of snow, pristine and deep, hangs over the room. I can smell the mildew and damp of the mattress and old sweat on the pillow, sour and nasty. The room itself smells of dust and wood. Not dirt, but I can tell the room hasn’t been cleaned properly in a long time.
Another kind of smell grows thicker from time to time before fading away. It reminds me of raw meat.
The silence in my prison is so thick it’s like a blanket over my head. I can hear the wind rattling against the window, making it chime, the way the messed up window in my apartment chimes. When that happens, the smell of snow intensifies and a freezing cold draft wafts over my bare legs and arms.
If I could get free of my restraints, I could escape out that broken window.
But I can barely move my arms more than a centimeter in each direction.
He called me Snow White.
And that’s the only thing I remember clearly.
Chapter 2
Eva
Three articles to finish, or I don’t eat, but instead of writing, I’m staring out the uncurtained window behind my desk and open laptop, focused on the softly falling snowflakes, some as big as half my palm. And I’m not thinking about writing either. I’m thinking about what it’d be like to watch these same snowflakes leaning on Mark’s wide chest, his arm wrapped loosely around me. Maybe we’re sitting on a soft, fluffy rug in front of a roaring fireplace in some mountain cabin in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by soft snow and silence.
I curse, shake my head and look back down at the blinking cursor in the middle of a blank page. If I don’t finish this article and mail it today, I’ll be feeling the fat snowflakes falling directly on my head. Outside. In the cold. While I’m begging for change in Alexanderplatz, hoping some of the thousands of tourists there will take pity on me.
Lucky for me the article I’ve started working on today is a filler piece and I could write it with my eyes closed.
Tomorrow—today when this article will be published—it will be six months since the last of the princesses were found. Deathly pale, wearing gowns of silk, their eyes forever closed. Cinderella wearing a pink ball gown and one transparent plastic shoe, that was specific enough to give the police hope it will be traced easily, but wasn’t.
Sleeping Beauty with her golden blonde hair neatly curled in the style of a Victoria’s Secret model, wearing a translucent pale blue night gown, her hands neatly folded across her perky breasts and a glass tiara in her hair. She was found in the tallest tower of the American Church in Berlin, lying on the floor, but positioned exactly like the picture in the fairytale book my grandpa used to read to me when I was young.
In real life, Cinderella was Mona Florescu, who came to Berlin at seventeen from a village in Bulgaria to find a better life. By nineteen, she was working the streets. By twenty, she was immortalized as the first victim of the man who soon became known as The Fairytale Killer, the most twisted serial killer Europe has ever had.
Sleeping Beauty was Lara Dunholm, a Nordic beauty queen looking for a career in modeling. She came from Denmark when she was eighteen, trusted one too many false modeling agents, ending up addicted to heroin, and working the streets as a prostitute of the lowest standing. Most often, she found clients among truckers at the big gas stations on the wide highways leading into Berlin. Not the night she disappeared though. No camera at any of the gas stations she frequented showed her that night. Another dead end. Another hopeful trail gone cold. No kiss would ever wake her.
Both were poisoned with a lethal dose of valerian and benzodiazepines. Both were bled until not a drop of blood remained in their veins. Both were raped after they died. No prince charming came to their rescue.
