Freed

Prologue

When she was nineteen, the girl fell in love with the devil.

She'd spent the night in the campus library, cramming for the first exam of the semester when exhaustion started to eat away at her very bones, sending her head dropping down on the table every other moment. The effort to stay awake was draining all that remained of the energy she needed in order to focus.

She decided that enough time had passed, and she was in dire need of sleep after the long day. Letting her eyes scan the hundreds of words she'd sloppily scribbled down on a worn piece of paper one last time, she gave into the urge to leave.

By then, the library had gone quiet. Only a few other students remained, their heads hanging over pages and piles of notebooks and information as they refused to let sleep lull them into its enchanting trance. The girl muffled a yawn with her hand as she gathered her things and made her way out of the library.

As soon as she stepped out of the building, she was met with a wave of icy air and howling winds that nipped at her skin. The night was dark, with little to no stars in the sky, and the only light came from the streetlights scattered around campus. The place was a ghost town, but she wasn't surprised considering it was a Sunday night and she'd gone to the secluded part of campus.

The girl shivered and wrapped her arms around herself as she quickened her pace back to her dorm, her footsteps fast and steady on the concrete as she walked. The atmosphere was almost eerie in a way, and an unsettling feeling wrapped around her heart.

It was the first time she saw him.

He was sitting on one of the benches that lined the sidewalk, and she thought that he was the most beautiful person she had ever seen.

He looked around her age, maybe a year or so older, and he had headphones in as he sat alone in the dark. One hand lazily held a cigarette in his fingers as he seemed to be lost in his own head. The sight of him all alone was almost haunting in a way, and yet her footsteps faltered in her path as she spotted him. An enigma in the night; that's what he was. It was the first word that came to mind.

She wanted to paint him.

As if he could feel her looking at him, the boy's head slowly lifted up and the girl's breath caught as she met his gaze.

Midnight black hair paired with a set of striking, cerulean blue eyes lured her into his trap the moment she saw him. Despite the distance between them, she saw everything on his features under the moonlight. His face was all angles and structure, with a set of defined cheekbones and lips that were the perfect shade of pink.

The girl never realized that she had stopped paying attention to where she was going, so she missed the crack in the sidewalk.

One moment, she was walking alongside the path steadily, yet in the next, her books slipped from her hands as she stumbled to the ground. Pain sliced across her bare skin from where she had landed.

It was the first time she fell in front of him.

It was the only time he wasn't the reason behind her fall.

Humiliation stained her cheeks pink as she realized what had just happened, and a deep chuckle had her head whipping back up as she shifted her attention back to the boy.

She watched, completely frozen from the shock and mortification, as he slowly pulled himself off the bench and started towards her. Her mouth turned dry as he came to a stop in front of her. She had opened her mouth to speak, despite not knowing what she wanted to say, when the boy reached one of his hands out for her to take.

She blinked in surprise and he grinned. His eyes glinted with something she couldn't read in the dark and she wished she had realized it wasn't the smile of a gentleman.