Chapter 1

Natasha woke from her slumber with a start, her aqua eyes scanning the room, looking for any sign of movement, her pulse beating in her ears. After a couple of seconds her tense body relaxed. 'It was only a dream' she told herself, shaking her head slightly to get the blood pumping through her brain. She pulled the covers around her, as the room suddenly felt colder now that her initial surge of adrenaline had faded, and looked at her alarm clock. It was 4am. Natasha sighed, she wouldn't sleep anymore tonight.

Lying back on her pillows she tried to remember what her dream had been about and why it had frightened her so. The same dream had been haunting her for months now, it started off only being occasional, but recently it had become more and more frequent. She had been dreaming the same blurred images more than three times a week. There was thick snow covering the ground, it swirled around her knees, and there was a great building. It looked like a cathedral, with its towers and stained glass windows. Then there was the screaming, the fire, the blood, the darkness. It all felt so real. Yet Natasha knew it couldn't be.

She had lived with her parents in the remote manor house in the Scottish highlands for as long as she could remember. It had been peaceful there, very quiet. Natasha looked around the dingy room she now rented in the centre of Glasgow. Her life had taken a severe downturn. Although it was painful to look back on, Natasha could remember all too clearly the months following her fourteenth birthday that turned her life upside down. Her father had to go on a business trip to Madrid. It was only supposed to be for a couple of weeks, but he had stayed away months. Then one morning Natasha had been woken in the early morning by one of the cleaning staff. During the dawn cleaning session her mother had been found floating face-down in the pool in the garden.

She had been too young to live by herself, but the social services could find no relatives who would look after her for just over a year until Natasha could start a life by herself. It had been then, while she was in care, that Natasha had found out that she had been adopted as a baby, there was no pregnancy on her mother's medical record, and nobody could find any birth certificate for her, or a certificate of adoption. It was as though she had appeared out of nowhere.

The dreams had started then. Natasha had blamed her traumatised mental state, but instead of getting better it just got worse, every time it was clearer. Natasha realised that the life she knew, it wasn't supposed to have been that way. She wanted to know who her real family was, and why events had played out the way they had. She wanted her heritage.

Unfortunately, being an orphan who couldn't inherit any money until her eighteenth birthday, Natasha had to make do with making ends meet every month in her rented flat which she shared with a bubbly girl called Adalia. The bubbly-ness wasn't so bad, but Adalia's insistence that Natasha go out, wear make-up and slutty little outfits to attract the interest of a low class guy who was after one thing only, grated on Natasha's personality. It was ok for Adalia; she had a boyfriend who had a job and a family who treated her as one of their own. Natasha had no-one and was not going to lower her standards in order to find some form of company, because she knew it would only hurt her in the future.

Stretching out, Natasha decided it was late enough in the morning for her to get up and have a shower before heading out to work in the local fast food restaurant. It was 5.30am, and all the thinking had made her brain hurt.