Sleep tugs at me with brutal insistence as the mist seeps in. I try to fight it, jerking my head up as it falls down, over and over.
In the haze, my thoughts slip where they always go. To them. My family. My mother’s voice at my door. My Dad’s laughter at the dinner table. Papa’s hugs. Father’s bedtime stories when I was little.
The way they’d pull me in, every night, just to remind me I was theirs. Loved. Safe.
My chest tightens as the images flicker, too fragile to hold onto any longer.
What if they aren’t coming?
The thought lodges deeply into my heart.
What if this is all there is now? White walls. Torture. Blood bags and shame.
I shiver as sleep drags me down, my breath hitching against the tears slipping down my cheeks.
Maybe I’m not strong enough to survive this place.
The dark rises to claim me, and for once, I’m grateful to not feel anything at all.
CHAPTER 14
CALLUM
Our suite is quiet.
Not the kind of quiet that comes with peace, but one that feels impossibly heavy, pressing against my skin like the walls themselves want to squeeze the breath from me. All I have are my thoughts to fill the silence, endlessly torturing me on a loop.
I miss the walls of our childhood home. The warmth of food cooking, the faint background of the T.V. blasting a football game, and our mother humming to music only she could hear in her head.
My eyes squeeze shut as the memories flood my mind.
Once upon a time we knew the depth of the love a family can have, like Briar has clung to in her retorts.
Every time she throws that in our uncle’s face, the closer she gets to just being another human on the street to me. Her focus has never been on terrorizing the world or turning humans into vampires.
She was just a woman with a dream that night on campus, in the wrong place at the wrong fucking time.
I sit on the edge of my bed, elbows to my knees, and my head bowed into my palms. I’ve rubbed at my face so many times itstings, but it doesn’t scrub away the memory of her screams and the images of her body being broken for entertainment.
Elias moves across the room, starting to pace with the sharp rhythm of his boots on the hardwood. Back and forth he goes.
I lift my head to watch him, knowing the only time he paces is when he’s trying to compartmentalize and file away whatever is bothering him, before it can eat him alive. We haven’t exchanged a word since our spat about me feeding her, so when he opens his mouth, his voice jolts me slightly.
“We just need to get through the year,” he mutters, voice clipped and even, as if saying it out loud is for both his sake and mine. His hands flex at his sides before he folds his arms tightly across his chest, shoulders hunched with tension as he locks eyes with me. “We keep doing what we have to, we keep our heads down, and then we get out. It’s already been a month.”
The words scrape through me like glass.A month.Has it only been that? It feels like a lifetime already, each day carved into me, each night bleeding into the next until time itself feels like another way to torture us.
I blink against the sting in my eyes. Elias’s gaze is sharp with that look that says he’s protecting me the only way he knows how–by telling me to shut down every emotion I’m struggling with.
But the thing is, I can’t. I can’t just file it away to deal with later, or not, like he does. We may be brothers but there are stark differences in our abilities to mask and cope.
“I can’t,” I whisper, admitting it out loud for the first time, shocked by the emotion that floods me with it.
My hands shake as I press them down against my knees in an attempt to stop the tremors.
Elias turns on his heel again, his boots thumping against the floor again as he crosses the length of the suite. His reflection flickers in the glass windows until he turns back toward me.
“You think I like this?” he asks, voice sharper now, but frayed around the edges like he’s coming undone alongside me. His hand drags down his face, catching at the bridge of his nose before he throws it down at his side again, fist clenching. “You think I don’t hear it too? I do, Callum. Every scream, every sound of her body breaking. But we can’t fix it and we can’t stop him. We’d only get ourselves killed, and then what? What’s left of our family then?”
