I needed to leave. Right now. Right fucking now.
It didn’t matter if he tried to stop me, I was leaving.
I could feel the blood moving through my veins as my heart pumped wildly in my chest. It was an awful sensation, and coupled with the growing warmth beneath my skin, I felt like clawing the flesh from my body and draining my veins of every drop of blood so I didn’t have to feel any of it anymore.
My breaths quickly became shallow and short, and I staggered across the room, trying to get to the door. Adrenaline was coursing through me, filling me with this frantic need to punch something, scratch someone, bite into their soft jugular and rip their throat out.
“No,” I panted, stumbling to my hands and knees. Pain flared through my chest and shoulder, and I fell onto my side with a shout. I grunted and ground my molars together, ignoring the pain and pushing to my knees, then to my feet. My ankle throbbed, and damn it, I’d dropped the stick, but there was no time.
A burst of determination to get out of here cracked through me like a bolt of lightning, and I limped to the door. I grabbed the handle and twisted, ignoring the way my hand was trembling. I yanked it open and took a hard step with the wrong foot. My ankle wasn’t fully healed yet, and I fell to the side, only able to get an elbow up in time to try and break my fall.
The part I hated most had come, and there was no stopping it.
My cock hardened and my balls tightened. Pain mixed with a horrible ecstasy as my body heated up. My vision started to blur, so I began crawling along the floor, still determined to leave, to get out, to be anywhere buthere.
But dragging myself along only stimulated my aching dick even more, until I was stopping altogether so I could grind into the hard concrete, moaning and panting and sobbing into my arm.
Terror slashed through me in a relentless torrent of dread and panic. They were the same fears that gripped me every time this happened, the same paranoias beating at the front of my skull.
What if I never came back? What if I just stayed stuck like this? Or worse, turned into one of the Corrupted?
Every time it happened, I thought maybe it would be the last time.
I wondered what my final thoughts would be. If I’d even have any.
It terrified me, knowing I had no control over it. Thinking I was one storm away from losing myself completely.
Not that my life was anything spectacular. But I wanted it to be mine—only mine, and if I corrupted before I even had a chance to get out of here, to live, then it never would be.
The edges of my vision blurred as I came on a choked sob, euphoria briefly taking over before dissolving back into that awful, visceral terror.
It was happening, and I couldn’t stop it.
I was going to hurt him.
Maybe even kill him.
Or he would kill me.
Either way, only one of us was coming out of this alive.
Chapter 7
Cain
His name is a number.
I cut the apple into slices, arranged it carefully on the plate, then studied my work.
That looked like a flower, right? Did he know what a flower was?
I scoffed. Of course he knew what a flower was. Except…actually, maybe he didn’t. He didn’t know a lot of things, and every time I discovered something else he didn’t know or understand, I felt this urge to teach him about everything.
But I couldn’t get past the fact that his name was a number. It was a constant drumming in the back of my mind, an unsteady beat that echoed against itself.
He’d never been a person to anyone, just…a fucking number.
I didn’t recognize these ugly emotions that were crawling out of dark places in my soul; they were hateful and violent, a wrathful entity that wanted to destroy the ones who gave him a number for a name.
