“Riven shares his. After what happened, I didn’t want to burden you.” He fixes the duvet, covering us, but I don’t want that.
It’s getting hotter and hotter.
It’s coming back.… I can feel it waking…I know nothing about you.
Just survive it and I will tell you anything.
Then it hits me again. Another round.
???
“I can’t lose you.” Jestin’s voice is broken, like he’s barely holding himself together. I can sense him at the edge of my bed.
“We won’t. She’ll get through it,” Riven states.
I want to look at them, but I can’t move. I am trapped in that miserable, painful shell.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
“We have a problem, Riven,” a voice I know, but don’t recognise, says.
“Not here,” snaps Aidon.
“She needs to know,” the voice says.
“She’s sick.”
“Speak. We don’t do secrets anymore,” Riven says.
“Elemental army… burn the…” my scream drowns out the rest.
“We’ve run out of time,” Jestin says under his breath.
???
I doze off and wake repeatedly, time stretching endlessly. I feel the towels on my head and the gnawing hunger. The different scents of the males around me, as they hold me in turn and the hunger. I remember a splash of water and the yelling.
And the hunger.
???
I snap awake.
The entity in me, once dormant, stirs, flooding me with its feelings, but I can’t move, can’t act. I exist, but have no body, no eyes. Only… the storm and me. It demands something. It’s livid. It threatens to consume me if I don’t deliver. But what?
Root,the storm growls.
I know depression. Trauma. But this hollow wreckage inside me? It beats it all. With ease.
“Just let me die,” I plead.
Crying, sobbing, trembling.
My veins feel like they’ll burst from the ache of emptiness. I need it to end.
“Oh, baby girl...” A male places his warm hand on my face. My heart knows him.
“Let me die,” I whisper as another tremor rips through me.
