Malik was playing with my mind, bending my will, weaving something insidious beneath my skin. He was darkness, just like Balthazar.
My heart pounded as fury surged through me.
“What have you done to my husband? Where is he?” My voice cracked, raw, and desperate.
Two months of nightmares of searching, of tearing myself apart with uncertainty.
Fat tears spilled down my cheeks. “Is my husband dead? Where did you take him?”
My knees buckled, and I collapsed, unable to hold myself up any longer.
Sobs racked me.
Malik crouched before me, still damnably silent.
He didn’t move. Didn’t speak.
He only watched, his gaze distant, as if he were miles away.
The stillness stretched around me, vast and suffocating, a chasm of nothingness that swallowed me whole.
I couldn’t take it.
My body shook with violent sobs, my arms wrapping around myself as if I could hold in the pain, keep it from spilling into the endless silence. But it was too much—the ache of everything I had endured and lost poured from me.
At last, my voice broke through the emptiness, fragile and desperate.
“Please… tell me what happened to Roman. I miss him so much. I can’t bear not knowing. I don’t want to suffer anymore.”
If I kept crying like this, I would vanish, dissolving into dust, carried away by the wind of my sorrow.
And then?—
Malik moved.
He reached across the emptiness between us, his fingers featherlight as they brushed away my tears.
I gasped.
Then—before I could react—he lifted his fingers to his lips, sucking my tears into his mouth as if they were the most exquisite, golden gemstones he had ever tasted.
The room shuddered. Or maybe it was just me.
I could hear Rosie and Emily breathing behind me and sense their wide-eyed stares pressing into my back. And yet, we were all ensnared—held captive by the force radiating fromEyan Malik.
He cupped my chin, his touch firm yet gentle, like a parent tending to a child’s scraped knee.
Warmth. Comfort.
I should have recoiled.
Instead, I melted beneath his fingers.
And then, at last, he spoke.
“I am indeed Eyan Malik,” he said, his voice deep and resonant, like the whisper of ancient trees. “I have been waiting for you for a long time. And finally, you have found me.”
His hands never stopped moving, his fingers stroking my cheeks, brushing against my forehead, weaving something dangerous into my skin.
