The walls of Thane’s house are too quiet; the walls of this bedroom feel as if they're closing in on me.
It's too still, too suffocating.
No matter how much I tell myself that I’m free now, that Blood Claw can’t reach me here, the silence feels like a new kind of cage—polished, tidy, with its own invisible bars. The yellow walls in the bedroom aren't a symbol of hope, but the false guise of it.
The air feels heavy with the scent of cedar and smoke, faintly filling the room. I catch it in every breath I take as I sit on the edge of the bed, fingers twisted in the sheets, trying to ignore the tightness growing in my chest. Why does it smell familiar? And why does the smell remind me of the Thane I knew in the past?
The only difference is that the Thane from back then didn't stir up whatever I'm feeling now. I can still feel the phantom pulse where Thane grabbed my wrist earlier, and where his hands had been planted on my shoulders as if that electric spark burned my skin and refused to fade.
I should hate him.
Idohate him.
But the thing about hate is that it can't exist without the existence of love, even if the latter has since faded into nothing. It burns the same way, sears the same part that once hoped for tenderness. It's just the opposite end of the spectrum.
And the hatred I feel for Thane reminds me that it was once love I felt.
Groaning with irritation, I lie back on the bed, staring up at the ceiling, counting the beams as if the repetition might ground me.
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.
My pulse slows eventually, my eyelids growing heavy, but sleep doesn’t come gently. It drags me under, rough and unrelenting, into the place where my mind twists truth and fear into the same dark thing.
The scent hits me first—smoke and iron. The copper tang of blood on the wind and on my tongue, faint but evident enough to be noticed. I’m standing in the middle of the forest where the greenhouse used to be, but it's not there anymore. The trees around me are stripped bare, the earth charred black and left with blankets of ash, and a red moon bleeds through the branches like an open wound in the sky.
Something moves between the trees, catching my attention. I listen closely and hear soft whimpers.
Familiar.
Desperate.
My own voice.
“No…stop…I didn’t mean to….”
The sound of my own pleading rattles through the woods like an echo from another life, prompting me to move forward.
Then I see her—me—kneeling in the dirt, trembling hands pressed against the chest of a lifeless body.
A man’s body.
His face is obscured by dark shadows and the bleeding red moon, but I recognize that build, the hair, his side profile from where he's lying on the ground.
Thane.
But not the Thane I've known for most of my life. This one's face lacks life, color, the essence that makes him so extraordinarily appealing.
My breath catches and lodges in my throat like a lump as I stumble forward, my bare feet crunching over brittle leaves that turn to ash underfoot.
“No…no, this isn't real…” I whisper. “It can't be....”
But when I kneel beside him, the shadow that hides his face flickers, and I see golden eyes staring back at me, glowing even in death. The skin on his face is cracked, mimicking the scar I wear from being abused in Blood Claw, but his is burned through with light—the same gold that bled from my fingertips the last time I was here.
