“Yeah?”
“I wish we didn’t have to pretend.”
Her words hit him harder than electroshock therapy ever could.
“Sleep tight, sunshine.”
Xialienakedandcurled on the bathroom floor huddled against the pile of towels she’d pulled from the rack. Goosebumps pimpled her skin from the cold tile, but she couldn’t move. The last of her energy had been spent pushing herself away from the vomit mere inches from her face.
The Lord of Nightmares, or the Devil as he was called in his nefarious club, had been greedy and took more than normal. If she didn’t know better, she might think death was knocking on her bathroom door.
She wasn’t so lucky.
Brooks asked her for a nightmare, but she couldn’t bring herself to speak of them. She couldn’t tell him she was lying lifeless on the bathroom floor in a pile of her own sick with nothing but a couple of towels to prop her head.
No. Dealing with the aftermath of the Devil’s greed was nothing new– there was no need to bring anyone else into it now. Especially when their time together was so precious to her. She wouldn’t burden him with her truths when she could simply enjoy his company.
Regret flooded her mind. Rather than a story to ease them both, she tainted their time with tragedy. She would do better. They both needed hope and during the times he let her in, that’s all she wanted to feel.
Hope.
Hope that he would rescue her from her gilded prison. A knight in shining armor who struck down the Devil and obliterated anyone on his path to save her.
Xia took a few steadying breaths and pushed herself from the floor. She didn’t know how much time had passed since the Devil left her chambers but her body was growing sore from the cold tile.
She rolled to her hands and knees and tested her right leg to stand, but it was too weak. No matter how hard she pushed, the muscle wouldn’t support her weight.
Tears sprang to her eyes as anger and sorrow built but she refused to lie helpless any longer. She urged her body forward and crawled to the small walk-in shower in the corner of the bathroom.
It was an effort and the tile was ruthless on her battered knees. Lifting to reach the knobs, however, proved even more difficult than the crawl over.
She allowed one sob, one moment of weakness, before she steeled her spine and walked her hands up the wall, turning on both the hot and cold as her body trembled from the exertion. Whatever temperature she managed would have to be good enough.
Xia slumped against the wall, knees hugged closely to her chest, as the water fell over her naked body. It was too hot, but she couldn’t muster the energy to adjust it.
She let the water warm her chilled skin and wash the stain of the devil away. She tried not to think of it, the way he tied her up to stop her body from thrashing against the pain. How he held her jaw in a bruising grip to keep their eyes locked, his magic probing and digging its claws into her mind, shredding it as it pulled her worst nightmares from her memories.
Xia had endured physical abuse. She was a victim in every form of the definition. But nothing came close to the pain of someone tearing your psyche apart from the inside out.
And when he was done making her relive her own nightmares? He would twist them into something worse and feed them back to her.
How many times had she thought her heart would burst from the absolute terror those nightmares inflicted?
Xia watched the bellowing steam curl in the air as the water pelted her skin. She wanted nothing more than to scrub the memories away.
Later. She would muster the energy for that later.
For now, she would fill her mind with Brooks.
“Tonight… can we just pretend?”
Had she not already been on the floor, she may have fallen from the vulnerability of his request. She would give anything to ease his pain, to pull him from the dark and hold his face between her hands. If he only knew how often he saved her… How often he was the only thing standing between her and the abyss.
Xia pushed a small bit of her magic into the water and occupied her mind by bending it to her will. She’d always had an affinity for water and learned how to manipulate it over time. She could make the steam dance or stop the rain around her from hitting the ground. Once she even pulled the water from a plant and watched it wither. It had become a challenge to see how small of a molecule she could influence, or how large of a puddle she could control.
As she swirled the droplets around her finger, she thought back to the first time she ever spoke to Brooks. She was in a similar position and on the cusp of letting her flame burn out. How close she had gotten to dying that day.
She had pushed her awareness into the chaos and begged the stars for a single ray of light in all of her darkness.
