His shadowy figure towered over me, a coldness sweeping through the air. He was smiling deviously, and I felt as if I were in a nightmare.
I cowered on the ground, my hands curled around my knees, helpless to fight.
Caiden was banging his hands against the glass, screaming words, but I couldn’t focus on what they were.
With a slow, deliberate movement, the mystery man bent down, his eyes intense. I felt his hands on me, a physical and unsettling sensation. The texture was rough, the temperature cold, much like a glacier’s icy surface.
A blurred dream was all that came after. A chaotic jumble of half-remembered sensations, like a fading echo.
A blackness, thick and suffocating, descended, pressing down on me as my mind drifted to a distant, unknown place. My muscles coiled tight, each fiber screaming in protest, on the verge of shattering.
I longed to escape into the boundless cerulean sky, its azure expanse a tempting invitation, so I closed my eyes and imagined soaring among the clouds.
I grasped at anything to shift my focus away from the distressing violation taking place.
THE PRESENT
AMELIA
The man's departure unleashed a monstrous darkness; it swelled, grew, and filled the space with a chilling, deep dread and suffocating silence.
The light had disappeared, and obsidian hues fluttered through the singular window. There weren’t any stars glimmering, that I knew.
It was as if the darkness had swallowed the outside, and we were falling into a black hole.
Not even the moonlight was noticeable, its presence was now a forgotten ghost.
Silence dripped sorrowfully. The barrier hadn’t moved, and I was thrown into an isolated terror.
I knew Caiden was on the other side, but I couldn’t see him. I couldn’t hear him. He was so far wedged into the shadows, he blended with them perfectly.
I opened my mouth to speak but nothing slipped out. My senses were frozen in time, coated with a seemingly permanent shock. Time moved slowly, and I wondered if time was passing at all.
At this point, it was unknown how long we had been gone for. I wondered if Shane and Sabrina were looking for us. If they were, they had given up by now.
We were far gone, and rescue was becoming a lost hope.
I tried to imagine my home. My home that I was never going tosee again. The image was faint, like a blurry picture taken from a distance.
Once that image fled my mind, it wandered to further memories. Childhood. Lillian’s face fell in and out of my head. My mother’s scrutinizing and haunted face going round and round, like screams of terror in my mind.
Nights and days filled with isolation and panic. Walking alone with my sorrows, feeling like a phantom in my own home.
The thoughts landed on Caiden. The contempt in his eyes burned with each abusive word, like a hateful fire. The sting of his actions coursing through me like a hurricane.
Each small thing felt like a crushing weight, and the turmoil in my body manifested as dreadful flames. I was corruption incarnate, a two-legged monster sinking deeper into the viscous, crimson pools of blood, the coppery tang infecting me.
He sat there, unmoving, uncaring, and my soul fell deeper into dusk.
Hours passed by of this dark stillness. I was too weak to do anything other than collapse further into myself like a dying star. Seeking comfort from Caiden was not an option, he was in his own hell in the dark on the other side.
A darkened inferno was raining down onto me, and I no longer fought it, but welcomed it, succumbing to its fatal grip.
I was startled awake by a sudden, animal scream.
My own, I realized, when my throat burned a moment later. I’d slept, or perhaps just slipped into some state of suspended terror, and now my body had remembered how to react.
I watched the sun’s rays bleach the world gray and then disappear altogether.
