Somno Slave (Love After Life #5)

Chapter One

Deogal

The darkness is sovereign.

There is no sky, no horizon, nothing for the mind to cling to.

I drink in the silence, the sweet stillness of nothing. My dreamscape has swallowed itself again, folded inward like a disobedient animal flinching from its owner.

But it can’t hide from me.

Hunger pains blister in my stomach, and my patience slips.

I step forward, and my Realm unwillingly responds.

Under the weight of my boot, a pulse of electricity bursts outward. Light tears through the darkness, illuminating the vast fleshy landscape.

My Dreamscape is a restless thing: thin, pale, stitched together from the leftovers of human sleep, stretched tight like the skin on a drum.

Billions of unconscious souls are trapped beneath the surface, held hostage inside orbs that ripple like raw muscle.

They scream beneath my boot, sick and alive.

This is the Realm of Unconsciousness, where minds rot and nothing leaves whole.

Light years away, their human bodies are bound to Earth; achy, twitching desperately, tossing between stuffy sheets and pools of sweat.

I feel the tense flutter of their eyelids, as though they can fight to open their eyes and stop the night terror.

My silhouette dances in the depths of their minds, creating twisted stories that drag out their worst fears.

The more they suffer, the more I feed.

And when they struggle, it’s a goddamn banquet.

They call me many things. None of them matter.

Humans spit sounds into the dark as if syllables could bare my fangs. But what is a name to a monster that fucks itself over sleeping bodies? To a thing that devours dreams from between vulnerable thighs.

This place belongs to me, because nothing else survived it, because nothing else thrives in taking what’s not theirs.

My stomach growls again, sharper this time, more like a final warning.

I glance down at the orb closest to me. It collapses under the heat of my attention and shrieks. I taste it’s breath on my tongue—salt, sugar, static—brief and forgettable, but it explodes with fear and the cry is intoxicating.

My pupils burst.

I grind my heel into it, light at first, drinking in its sorrow. It splutters violently, and with every wave of agony ripping through its mind, I press down harder.

Something beneath the surface gives. The night terror ruptures with a wet, meaty pop, and gore splashes up my calf, steaming as it hits the frozen air.

The creature’s scream doesn’t come from a mouth; it tears out of the ground instead, a shrill, bubbling wail as its exposed nerves twitch and curl like severed worms.

It’s pain detonates outward, a shockwave of stolen dread slamming through me.

For a split second, flashes of the dream burn behind my eyes: teeth spilling like pearls onto tile, a faceless figure dragging them backward into a narrowing hallway, the sensation of sinking with no bottom.

The energy from the dream bleeds into my stomach, hot and violent, until the hunger cramps start to subside.

I exhale, steadied. Fed, but not full. I need more. So much fucking more.

I sink deeper into the abyss, pressure wrapping around my skull. Down here, the air thickens, spooled with shadows. Something damp clings to the back of my tongue.

The landscape tunnels, and the walls breathe around me in a slow, corpse-like rhythm. Wet stone glistens with sheen, silhouettes writhing just beneath the surface like trapped insects. My cock twitches with the promise of release.

I descend deeper.

But then, a pulse cuts through the haze, clean and violent. I see it in my mind vividly as if it hangs before me, suspended in the dark. Small. Sweet. Not the shivering blue of common dreams, but a deep, scarlet throb.

I close my eyes and listen.

Female—breathless, soft, bitten-off whimpers bleeding through the dark. The sound drags my attention toward her like blood in water.

My head strikes up.

The dreams around me tear, thousands of them, each one fading when I pass. They know who I am. They bow, they break, they scatter.

Only one holds.

Only one refuses to yield.

Hers.

Her pulse draws a trail through the dark like a red thread. The farther I follow it, the clearer the rhythm becomes. It hums inside my skull, matching the rise and fall of my own heartbeat until I can no longer tell which one of us is leading.

I finally find her at the edge of a threshold, buried beneath four larger, quivering souls.

There she is.

A small, trembling thing buried beneath the others. Soft enough to ruin. Mine the second she looks back at me.

Before the thought even finishes forming, I’m already on my knees, dragging her out of the dreamscape. Heat spikes instantly. Her dream ignites—flames licking at my palm like a beast on a too-short chain. Each lick is barbed, flaying thin strips of pain across my skin.

She pushes back. She rejects my touch.

No...

She fucking marks me.

I bite back the growl, refusing to let go. Instead, I curl each finger around her dream and squeeze. She stills under my grip so completely it feels less like surrender and more like the moment prey realises it has been caught.

I bend over her like a sinner over an offering, and fuck, she is blistering with life. It rolls off her in panicked waves, hot enough to make my hunger vicious.

The silence parts for me: a hush before the strike.

I tap into her mind and lull her into a false sense of security. And her dream—God, her beautiful, helpless, unguarded dream—moans.

Soft.

Needy.

Inviting in the very monster it should run from.

I drag her closer. She resists but still comes. She breathes, shivering in my grip like something caught between terror and want. The pulse of it flutters against my palm.

The seam along her dream splits ever so slightly in my grip. She swells with heat, with colour, with the liquid panic of a creature that knows it’s being watched. That knows it’s about to be violated.

The surface of her dream ripples, trying to seal itself. I watch the hole tighten.

My thoughts blacken.

She’s trying so hard not to part for me, and she’s failing so beautifully.

Hunger coils low.

My cock aches angrily, and I can’t deprive myself any longer. With my other hand, I quickly free myself. Next to her small red ruby, it looks huge and thick and furious. It’ll pierce right through her whimpering slit. It’ll ruin her. It’ll probably kill her.

Her dream quakes. It begs to scream, but the sound lodges in the throat of her sleeping body light years away—a body that doesn’t know what’s happening to its mind.

I do not need her body to break into her. Her mind is enough for now.

I press my thumb against her glistening hole until the seam quivers. The wound in her world parts for me, with a sigh, spilling the colour and sound of her dream: Noise from a market. Laughter. Bells. Smoke curling from a thousand small fires. Heat, motion, life—it all rushes at me like a tide.

Her thoughts tremble against my fingers.

I can’t hold myself back any longer. I line my cock up with her hole.

A scream tears through the small orb, sharp and ignoble. It does something unholy to me. I respond like a beast responding to its mewling mate.

I force my way deeper, desperate to feel all of her.

She refuses—desperately tries to reject me. Her orb squeezes me; chokes my cock until the pain is almost unbearable. The tightness feels more like teeth biting.

“Breathe for me,” I pant, and she does, my obedient little fool, her chest stuttering, throat flexing like a swallowed prayer somewhere in the distance.

I see a flash of red, a memory breaking through the surface.

Hair.

Vibrant red swept back into a tight bun, secured neatly with a black bow. Not a single loose thread, all discipline and order. The memory stutters when I thrust deeper.

The word Doctor whimpers in the back of my mind like a stolen moan. And then, the picture vanishes.

I fix my eyes on the small orb struggling to accommodate me.

Somewhere in the distance, she cries out loudly. I hear it like she’s below me now, strangled, and sharp. The sound tears through my balls.

My control starts to rot.

I plunge fully into her. Something sharp drags down my back. Nails. Clawing at me. It’s not real. She’s not here. And yet, I can feel the blood bubbles pricking my skin. She pulses around my cock, squeezes painfully tight as every muscle seizes within her.

Her orgasm is close. She pants. She cries. And what’s worse—what’s intoxicating—is that she seems to rock in tune to my thrusts even when her mind knows she shouldn’t.

By morning, she’ll call this a nightmare.

I’ll make sure that stops working.

My balls tighten. Heat spreads across my body. My orgasm rips through me with a roar.

Intense pleasure smashes into my ribs. It tears through everything.

The ecstasy refuses to relent, and she falls just as fast, seizing up viciously.

The pressure of her orgasm only heightens mine.

She chokes me. Milks me. Fuck—she drains everything within me, thrust after thrust, until my cock empties everything inside of her.

She shakes violently, and then she stills. Time passes not in seconds, but in the heartbeat around my cock. She throbs. She gasps.

And then, she falls.

And before I can stop myself, my talons strike out to catch her, closing around her in a way that feels obscene. They hang there, curved and too sharp, like they’re waiting for permission to rip her apart again.

This isn’t the first time I’ve touched a mind that fought back. But it’s the first time I’ve wanted to break one slowly.

She twitches in the palm of my hand, the aftershocks of her orgasm still pulling through her. I hold her close, keep her hostage, because I know there’s no letting go of her now that I’ve tasted her.

Poor little thing.

She wrapped herself in pleasant dreams and thought that would keep monsters out. But unknowingly, she locked herself in with something far worse.

Me.

And now I am inside her world.

Inside her.

And she has nowhere left to run.