Chapter 367 Give Her to Me
Lucian looked up, intending to tell the driver to get them to Zara's house as quickly as possible.
Then, in the blink of an eye, everything seemed to freeze.
The driver was gone.
More precisely, it was not just the driver. Everyone was gone.
Outside the window, every vehicle on the road had vanished. The skyscrapers across the city were still lit up, but the streets were completely empty. Not a single person. Not a single car.
Only their vehicle remained, stranded in the middle of the road like the one thing that did not belong.
The silence was suffocating.
Lucian instinctively tightened his grip on Zara's arm. Although she was unconscious, her body was still warm, and that warmth gave him something tangible to hold on to.
He knew they had probably been dragged into some bizarre situation. But once a person had witnessed enough strange things, even something like this stopped feeling all that shocking.
Click... clack...
Footsteps echoed in the distance.
They sounded like high heels striking the pavement, each step crisp and distinct. Under normal circumstances, the sound would have been too faint to notice, but the world around them was so silent that it carried clearly through the air.
Lucian looked toward the source.
It was coming from somewhere ahead of the car.
Some of the city was still visible around them, yet everything felt eerily hollow and abandoned. Directly ahead, however, it was as though the world itself had been swallowed. Only darkness remained, thick and inky, stretching endlessly outward and consuming everything around it.
The sight alone was enough to stir instinctive fear.
Lucian remained remarkably calm. He merely frowned as Zara lay quietly in his arms, looking as though she had simply fallen asleep.
This situation was probably going to be troublesome.
He checked his phone.
Perfect. No signal.
As expected, they had most likely been pulled into some kind of hidden space.
Any scientist who witnessed this scene would probably have their entire understanding of reality shattered on the spot.
The clicking of high heels drew closer, each step louder and clearer than the last.
From within the darkness, a woman dressed in white slowly emerged.
Her features were plain but pleasant enough, though she was alarmingly thin. The dress hanging from her body looked unnaturally oversized, leaving wide gaps around her frame whenever she moved.
A strange smile curved across her lips.
As she approached, a woman's bright, delicate laughter drifted through the air. In any other setting, it might have sounded harmless. Here, it only made the atmosphere more terrifying.
Lucian said flatly, "Stop laughing. It sounds awful."
The laughter abruptly ceased.
The smile also vanished from the approaching woman's face.
Without it, she looked even more lifeless, like a human-sized doll with nothing inside. There was only emptiness and an unsettling chill.
Only now did Lucian realize that, compared to this woman, Seraphine had practically been the other world's beauty standard.
The woman appeared to be walking slowly, yet after Lucian blinked, she was suddenly standing directly in front of the car.
She stared at him. Her pupils were so brown and enormous that they filled nearly two-thirds of her eyes. Slowly, her gaze drifted downward until it settled on Zara.
Every movement she made felt eerie and unnatural.
Her eyes gradually slid back to Lucian. "Give her to me."
Lucian remained seated, so calm it was almost unnatural. A faint smile even appeared on his face as he asked, "And if I hand her over, you'll let me go?"
Under the dim light in the back seat, there was something strangely unsettling about him too.
The woman stared at Lucian for a moment.
Then she slowly nodded.
"That's great." Lucian's smile remained effortlessly charming. "Now I'm even less inclined to hand her over."
He wrapped an arm firmly around Zara's waist, keeping her from slipping out of his grasp.
The woman let out a cold laugh. "You think you can stop me from taking her? You're nothing but a lowly human!"
Under normal circumstances, being called lowly might have been irritating. Lucian was a powerful CEO, after all. The whole thing sounded like something straight out of an over-the-top TV drama.
Yet he showed no anger. He merely gave a faint laugh. "Then quit talking and show me what you've got."
The woman frowned, making her already sinister face look even more terrifying.
In the next instant, she passed straight through the windshield and appeared inside the car.
Before Lucian could react, she was already leaning over him, so close that he could smell the strange odor clinging to her.
It was a foul, nauseating stench.
Lucian's brow furrowed immediately.
She raised one hand above his head, spreading her long, pointed fingers before slowly curling them inward.
As her fingers closed, Lucian felt his body slipping beyond his control. His strength drained away little by little, as though something had latched onto his soul and was wrenching it out of him.
His mind began to blur.
Even so, his arm remained locked tightly around Zara's waist, almost entirely on instinct.
If the woman took Zara, then at least she would have to take him too. That way, he would still know where Zara had gone.
He did not understand why he was doing this.
He simply had a vague feeling that the woman could not separate them and take Zara away on her own.
She leaned closer, her voice dripping with contempt. "Do you really think resisting will make a difference?"