Chapter 8
CHAPTER EIGHT
SANORA
My mother’s voice was the first thing I heard.
It wasn’t soft, it was a scream. A sharp, terrifying one she’d probably never let loose in real life, breaking through the fog of unconsciousness.
My eyes shot open.
Damn.
The ceiling spun, white dots dancing in my vision as if they'd been hiding behind my eyelids, waiting to ambush me. My head throbbed so hard I believed something was trying to crack my skull open from the inside. A sharp, hot pain crawled up the back of my neck and curled behind my ears. My body felt like I’d been tossed down a hill in my sleep.
Every joint was stiff, and every muscle was sore. Even my skin hurt.
What the hell happened?
I tried to sit up, but my arms wobbled, my spine protested, and the motion sent a jolt of nausea through my gut. I collapsed back onto the bed with a wince, my chest rising and falling rapidly.
Sunlight poured through the window, slicing through my headache like a blade. It was morning. I blinked up at the ceiling and squeezed my eyes shut again. Everything hurt too much to process.
Then something tugged in my mind. Just a colour.
Green.
So much of it. Leaves. Grass. Trees…water.
My eyes flew open. The stream.
Right. The Crater.
I remembered kneeling there. I remembered the ache in my limbs and the parched burn in my throat. I’d drunk from the stream. Then a wave of nothing had paralysed me.
But now I was here.
In my room.
Back in my bed.
I hadn’t walked home. I hadn’t woken up in the forest. I hadn’t crawled to my car and driven myself back. I didn’t even remember anything after falling.
So how was I…?
A soft flip broke through the silence. The sound of a page turning.
There was someone else in my room.
My blood froze in place as my brain screamed at my body to bolt out of the bed, but my limbs were too slow to obey. I turned my head on the pillow, my pulse instantly shooting through the roof at the sight I met.
He sat to my left.
Black turtleneck, black trousers, black coat, black gloves, legs crossed. One gloved hand held up an open book, covering most of his face, but I didn’t need to see his features.
I knew who he was.
Arrogance radiated off him in waves, a calm and quiet one.
I swallowed, barely noticing how clean the room was until my eyes flicked away from him.
The clutter I’d left—plates, papers, clothes, books, my printer—were gone.
My suitcases were lined perfectly along the wall, boxes closed and stacked like they’d never been opened. The floor was so spotless it gleamed.
This wasn’t how I left it.
This wasn’t normal.
It felt like a shrine.
Like someone had come here to prepare my room for prayer or...death.
Tears stung the back of my eyes, and a horrible thought bloomed in my chest.
Was I dead?
Was he here to drag me to the afterlife?
Was he really the Grim Reaper’s personal intern like I’d thought?
The aura around him wasn’t human. It never had been. Even from the cliff that day, I’d felt it. That...wrongness. But I’d ignored it.
“Even if you were dead,” he said, low voice deep and viciously calm, “you brought it upon yourself. It baffles me why you’re sad.”
His words slid through the air and sank beneath my skin, pooling in my bloodstream like poison and making my body break out in goosebumps. I shivered from the sound of his voice. It was like my heart had stopped, rebooted, then tried to sprint its way out of my chest.
He still hadn’t looked at me.
Still hadn’t dropped the book.
Suddenly, what he said hit me.
“I’m not…” My voice cracked. “Not dead?”
He made a soft, indifferent sound. “Hmm.”
I exhaled shakily, the relief sharp enough to sting.
But then the relief faded.
Because I wasn’t dead.
And he was in my room.
Sitting on my chair.
Reading—
My blood went cold.
He was reading my goddamn journal.
“Fuck!” I threw the covers back and lunged out of bed, snatching the book from his hands so violently a page tore. I didn’t care. I slammed it shut and cradled it to my chest.
His face.
Damn. Fucking. Crows.
I forgot how to breathe.
What I’d seen from the cliff wasn’t even a shadow of what stood in front of me now. He wasn’t beautiful.
No.
He was catastrophic and not natural, if that meant anything. He looked like he was carved from shadows and winter, all sharp lines and cold elegance.
His face was cruelly captivating—high cheekbones, a razor-straight nose, a sharp jaw that looked like it could split the universe into tiny pieces. His lips were full, sitting beneath the most infuriatingly perfect philtrum I’d ever seen. And his eyes—
Gods.
They weren’t human. Couldn’t be.
Dark.
Deep.
Bottomless.
Deceptive.
Captivating.
They pinned me where I stood, reading me, touching things inside me that even I didn’t have names for.
His hair fell just to his shoulders, dark as ink and slightly wavy with strands slipping over brows that looked like they’d been etched with a razor.
The softness of it was a lie, because nothing else about him felt soft.
He was a perfect representation of a statue built to house something strongly violent.
My legs wanted to give way.
I wanted to kneel.
Not out of worship, but out of something I didn’t understand.
There was just something…pulling at my chest. It was a string, tight and invisible, buried beneath my ribs. That same pull from The Crater—the magnetic drag that made my ribs ache and my chest burn—was in him. Alive and strong and calling to me. My chest physically pulled forward.
Towards him.
My trance shattered the moment his gaze dropped from my face to my legs. I blinked, confused by the sudden coolness of the air against my thighs.
Oh no.
I looked down.
Panties.
Just panties and the first shirt I’d worn under my layers earlier.
“Shit.” I dropped back onto the bed and yanked the covers over my thighs, heat flooding my cheeks. Embarrassment hit me deadly in the gut and I groaned internally.
But then the horror crept in.
“You undressed me?”
He didn’t blink at my question.
He raised his gaze to mine, slowly, as if weighing whether I deserved an answer.
“You’re welcome,” he said, like I should be grateful.
I stared at him, frown lines deepening. “Are you serious right now? You undressed me to my panties.”
“It was necessary. Something worse could’ve happened,” he replied, calm as ever. “Like dying.”
I felt sick.
The casual way he said it. The way he dismissed the violation like it meant nothing.
Disgust twisted in my stomach. “That’s not the point. That’s…that’s perverted. You had no right—”
His expression shifted slightly, something flicking behind his eyes. He frowned, and it was the kind of frown I felt around and on my skin. The air in the room changed as he spoke.
“You shouldn’t be repulsed right now. I saved your life by doing so.”
“What are you?” I asked, voice barely above a whisper. “How did you find me there? No one could have.” Even Weeny Man didn’t know the place existed.
“You almost died.” His voice was flat now, but the anger beneath it was loud.
“How would you know that?” Why does it sting him?
He didn’t answer. He just tilted his head so fucking slowly, as if accessing or comprehending something that was below his mental range.
“You’re stupid enough to consume anything in a place like that?”
“I was thirsty,” I snapped in defence. “And tired.”
“That wasn’t water. What you saw was Pylath. It’s a curse that lives around The Crater.”
My mind stopped working. A curse? “What?”
“The Pylath reaches into your thoughts. It finds what you want most and wraps your desire around its taste. It makes it irresistible. You consume it, you die. And it buries your soul so deep you’ll never reach The Crater again. You become its offering. It protects the place. Keeps people out.”
My heart dropped to my stomach.
Hope, that little traitorous thing, drowned again.
Every time a door opened to The Crater, it slammed in my face when I reached for it. And yet…it still pulled at me. Still wrapped fingers around my chest and yanked. Still begged me to come closer.
“But there was nothing like Pylath on—”
He cut me off. “That’s because you were the first to venture into the other side.”
“Second,” I corrected. “You were the first.”
I sank deeper into the bed, hollowed out by everything. My thoughts scattered, reaching for clarity but finding none.
“Hold on.” I looked up at him. “How did you know about Pylath?”
He said nothing.
He was the first person who knew the other side existed, so how did he know what the curse was called if he didn’t read or hear stories about it? How did he know it was a curse that protected The Crater or that I was lying unconsciously on the other side?
The room closed in on me.
His silence made my skin prickle. Fear struck me like a whip to the ribs, the same fear Weeny Man had felt towards him.
I shifted an inch back instinctively, attempting to create distance between us. He noticed. Of course he did.
He tilted his head again, the barest hint of displeasure appearing at the corner of his mouth.
I could tell very much he didn’t like the distance. Or maybe it was the fear he didn’t like.
My hand shot to my neck.
The medallion.
The medallion was gone. The one thing that was meant to ‘protect’ me from bad things. This bad thing.
“What are you?” I whispered, panic creeping into my throat. “Where’s my medallion?”
He didn’t answer or move. He only stared.
Steeling myself, I swallowed my fear and bolted upright, covers clutched to my thighs. “Who—”
He stood.
And I instantly wished he hadn’t.
He was tall. Towering. Gods, too fucking tall.
And I wasn’t short.
He closed the little distance separating us, and I couldn’t stop myself from shrinking back until I hit the bed frame, my neck craning to keep up with him.
He raised his hand, my breath catching as he slid a single gloved finger under my chin.
My body lit up like I’d been electrocuted.
The contact was barely a touch, but it felt like static crawling beneath my skin, coiling in my belly. He lifted my head upward gently until my face was tilted to his, and then he leaned in.
He was like a man studying the face of something doomed.
I was stranded, trapped in the tide of him, my limbs refusing to move.
“Don’t search for the medallion,” he said, his voice dark in my ears. “Keep it away from you. And stay away from The Crater. Ignore whatever’s pulling you to it.”
His grip tightened. Thumb resting just beneath my lip, almost brushing it. Almost.
“Next time you go near it, I might have to kill you myself.”
The threat didn’t feel like a bluff.
My skin broke out in chills as he studied me for one more heartbeat, memorising me with his dark, endless eyes before dropping his hand.
The second he did, I could breathe again, as though I’d been released from a binding spell. My limbs unlocked and my chest filled with air.
He turned his back to me, his broad, imposing back disappearing through my door, footsteps echoing loudly in my soul.
When I heard the front door shut downstairs, I let the covers fall from my grip and crumpled to the floor beside the bed, breathing like I’d been drowning the entire time.
I never told him something is pulling me towards The Crater.