Chapter 38
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
SANORA
“Did you put something in the water?”
I blinked, my brain suddenly clicking on the fact that my body system had been feeling weird for some minutes now. It had not been this way before I left the warehouse. It started a couple seconds after I drank that water. I shook my head, trying to ward off the drowsiness trying to drag me under.
Weeny Man’s distorted face turned to me briefly, and I didn’t miss the slight hurt in his voice. “Only for a few minutes. The weakness will fade soon.”
Horror gripped my chest as my breathing shot up to the sky.
I’d just escape a prison just to fall into another one.
I shook my head violently, willing the sleep to go away as my body went paralysed.
My limbs were like leadened ropes, but my mind was a bright, frantic thing trapped behind glass.
Panic and helplessness weaved together; I could think clearly, but my body refused to obey a single small command.
“It’s only going to limit your ability to move for some minutes.”
“I fucking trusted you,” I whispered. He’d been serious about what he said, but a part of me had thought he wasn’t the kind of man that was capable of it.
He loved children, he loved...things. He was too kind of a man to carry out this dark shit.
I tried to push air in and out regularly, ordered counts to steady the panic, but the effort alone made my vision swim.
“Yes, and keep trusting me. This is for your own good. I don’t want you to die, Sanora. I won’t let you surrender your life to break the bastard’s curse.”
I wanted to speak, to ask him what bastard and what curse he was speaking of, but there was no single strength in my bones, not even to part my lips or hold my eyes open. In seconds, my lids clamped shut, but I wasn’t sleeping. I was weak and tired, my bones melting into liquids.
It was a living paralysis: fully conscious while every tendon and muscle refused to answer.
My head was slumped against the window, eyes closed, with a body that didn’t feel like mine.
Winifred might have driven for one more minute or hour, I didn’t know.
But when the car stopped, he came to the passenger side, opened the door, and my head fell against him with no control over my body.
I wanted him to get his filthy hands off me, but I was helpless and could hardly move as he dragged me out, his struggling sounds and breaths echoing loudly in my ears.
My legs too were paralysed, and I was depending on him for movement. I wanted to see where he was locking me into, but I couldn’t summon the strength to even open my eyes.
The next thing I knew was that he was breathing heavily, trying to help me climb something. Stairs? The movement had been going on for long, and the house I was in seemed to have stairs within.
The next time my brain registered anything was the creak of the door before I was dropped to the wooden floor of the room.
Dust.
That was the first thing that struck me.
He’d dropped me in a room full of dust. I could swear there were cobwebs and unused stuff stacked in boxes and pushed to a corner.
It smelled like those storage rooms in the attic where no one had visited in years.
I was probably lying in mice shit for fuck's sake. Bile rose hot in my throat.
“I’ll go make you something to eat.”
And then the door closed, keys locking into place. I was thoroughly fucked.
He said the paralysis would only last for a few minutes—he’d definitely done it to weaken me so I wouldn’t be able to fight him when he brought me inside.
I tried to move my hands, to will the paralysis away faster, but I was boneless.
It felt like my brain had emptied itself out for the amount of drugs that’d flown through my bloodstream in the past twenty-four hours.
Every attempt to twitch my fingers felt like reaching through water.
My mind wandered to the thought of Thrax, his warmth, his kisses, his tight hold, and the intense way he often gazed at me.
I missed them all. I wanted them all again, craved them so bad a tear slid out of my closed eyes.
I conjured his hands—the comfort of them—because imagining it was the only motion I could make that didn’t need limbs.
I just wanted to curl up in his hold while he smoothed down my hair on his bed.
I didn’t know how many minutes passed, or even how many hours passed.
I’d been slipping in and out of consciousness.
And every time I was conscious of my surroundings, I tried to move my body.
So far, I’d only been able to move my neck a little, my left hand and roll my right ankle.
They were coming back to me, but slowly.
That was when I heard a burst of a door that rattled the wood underneath me. It wasn’t the room’s door, no. It was the door from downstairs. Then—
I opened my eyes.
“FUCKING. BASTARD.”
My heart stopped, then it skipped and rushed back to life, beating so fast I could hardly contain it in my chest. I could be old and grey and still know who that voice belonged to, simply from the way it made my chest ache with joy and made my nerve buzz with excitement.
Thrax.
How did he find me though? Had the severance draught like Amelia had called it faded off? Was that how he found—
Something collided with what I could only assume was glass. Did he fucking fling Winifred against it?
Strength bled back into me, fuelled by the knowledge that he was here for me. When I found the ability to move both of my hands, I tried to sit up a couple of times but failed. The desperation of my limbs flailing uselessly while the house roared below me was a cruel kind of torture.
I could hear the punching sound, and something crashing against pots, against another glass, wooden furniture breaking into splinters, and even the wall.
The floor shook beneath me with every crash, like the house itself was bowing to his fury, and somewhere inside me, I prayed Thrax didn’t send the poor man home soon.
I clawed at the floorboard with useless nails as I fought to move, my breath coming in jagged pulls.
My eyes swept around me in the dark room as I breathed through my nose, pushing myself up with a groan, trying to sit.
A burst of breath rushed through me when I finally succeeded.
That was when I heard footsteps coming up the stairs, and there was another sound except that, like he was dragging something up with him. Winifred?
My heart rocked even more loudly and feral in my chest when he stopped in front of the door, my skin tingling with the fact that it was the only barrier between me and the warmth of his skin.
He dropped what he’d been dragging up the stairs with him, and a huff from the body as it connected with the floor told me he’d actually wrecked the shit out of Winifred and dragged his body up the stairs.
I didn’t know whether to be sorry for him or to drown in the thrill that Thrax had nearly pronounced Winifred dead for me.
“Didn’t I tell you,” Thrax’s voice bled through the door, low and barely human. “I told you Sanora was mine the moment the stars blinked her into existence, and I warned you not to put yourself between us.”
The snap of bone cracked the silence.
Winifred’s scream tore through the walls.
A gasp sped its way through my chest and got stuck in my throat. No, no, Thrax. Don’t.
He spoke again, tone unrecognisable. “But not only did you do that. You tried to keep her away from me.”
Another bone shattered, like he was taking and snapping him into two with his bare hands.
A louder wail from Winifred followed, echoing in the stairwell like a grotesque bell.
I tried to reach for the door, to call him to stop, but I was helpless, and I’d never hated myself more than this moment.
Of course Winifred had done a completely out of character and unforgivable thing that I hated him for.
Yet, a part of me, that little kid that had looked up to him while growing up, was uncomfortable that he was in pain.
“Th-Thrax,” I called out so inaudibly I doubted he heard me as I worked against the resistance paralysing my mouth. I didn’t care what happened to Winifred, I just needed him with me already.
But he heard me. And that seemed to snap him out of whatever red he was seeing. I heard a key rattle before the door burst open, and the scent of myrrh flooded down my throat where I sat on the dirty floor.
Thrax dropped to one knee in front of me, and I was able to see him thanks to the light streaming in from the hallway. Although it was still less than twenty-four hours since I left him, it felt like months. Seeing his face again brought the kind of relief nothing in this world could ever compare.
His hair was mussed, even longer than I remembered, his eyes nearly bloodshot from either lack of rest or sleep, and I wanted to believe my absence had done that to him. The sight of him—wild and dangerous and breathtaking—filled my chest with joy.
Tears clouded my eyes, blurring his gorgeous face from view, and I blinked them away, letting them slide down my cheeks.
I wanted to tell him to squeeze me into a hug, to breathe life back inside me, but I was still too paralysed to utter another word.
So I just stared at him, drinking in his expression as his hands slowly came up, chest heaving.
I looked down at the arms I was eager to have around me, shaking as they neared me, and as if I didn’t have enough reason to cry already, I began to cry harder.
Thrax, the legend in every scholar's mind and the nightmare of every child...Thrax, the Soulless Man, was shaking to touch me.
How unluckily lucky I was.
When he finally touched me, gripping my shoulders firmly, he swallowed. One of his hands came up to wipe at my tears, only for them to fall harder, until he hauled me against himself and locked his arms around me, pressing my face to his chest.