Chapter 55 #3
His fingers found the back of her neck, settling his palm against the base of her skull with a deliberate, practiced pressure, his thumb sliding along the ridge of her spine while his other fingers curled around the curve of her neck.
The hold was firm. Authoritative. The kind of grip that looked, to anyone watching, like he was pressing into the pressure points that supposedly controlled the beast.
The anger surged up so fast it burned. Not the beast’s anger—hers.
Clean and sharp and entirely human. He’d come here.
In the dead of night, risking everything, to sit on her cot and wipe away her tears and whisper she’s safe when the whole point of being here was to not be safe.
He’d put a hand on her, as if she were something precious, and now Thorn was standing in the doorway cataloguing every single soft thing Rell had ever done to her.
She wanted to fight him. Not the performance—the real thing. She wanted to twist out of his hold and drive her elbow into his ribs, to make him understand with her body what she couldn’t say with words: you shouldn’t have come. You shouldn’t have cared. You’re going to get us both killed.
Her claws were still out. The shift pulsed through her, prepared, and for one reckless heartbeat she considered letting it carry her. One more lunge. One more snarl. Make him work for it. Make Thorn see him struggle, see him earn whatever control he claimed to have.
But she didn’t.
The fight drained out of her in a single, shuddering exhale. She let her shoulders drop first, then her arms, then the shift itself—claws retracting, fangs sliding back, the sharp edges of the world softening into the dull gray blur of human senses.
His thumb lingered for a fraction of time more than it should have, a ghost of warmth against her skin, and then his fingers uncurled one by one, releasing her with a gentleness that made her want to scream.
The cuffs hit the floor before his hand left her completely.
Elora flinched, her gaze snapping to her wrists. The manacles lay open at her feet, the locks sprung, the raw, bleeding skin of her arms suddenly bare and exposed to the cold air.
Thorn’s hand rested on the lever beside the door. The man’s gaze shifted from the open manacles at Elora’s feet to Rell’s face.
“Very interesting,” he said, like he was confirming something.
Elora’s heart stuttered. She felt Rell’s body tense behind her, his breath catching against her hair. What had they given away? What small detail had betrayed them? Her mind raced through every second of their performance, searching for the flaw.
“Secure her properly. We’re going for a walk.” Thorn gestured to Rell.
“I want to show you something, Elora,” he continued, his thin mouth shaping into what might have passed for a smile on someone less monstrous. “Something I think you’ll find... enlightening.”
Rell’s hands were gentle despite the firmness of his grip as he pulled her arms behind her back.
New metal cuffs clamped around her wrists with a definitive snap that reverberated in the small cell.
Elora felt Rell’s hands linger, his grip a mixture of restraint and concern, and she bit back the instinct to pull away.
Annoyance flared within her. After everything, after the chaos they were entangled in, his tenderness felt like a betrayal of their grim reality.
She wanted to shake off the weight of it, to remind him that they were not safe, that this wasn’t a moment for softness.
But beneath the annoyance lay a flicker of gratitude, a tiny ember of comfort that she couldn’t extinguish.
Thorn paused before a heavy iron door. She recognized this door—the entrance to Thorn’s private laboratory where he conducted his most secretive experiments, where he’d first forced the nightglider transformation upon her.
The familiar scent of chemicals and copper hit her nostrils, making her stomach clench, as he gestured for them to enter.
Elora’s legs turned to lead, each step requiring conscious effort as Rell guided her forward. The laboratory looked exactly as she remembered—clinical and sterile, yet somehow reeking of suffering. Thorn led them to the room where he carved into her.
The room was dominated by shelves of glass vials and leather-bound journals.
Notes lined one wall, meticulously organized and labeled in Thorn’s precise handwriting.
Opposite them hung a large board covered with parchments, arranged in what appeared to be a timeline.
Dates and names were connected by thin red strings, creating a web of information that made no immediate sense to her.
A glass cylinder dominated the table’s center, filled with luminous green fluid that painted the room in sickly light.
Within this liquid prison, suspended by a network of tubes and wires, hovered an unmistakable human brain.
Elora felt the floor seem to drop away beneath her.
The living tissue twitched with unnatural life, occasional sparks of electricity skittering across its folds like perverse lightning.
Thorn’s gaze fixed on her face, drinking in her horror with evident pleasure.
“I thought you might like to see Tehvan.”