Chapter Twenty
I’m back there again. Sometimes I see this place in my nightmares, in my weakest moments in my life, and I feel like I’m stuck.
He will always haunt me, and there is nowhere in my mind that I can escape him.
He didn’t just destroy my body; he destroyed my spirit and left a part of me haunted by him forever.
I know it’s a nightmare, because I fell asleep on the floor, curled up in a ball, screaming to the wolves that have trapped me to let me out.
They didn’t listen, and I don’t know why I expected them to listen to me.
Everything is such a mess, and I keep making it worse. My stupid, weak heart is making me feel things for some of the wolves, and I don’t know how to make it stop. Apparently, my mind came up with a solution—show me a nightmare of the worst moment of my life. This is why my mind is broken.
I open my eyes to find myself back here in the empty prison of a room that Eli locked me in.
The dirty red rug on the ground, the crumbling walls and the cobwebs on everything I haven’t touched.
I know my life has been shitty since I was eight, but I have never wanted to give up on it, not until now.
I’ve resigned myself to the fact I’m going to die; I just have to make sure it happens before Eli can take anything else from me.
It’s freezing cold at all times of the day, and my breath is pure smoke as I shiver on the floor. The scraps of food that he brings me once every three days are not helping the hunger pains.
I ran out of food and fresh drinking water two days ago, and he hasn’t come back.
It’s been six days since I’ve seen him. That’s longer than he’s ever left me, and I wonder if he’s going to leave me to die in here now.
I’m certainly not nice to him when he comes.
I scream with all the fight I have left.
I throw my fists at him, and he dodges me so easily.
Eventually I beg him to let me out, while he stands there with a stupid smile on his face, looking at me and telling me he loves me.
Eli doesn’t know what that word means. I am certain of it.
I might never have been in love with anybody before, but I’ve read enough books that I’ve snuck from every library in the human district to suspect that love is not this. You don’t hurt someone that you love, not on purpose. You don’t trap them and trick them.
I love Tannith, my sister in everything but blood, and I won’t see her again.
She won’t even know I didn’t run away and leave her for Eli.
She must be so worried about me and scared Eli has put the slave mark on my forehead and taken me to his home.
I wish I could see her just once more and tell her she was right, and I was so, so wrong about Eli.
I jerk up to my feet when the door appears right on the wall, the fizz of flames alerting me.
Eli walks in, running his hands through his red hair, with a wild look in his eyes that I’ve not seen before.
He slams the door shut behind him, and for once, the door doesn’t actually disappear like he always makes sure of.
He’s made a mistake. I just have to distract him long enough to get out.
I rush to the other side of the room and quickly begin my plan to escape.
“Come here and hug me, Merry.” Eli opens his arms. Such a fool.
“Don’t run from me. Look.” He pauses and lowers his arms when the dipshit realizes I’m not going to run into his arms and happily embrace him.
I quickly notice there’s no food with him, no bags, nothing, and my heart races.
Has he come to kill me this time? “You don’t understand everything that is happening, and it’s okay.
I will tell my father, and then we can have a future.
I was right about you, and he will see it.
” I shake my head. “I’m sorry I took so long this time,” he gently coaxes, like I’m a scared sheep.
“My father and my cousin…they’re ganging up on me.
They’re going to send me away because they say I’m out of control, but I’m not,” he snaps angrily, and I flinch.
“I’m sorry, I’m not angry at you, just at them.
They are self-righteous and arrogant, like they haven’t killed before. ”
“Who did you kill?” I whisper.
He shrugs. “My fiancée. She wasn’t you.” He steps closer. “She wouldn’t understand you, and she wouldn’t let me keep you. I had to make sure she was gone.”
He’s in my face in a second, his hands clenching my shoulders tightly.
Too tight and I whimper. I’ve lost so much weight, and I thought that starving in the orphanage was bad when we didn’t get food for two days.
Now my bones are sticking out, and everything hurts.
Six days of no food was all the time I needed to drop into madness.
There is nothing like being fed scraps of food every three days—that wouldn’t even keep a cat alive—to twist reality.
I don’t think he’s even aware of how much food I need, but one slice of bread and a few chunks of cheese really don’t last that long.
I swear it’s just food he slides off the table to bring here for me from whatever posh, ridiculous house that he lives in.
I still don’t know anything about him. He still doesn’t tell me things, but I don’t care.
I just have to get out. That is it. I’m done with starving to death, and I’m choosing myself.
I slam my hands into his chest. He doesn’t move, not that I thought he would, but I make sure he hears me.
“Eli, you realize I hate you, right? I thought you were my friend that day when you came to help me with the logs. I thought there was something like humanity in you, but you’ve shown me that wolves don’t have humanity.
You don’t have feelings. You don’t have anything other than this need to claim and possess humans like we’re just toys to you.
I will never be yours. I will spend every day of my life trying to escape you and leave you because I do not want you.
” I make sure he sees it in my eyes. “I will never want you.”
Fire explodes out of him and wraps around me.
At first, I’m too shocked to process what he has done, but then I scream.
I collapse to the floor as his fire rips across my stomach, across the tops of my thighs, burning away my clothes.
I scream and scream as the fire licks down my arms, across my breasts, across my back.
I roll in flames and I beg him to stop for what feels like hours, but it must be seconds, but he doesn’t.
His laughter echoes in the air as the smell of flesh burning hits my senses.
“Fine then. If I can’t have you, then you can just be this ugly burnt thing that I leave behind.
This will mark you as mine, and no one will touch you.
” He doesn’t stop burning me. My hair catches on fire.
All of me screams and screams and screams as he tortures me, as he burns away anything he thinks is pretty.
“I’ll leave that pretty face. It’s my favourite part of you.
” His foot kicks into my stomach, and my cries increase.
“You will change your mind. I’ll come back for you one day. ”
“No, you won’t,” I manage to whisper with every bit of strength I have left. “I am choosing to take you to death with me, Eli, and only one of us is going to burn in hell.”
He looks up, his eyes widening as he realizes what I’ve done.
In my time here, I found all the gas pipes in the walls and floor.
I dug through the walls and ground, cutting my hands and ripping my nails off, but I knew it was the only way.
When he came in, I opened the pipe by the fireplace, and now it’s too late for us both.
The air explodes with fire, slamming into him, throwing him away from me as it rips across the room in front of my eyes.
I just smile. Even as I begin to burn again. “Tannith, I’m sorry. Goodbye.”
I wake up with a gasp, a hand stroking my face, pulling the hair away from my cheek.
The memory of Eli fades from my nightmare, and I remind myself I did survive.
That humans found me, a healer took pity on me, and I woke up with Tannith holding my hand.
It took months for the healer to make it possible for me to even get out of the bed.
Many more months before I could wear clothes and function on my own.
I was told there was nothing much left of the house other than ashes and my body under the rubble, and I know Eli must be dead.
He would have come after me if he weren’t.
There was a madness to that wolf that will always scare me, but he just lives in my nightmares.
Not reality. He is dead. “Fire. Fire. No! Stop the burning!” I whisper a plea, struggling to push the feeling of the burning from my mind. The pain feels so real.
“You’re not burning.” Reed’s hands cup my face, pressing me against his chest, his voice so firm that I pause.
I hear his heart beating fast next to my ear, and I focus on it, letting the memory wash away like a river.
“I’m here,” Reed breathes into my ear, smelling just like the salty sea.
“I get nightmares too, and I know it helps to focus on something real when you wake up. Listen to my heartbeat, little human. You’re not alone, and you’re definitely not burning when a water prince heir is holding you.
” For a long time, I just do as he says, listening to his heartbeat until my shoulders untense and drop, until I unclench his shirt I’ve been grasping.
“Why would you be burning, little human?”
“I’m scared of fire,” I whisper into the room. I can’t tell him about Eli and the burns, but I give him a bit of the truth. I glance at the other bed in the room and see Elizabeth isn’t in it. It doesn’t surprise me; she often falls asleep on the sofa downstairs and chooses to sleep on it.