Chapter 4
CHAPTER
FOUR
I wake before dawn with my throat burning. For a few seconds, I don’t know where I am.
My body is already reacting before my mind catches up—lungs dragging in air too fast, fingers curled in the blanket like I’m bracing for something to hit me again. My heart is pounding hard enough that I can feel it in my ears, each beat intense and insistent in the quiet room.
The nightmare lingers the way they always do. It doesn’t fade immediately. Instead, it sits there in the dark with me.
It takes a moment before the warehouse ceiling resolves above my head, familiar beams cutting across the dim grey light that leaks through the high windows. Dust floats lazily in the air, catching the faint glow from the street lanterns outside.
Not the forest.
Not the green sky.
Not Thomas.
I exhale slowly and sit up, touching the crooked scar on my face.
The blanket slides off my shoulders as I push a hand through my hair, pressing my palm briefly against the back of my neck as the last echoes of the dream settle.
It’s been ten years. Ten years in Terrafeara. Ten years since that night in the forest.
And still, my brain sometimes decides it wants to replay the moment my life split clean down the middle.
I swing my legs off the bed and sit there for a minute, elbows on my knees, breathing slowly while the adrenaline drains out of my system.
The warehouse is quiet. Too quiet now that Varek isn’t here.
The thought rests before I can stop it, which is ridiculous. He’s been gone less than a day. Still, the absence lingers around the room like a missing piece I’ve grown used to ignoring.
I push the thought aside and stand. The wooden floor creaks faintly beneath my feet as I cross to the basin and splash cold water on my face. The chill helps a little, dragging my thoughts back into the present.
But the dream has already done its work. And once the memory starts moving, it doesn’t like to stop.
Three weeks. That’s how long Thomas and I lasted when we first arrived here. Three weeks of surviving in a world that made absolutely no sense.
The rift storm had swallowed us on the highway outside Kalgoorlie. One minute we were driving through red dirt and open sky, the next the world had twisted itself inside out and dumped us somewhere with a green sky and trees that hummed faintly in the wind.
The cruiser had saved us at first.
Thomas’s patrol car was stocked the way outback police vehicles usually are—water, emergency rations, blankets, a basic med kit. Enough supplies to keep someone alive for days if they broke down halfway between towns.
Of course, the car itself had stopped working the moment we arrived. Whatever rules electricity followed in this dimension weren’t the same ones it followed in Western Australia. But the supplies had lasted a while.
We’d rationed the food and stretched the water.
And Thomas had burned through the two bottles of whiskey he kept hidden under the passenger seat by the fourth day.
After that… things got worse.
The forest we’d landed in had been thick and humid, full of insects that sounded like machinery and plants that glowed faintly when the sun went down. We’d spent the first week convinced rescue would arrive any moment and the second week learning that wasn’t going to happen.
By the third week, the arguments had started.
We were hungry and exhausted, and Thomas had never handled fear well.
Back in Australia the abuse had always been careful. Measured and private behind closed doors of a shared life no one knew about.
Voices low.
Bruises hidden under clothes so they didn’t raise questions.
Out there in the forest, none of that mattered. There was no one to hide from. No reputation to protect. No station colleagues who might start asking the wrong questions if they noticed something off.
The mask slipped. Completely.
I lean against the basin, gripping the edge as the memory sharpens. I can still see the moment it started.
We were sitting beside the dead cruiser, the engine silent and useless beneath the open hood. The sky above us had been that strange sickly green that still makes my stomach turn if I stare at it too long.
Thomas had been pacing, restless and agitated. By that point the whiskey had been gone for over two weeks, and his temper had gotten… unpredictable.
I’d tried to keep things calm.
Tried to keep him focused on the practical stuff—finding water, gathering anything edible, figuring out whether the strange animal tracks we’d seen belonged to something dangerous. But that morning we’d both been running on fumes, and I’d made the mistake of asking something simple.
Something reasonable.
“Maybe we should start moving again,” I’d said quietly. We’d tried and failed a few times. “If there’s a town somewhere—”
That was it. That was all it took.
Thomas had spun towards me like I’d just insulted his entire bloodline. “You think I haven’t thought of that?”
His voice had already been loud.
I’d raised my hands automatically. “Hey. I’m just saying—”
“I’m the one keeping us alive here.”
“I know that.”
“You think you could do better?”
“That’s not what I—”
The punch came out of nowhere. One second we were arguing. The next my vision burst into white as his fist slammed into the side of my face. Pain detonated through my skull, violent and disorienting, and my footing went with it. I hit the ground hard enough to jar my teeth.
For a split second, I thought that was it. Same as always. A hit, maybe two. Something I could cover. Something I could explain away.
That was how it had always worked back in Australia.
Thomas knew exactly where the line was. Knew how to keep it contained. A shove. A slap. Fingers digging just hard enough to bruise where no one would see.
Here, there was no one watching. No reason to stop.
I pushed up onto one elbow, head ringing, and that was when I saw him reach for the rock.
It didn’t register fast enough.
“Thomas—”
He brought it down.
The impact was wet and cracking all at once, pain flaring bright across my face as something split open. My vision fractured, red spilling into one eye as heat poured down my cheek. I tasted blood instantly—thick, metallic, choking.
The world tilted.
I barely felt myself hit the ground again, but I felt the blood. Warm. Fast. Sliding down into my eye, blinding me on one side.
Thomas didn’t pause. His hands were on me before I could even orient myself, fingers locking around my throat with brutal familiarity.
I remember the pressure first.
Those big, solid hands crushing down, thumbs digging into the soft space beneath my jaw as the air vanished from my lungs like it had never been there at all.
I tried to breathe and got nothing. Tried to drag air in and felt my throat close under his grip.
My hands came up automatically, clawing at his wrists, nails scraping skin that didn’t give. Thomas had been a police sergeant for years. He knew exactly how to hold someone, exactly where to press to take control.
My vision tunnelled, already half-blinded by blood. The edges of the world dimmed, sound pulling away like it was being dragged underwater.
I remember thinking—absurdly—that this was it. That after everything, after surviving the rift and this world and everything in it, this was how it ended.
On my back.
Under him.
Again.
And then the forest exploded.
It didn’t build. It didn’t warn. One second there was choking silence, the next something tore through the undergrowth with the force of a storm given flesh. Branches snapped. Leaves scattered. The ground itself seemed to shake.
Thomas barely had time to turn.
Varek hit him like a weapon.
I didn’t understand what I was seeing at first. My vision was half gone, the world smeared red and shadow. There was just movement and violence. Something large and fast and utterly unstoppable.
Claws.
The sound—
God.
The sound of tearing flesh.
Varek ripped Thomas off me like he weighed nothing, dragging him away with a force that snapped branches and sent them both crashing through the undergrowth.
I sucked in air that wouldn’t quite come, my throat screaming, lungs burning as I rolled onto my side and coughed blood and dirt.
And then I saw it clearly.
Saw him.
Saw what he was doing.
The memory cuts there, edges clean and deep. I squeeze my eyes shut because the truth of it has never changed.
Varek didn’t just kill him. He tore him apart.
The Nyxerian instincts had taken over completely—protective fury, mate-bond instincts snapping into place the moment he’d seen Thomas trying to strangle me.
Thomas had died screaming, and I had lost my mind.
Not from grief. Not entirely. But from shock and terror. From the sheer animal horror of watching a creature tear my husband to pieces in front of me.
I’d thrown myself at Varek like an idiot. Punching, clawing, screaming things I don’t even remember saying.
He hadn’t fought back. He’d just taken it until exhaustion and oxygen deprivation finally caught up with me and the world went black.
When I woke up, I’d been cradled against the broad chest of a giant monster warrior, being carried deeper into a world that had already destroyed everything I thought I understood about reality.
I let out a long breath and open my eyes again, running my fingers once again over the scar left behind from that day.
Ten years.
Ten years since that moment. And somehow… despite everything… my life now is better than it ever was back on Earth.
The thought sinks slowly in my mind. It’s strange and so fucking complicated. But true. Because Thomas had been a very special kind of brutal piece of shit. And for the first time in my life, I haven’t been living under someone’s shadow.
The warehouse is quiet. Morning light has begun creeping through the high windows, turning the dust-filled air pale gold.
I straighten and grab a shirt from the back of the chair. The day is starting. People will come by the warehouse soon.