Chapter 20
Alina
Iawoke to an obnoxious chorus of birdsong heralding the dawn.
Fucking birds. Always so goddamn cheerful.
It always took a few minutes to orient myself after a jump.
I sat up, rubbed my eyes, and breathed in the cool, pine-laced air.
Dew clung to my ankles, and the morning chill slipped over my skin like a phantom.
Fir trees and towering pines surrounded me, swaying gently in the wind, whispering their ancient secrets.
They were too serene. They were too untouched.
I walked to the nearby stream and crouched at the edge. The water glided over stones with a soft gurgle, its music annoyingly peaceful. I stared at it, unblinking, as rage began to crawl back into my chest like a long-lost lover.
Balthazar.
The name hit me like a knife. All I could see was his grotesque form and his monstrous betrayal. His secrets, his silence, his insatiable thirst for control. How many times had he left without a word? How often had he whispered of her, the so-called love of his cursed, endless life?
I clenched my fists until my knuckles turned white.
No more.
I had power now. My own darkness. My own path. I didn’t need to share it with a man who couldn’t even pretend I was enough. I was done being someone’s second choice and done begging for affection masked as punishment.
And yet…
My skin still remembered him.
The way he touched me. The way we burned. Our twisted communion of sex and madness. The way our bodies collided like twin storms—violent, glorious, fucking feral. It made me sick. It made me ache.
I hated him.
I wanted him.
But more than anything, I wanted to become so powerful that even he would kneel.
A dizzy wave washed over me. I braced myself against a tree, breath ragged, head spinning.
How was I supposed to live without that heat, without those brutal, soul-shaking nights?
But that was the problem, wasn’t it?
That was all we ever were. Rage. Lust. Blood and fire. Fight, then fuck. Repeat.
I stepped into the stream to cool the fever under my skin, but something yanked the second I planted my foot midcurrent. My foot wedged between two submerged rocks, and a web of creek debris curled around my ankle like nature’s noose. I tugged hard. Nothing.
“Shit,” I hissed.
I dropped to my knees, thrusting my hands into the freezing water. The laces of my shoe had knotted tight, stubborn as sin. I clawed at them, but they wouldn’t budge. I was well and truly stuck.
That was when I saw her.
A woman downstream. Dirty-blonde hair spilling down her back like tangled sunlight, wild and untamed. A flowing white dress, too pristine for the woods. She moved like something unearthly, graceful as a ghost, lifting her skirts as she approached me upstream.
“Hello!” I called out, waving one arm while the other tried to pry loose my foot. “Hey! Can you help me?”
She didn’t flinch. Didn’t even glance my way.
“Hello?” I shouted louder, waving more aggressively now. “Can you hear me? I’m stuck!”
Still nothing. She was close now—close enough to hear and see the distress carved into my face.
I narrowed my eyes, heart thrumming. “Are you deaf?”
The woman lifted her gaze.
And smiled.
Not a friendly smile. No. It was cruel. Icy. Menacing.
“No,” she said, her voice cold.
Her vehemence caught me off guard. I was the one trapped, not her.
“Then… can you help me?” I gestured to my foot, forcing calm into my tone. “It’s stuck between these boulders.”
She stepped forward—slow, deliberate—and stood over me in the shallows. “Oh, poor thing,” she cooed mockingly. “You need my help. But tell me… why should I give it?”
I blinked. “I don’t know. Basic decency? Help someone in need?”
I tried to smile through my irritation, but she grabbed my jaw swiftly and squeezed. Hard.
“Aww, look at you,” she said, voice sickly sweet. “So helpless. So pretty. Is that what you think? That I should help you because you’re easy on the eyes?”
I jerked back, but her grip was iron. I clawed at her hand, but her fingers may as well have been carved from marble.
Who the fuck is this woman?
“What’s your problem?” I snapped, yanking my head free. “Why are you acting like a lunatic?”
Her eyes narrowed. Her lips curved in a venomous smirk that might’ve left a scar. “Because I am your problem. I’m the storm you didn’t see coming. The nightmare you can’t wake up from.”
A chill slid down my spine as she leaned closer, her breath hot against my cheek. “And it starts with this—me watching you suffer. Just like you made others suffer.”
I flinched.
“Vicious little serpent,” she spat, stepping back. “Your sins have caught up with you.”
I cursed under my breath, thrashing in the water, trying desperately to wrench my foot free. The icy current gnawed at my ankles while she stood perfectly still, backlit by the blood-red sun. A ghost. A judge. Something ancient.
Her eyes—those cold, gray eyes—never left mine.
Finally, I forced my voice into stillness. “What do you mean you’re my nightmare? You don’t know me.”
I lunged, hand raised to slap her across the face—but she moved like a ghost. In one swift, brutal motion, she caught my arm and twisted.
A cry tore from my throat as pain shot up my shoulder.
Then, without hesitation, she slammed my head into the icy stream.
Water surged into my mouth, up my nose, as I thrashed and sputtered. My foot was still trapped between the rocks, and I couldn’t escape. Couldn’t breathe.
Just when I thought I’d drown, she yanked me up by the hair, dragging me back into the world of air and pain.
Her fingers tangled cruelly in my soaked hair, tugging it tight against my scalp as she leaned in to me.
“You wicked little viper,” she hissed, her breath hot against my cheek. “I do know you. I know all about you. But you… You don’t know me.”
Her eyes glittered with malice.
“I think you deserve the same punishment you dealt to all your lovers,” she sneered. “Starting with Francesco—the poor stable boy you falsely accused of assault while moaning under him in pleasure. You ruined him. And for that, I will bring you the worst pain imaginable.”
She shoved me away, and I tumbled backward into the shallows, my shoe still caught. Pain lanced through my ankle like fire. The chill of the water wrapped around me, but it couldn’t cool the terror blazing in my chest.
And then—she vanished.
One breath. Two.
Suddenly, she was there again, her hands clamped around my throat.
I gasped. Her grip tightened. Inhuman. I scratched at her wrists, flailed helplessly as her thumbs pressed into my windpipe.
“You—you’re just like Balthazar!” I rasped, my voice a ragged croak. “You’re a monster!”
She didn’t flinch. Her lips curled.
“And you,” she spat, “shared his bed. Moaned for him. Loved him. And now you dare call him a monster? What kind of wretched little traitor must you be to lie even to yourself?”
She flickered again—gone one moment, back the next, each reappearance with her fingers clamping tighter.
My vision went white with panic.
She’s not human. She’s something else. Something worse.
Finally, she let go.
I collapsed into the stream, coughing, gasping, tears mixing with the icy water.
“I… I do love Balthazar,” I choked, each word catching on broken breaths. “With all my heart.”
But even as I said it, I tugged at my foot, yanking with raw desperation. I didn’t care if I tore the tendons. I had to get free—had to escape this thing.
The woman’s voice slid through the air like poisoned mist, choking the life out of it.
“You say you love him,” she whispered, her form flickering in and out of existence like a flame in the wind, “but all I hear is a hollow echo—thin, pathetic, false. You think your bond matters? You and he had nothing—nothing like what we shared.”
She materialized inches from my face, her breath ice on my skin.
“Our connection,” she said, trembling with rage and devotion, “was a force that swallowed the stars. Shadows bound us. Devoured by the dark. You? You’re just a cheap thrill, a whore who happened to warm his bed.”
The air around us fractured and warped as if it couldn’t bear her fury, like the world was quaking with her grief.
I sat there, soaked to the bone, staring at her as realization dawned like a punch to the gut.
“You’re his first love,” I whispered.
A crooked smile slithered across her face. “I am Zara. Balthazar’s only love. His first. His last. The rest?” She curled her lip. “Pale imitations.”
Then she laughed—high and brutal. It rang through the trees like breaking glass, like every vengeful ghost had found its voice through her mouth.
Zara.
The name carved itself into my brain like a curse.
But—she was supposed to be dead.
My father had killed her.
Panic exploded in my chest. I writhed, twisted, and kicked. Finally, one of the boulders shifted with a splash, and I scrambled upright, half-falling onto the slick rocks.
I tried to run.
But my foot, swollen and raw, couldn’t grip the riverbed. My soaked shoes slipped uselessly, and my scream sliced the morning air as she grabbed me by the hair and ripped me backward.
I flew like a ragdoll. Water exploded around us.
My head hit the stones with a wet smack. Dizzy. Cold. Drowning in pain.
Zara stood over me, her eyes gleaming with murderous delight.
“You brought unspeakable suffering to Layla,” she snarled. “You broke Malik’s soul. You ruined lives with your poison. Now—now, I will unmake yours.”
She wrenched me up by the hair again, and I screamed as her voice split the sky in two—pure fury, pure vengeance, unholy and divine.
“I will turn your days into torment. Your nights into damnation. You wanted power?” she spat. “You will have it—but only the kind that devours you from the inside out.”
She hurled me through the air like I weighed nothing—just a plaything in her hands.