Chapter 5
THE SHADOWS THAT CLAIM
The moment I returned to that warehouse, I knew I was trapped in a dream…no, a nightmare. One that Vasileios hadn’t shaped, but one he still ruled, if only by his presence.
Now it felt like my own mind was turning against me.
My memories, raw and unmerciful, assaulted me with everything I had tried so hard to bury.
The terror that had seeped into my bones that night replayed with cruel precision.
Every scream, every pleading breath, every sound of flesh being torn apart from outside that office.
I thought I had known pain before. I thought I had known fear.
But this…this was something else entirely.
The air was thick with blood and smoke. Chains groaned overhead, swaying from the rusty beam.
I looked up and saw myself hanging there, wrists bound, my body bruised and limp.
The me in the dream was trapped, helpless, watching as the shadows around her twisted and came alive.
I tried to tell myself this wasn’t real, that I had survived this, that it was over. But the nightmare didn’t care. It blurred the lines between memory and madness, merging the horrors that had been real with the ones Vasileios had once conjured in my dreams.
The hospital. The demon patients. The screams that weren’t mine but somehow felt as if they were. The nightmare fused them until I couldn’t tell where one torment ended and the other began.
And behind it all, behind every horror, every shriek of pain, there he stood.
The darkness always wore his shape and called out to his victims.
Called out to me.
He shouldn’t have been there. Not this version of him, not the one that haunted the edge of every fear. He was the embodiment of everything I should have hated. Everything I should have run from. Yet at that moment, when the chains rattled and my pulse thundered, I called out for him.
Not out of fear.
But for help.
It didn’t make sense. He was the one who had invoked nightmares like this, the one whose shadows had clawed through my dreams and made me fear my own death. And yet, somewhere deep inside, I had stopped believing he would ever let anyone else kill me.
Because that darkness of his, it didn’t want to destroy me.
It wanted to claim me.
Even in my nightmare, I could feel it, the way his presence filled the void, his eyes gleaming through the smoke as he stepped out of the shadows.
The world bled red around him. The chains above me snapped one by one, and the echo of his voice whispered my name through the air like a prayer or a warning.
Vanessa.
The sound of it made my heart twist painfully, even as the rest of the world fell away. And then, just as I reached out for him, the scene shifted again. The blood, the bodies, the sound of tearing flesh, all of it dissolved, and I was alone in the dark, the silence deafening.
I couldn’t tell if I was still dreaming or if this was something else.
Something that had followed me back from that night.
Because it wasn’t just the warehouse anymore.
It was everything. The kidnapping. The witch.
The Erebus brothers. The betrayal. My life had become a loop of survival, of clawing through one cage only to wake up in another.
Somewhere along the way, I stopped asking whether I even wanted freedom, and instead started wondering if I deserved the two men I had fallen in love with.
Maybe this was to be my punishment for loving them despite the curse.
To live forever caught between one monster and the next.
The price of loving somebody, of trusting them, had already destroyed me once.
It had left me with mountains of debt, bruises that ran deeper than skin, and a lifetime of hardship.
And now, here I was again.
Falling.
Bleeding.
Haunted.
Only this time, I wasn’t sure if I was more afraid of dying at the hands of my enemies or being saved by the vampires who might have already stolen my soul…
as they had certainly claimed my heart. Victor had reminded me of it too, his words laced with anger, throwing my debt back at me and warning me what would come the next time I put my trust in the wrong hands.
But I was starting to realize that a life in debt still meant a life of living. There was one thing to fear, the knock of a debt collector at your door.
But it was quite another to fear the New York vampire mafia bosses turning up and breaking it down to steal you away. To be used as ransom, a weapon against the very people who cared about you.
It was little wonder why I was trapped in this endless loop of nightmares.
Each one was bleeding into the next, memories of the last few days merging into a single, suffocating reel of terror.
The witch’s hands, cold and cruel, flashed in my mind.
The way she’d used me, twisted me, played me like a tune she already knew by heart.
And behind it all now stood him.
Tal and Victor’s brother.
Vasileios Erebus
The one whose agenda did not, by any stretch of mercy, include me surviving this ordeal.
My only hope was that somewhere in that cursed heart of his, a crack had begun to form.
That perhaps, without meaning to, he had grown attached.
Because if he had, then maybe, just maybe, when the time came to make his choice, I’d have a chance to live.
But dreams are cruel things.
The warehouse bled away, replaced by stone and shadow. I was no longer hanging but trapped. A cell surrounded me, the bars biting cold against my skin. I pounded my fists against them until pain jolted up my arms, raw and real.
“Let me out!” I screamed, voice breaking.
The sound echoed back, hollow and distorted. The small window behind me glowed faintly with moonlight, though it offered no comfort. Because the shadows beneath it were moving, stretching, shifting, coming alive.
Hands.
Dozens of them, dark and inhuman, slid across the floor like liquid ink.
They clawed toward me, reaching for my ankles, my wrists, my throat.
I stumbled back until the cold metal of the door pressed into my spine, breath tearing from my lungs.
The shadows coiled and rose, serpentine, alive with purpose.
They were his.
His darkness.
The same power I had seen twist around him, that had slaughtered the mob like they were paper.
Only now, that same darkness wanted me. They reached for me, those shadowed serpents, eager to touch, to claim, to consume.
“No!” I cried, slamming my fists against the metal door again and again until my hands ached and burned. My voice cracked with desperation.
“Help me!”
A low, sinister laugh filled the space, one that did not belong to him this time.
It was her.
The witch.
Her voice slithered through the air like poison.
“You thought he’d save you, little rabbit?
He only keeps what he wants to break.” The walls groaned.
Then they moved. The cell began to close in, stone grinding against stone as the space shrank around me.
The air turned heavy, hot, impossible to breathe.
I clawed at the door, screaming again, my voice raw.
Panic seized me, and somewhere in the madness, I remembered that old superstition, the one whispered by children and dreamers alike. When you fall in a dream, you always wake before you hit the ground. That if you didn’t… you’d never wake at all.
Would the same be true here?
If the walls reached me, if they crushed me, would that mean death in the waking world?
The thought froze my blood. My heart pounded hard enough that I could hear it, feel it, a steady drumbeat counting down my seconds.
I thought of the dreams he had made me endure.
The one where I fell through the floor, the drop endless, the fear absolute. He hadn’t let me die then.
He had saved me.
Because even in his nightmares, he had refused to let me fall.
But he had also terrified me, broken me, made me beg.
In this dream, I could still hear my own voice pleading with him, the desperate girl I had been, begging the monster who haunted her to save her from the monsters he had created.
It wasn’t forgiveness I had ever given him. It was surrender. But now, as the walls crept closer, the witch’s laughter rising to a fever pitch, I found myself whispering again, not in fear, but in defiance.
“Vasileios.” I breathed.
And somewhere in the dark, even through the dream, I swore I felt him answer. A pulse of shadow. A flicker of heat. The whisper of my name, carried through the black.
“Vanessa”
But it wasn’t enough to break through.
I screamed, again and again, my throat raw, my fists pounding until pain exploded through my bones as though they might splinter beneath my skin. The door stayed unmoving, cold, unfeeling. My sobs turned to shouts, my shouts to wordless noise.
The room was alive around me.
Furniture scraped across the floor, the sound of metal legs shrieking against stone.
The narrow cot and the dented bucket, my only companions in this nightmare, were moving, drawn toward the centre of the room as each was pushed by the walls closing in around me.
The sound of shattering glass from the window behind me exploded inwards, making me shriek.
Shards falling like silver rain. I covered my head with my arms, crying out as the debris cut across my forearms and shoulders.
The shadows on the walls screamed, a horrible, keening sound, as they recoiled from the light, pulling back into the corners.
Only, it didn’t feel like they were the cause.
No, it felt like they were fighting something else. Something darker, something stronger, something that had no form yet, but that wanted me all the same.
The air shifted, trembling. And then I heard it again, this time more forceful,
My name.
The first had been a faint whisper threading through the noise. Now it was much louder, rougher and more desperate.
“Vanessa!”
My head snapped toward the door. Through the narrow opening, a face appeared, one half cloaked in shadow, the other half covered by leather molded against bone. The mask gleamed in the fractured light, death and life fighting for dominance across the features beneath.
And behind that mask, I saw them.
His eyes.
Dark, furious, afraid.
The door ripped open with a scream of metal and wood, splintering from its hinges as if torn apart by some unseen force. I stumbled forward, gravity and terror dragging me down, and fell into his arms just as the walls collapsed behind me with a deafening roar.
The impact stole the breath from my lungs.
For a heartbeat, I couldn’t move. Couldn’t think.
I could only feel the solid weight of him, the press of his chest, the warmth of his body.
My hands fisted in the fabric of his shirt.
My tears soaked through it, leaving small, wet marks that burned against my palms.
It wasn’t until I heard his voice, low and careful and trembling with something I couldn’t name, that I realized what was happening.
“Vanessa.” The sound of it wasn’t a whisper this time. It was a truth. A confirmation that I was awake. The chest beneath my cheek was real, and the arms that wrapped around me were solid strength.
And the voice, his voice now echoed softly against my ear, pulling me back into the world of the living.
The nightmare was over and once again…
He had saved me from it.