Chapter 36 #2
“I want you, Eliana,” he whispered violently against my mottled skin. “You can’t leave me behind anymore. I've waited too long for you.”
My breath ran ragged, shallow from panic and desire—no longer sure which one I was drowning in.
My blood poured through my veins too fast, and my lungs couldn’t keep up with the need for oxygen, even if I hadn’t been strangled only seconds earlier.
Besides, Soren was nearly crushing me between himself and the door, so my chest couldn’t possibly expand to accommodate enough intake.
Was this punishment? Or possession?
Or something else entirely.
I didn’t care.
If I did, it wasn’t enough to tell him to stop.
His teeth grazed my collarbone, his tongue hot against my skin.
My hands found their way to Soren’s arms, nails digging into the biceps beneath.
I wasn’t entirely sure whether I was pushing, pulling, or just holding on.
When Soren tore the bodice of my dress down with a single jerk of his hand, and my breasts spilled free into the cold air between us, I immediately knew the gasp ringing out in the room belonged solely to me this time.
His mouth was on one of my breasts instantly, sealing around my nipple and sucking hard. His tongue licked over it in maddening, deliberate strokes, and my entire spine arched off the door.
“Soren,” I moaned through my panting. “It feels so...”
His other hand cupped my second breast, thumb brushing over the peak in circles that made my legs quake.
Those icy tendrils that had started in my fingers and toes—they’d vanished. Now, a molten warmth replaced them.
No air. No thought. Just heat and pressure and his mouth ruining me.
Pleasure exploded from my lower back and pulsed outward.
When his teeth scraped again—this time on the underside of my breast—I cried out. Loud. Wanton. Helpless.
Then I was alone.
Soren’s mouth and hands had abandoned me.
When he pulled away, I slipped to the floor, my back sliding down the door.
This was a terrible, awful mistake.
I allowed myself two gasping inhales.
On instinct, my hands yanked my dress back up, and I crawled as best I could in the dress now roping around my limbs as if it were on Soren’s side to try and strangle me.
I scrambled away to the furthest corner of the room from him and cowered as low as I could, knowing I wasn’t even prolonging my death by a millisecond.
I wasn’t.
He’d take what he wanted, whenever he wanted.
Nothing I could do would stop him.
I wasn’t sure I even wanted to stop him.
I didn’t want him to murder me. That much was clear.
But the other part…
The part that had left me a mess in his mouth. That part, I wanted. That was even clearer.
Soren strolled toward me with a slow, cruel confidence. The predator coming for the prey he’d maimed. His eyes shone so black that the color seeped out of his irises and into the whites.
“Is it on?” he asked, low and flat.
I stared at him blankly.
Glancing down at my dress, I checked to ensure that I had covered myself.
“The Visex,” Soren clarified.
Oh.
I looked up to meet his horrid gaze again and shook my head. I could only whimper, no words mustering in my shaking frame.
“I didn’t turn it on. It just happened by itself.”
“I should crack your skull open on the floor right now,” he growled, “And pry the implant out with my bare fingers. If you were anyone else, it would have already been done. You betrayed us.”
I screwed my eyes shut and turned my head away, not wanting to see my death.
I didn’t want to see him anymore, not like this.
Even if what he had done just now had felt like pure bliss, that was not his final intention. He was a monster created out of hatred and lust. He was an abomination doomed to be nothing but evil, bent on taking down humanity.
He was built to destroy.
He was destined to destroy me.
But he didn’t move.
The room remained silent except for my unsteady breathing.
Then:
“Look at me,” Soren said with his tone even and light, a sharp contrast to every word he’d uttered since I’d entered the room.
His voice had changed. Soft. Almost…coaxing.
It felt like hours had passed, but maybe I’d only left Farren in the hallway five minutes ago.
I didn’t look at him.
I stayed frozen.
“Little Shadow,” he murmured.
I flinched.
He knelt in front of me, fingers cold and gentle as they slid under my chin and tilted my face toward his.
My eyes weren’t closed quite as tightly as before.
“Look at me,” he said again.
There it was. That gentle side caught me more off guard than all the growling he did.
My lids lifted, and he was the only thing I could see as he crowded me further into the corner.
“You have to be good,” he said. “Good girls get rewards. Bad girls get punished. And I don’t want to have to punish you again.”
Unsure which part of that was the punishment, I agreed with a nod despite a soon-to-be-orphaned part of me wholly disagreeing with the idea of not having his mouth on me like that again in the next three minutes.
But what else could I do when Soren’s hand slid down so that his thumb grazed a circle over the mouth-shaped bruises forming on my neck and chest? I shuddered at the combination of the sting from being touched and the chilling effect of his skin. Part blade, part balm.
“You want to hurt someone?” His voice darkened again. “Hurt me. Don’t put anyone else in danger. Don’t say those things about them. Don’t accuse them of being dishonest or selfish. That’s all on me. I’m your problem. Not them.”
I inhaled a gulp of air and exhaled it as slowly as possible. “What do you want from me?” I asked in a high-pitched mumble.
He rose slowly to his feet, towering over me again. I was smaller than ever down there in the corner with him standing above me, no longer holding me.
“I want you to be good,” he said. “Because if I’m in love with someone who isn’t good, then there really is no hope for me.”
He turned his back on me.
“You’ve gotta be my saving grace, Xiao Ying. It's why I chose you.”
Then he was gone.
The room felt impossibly empty.
Like he’d taken all the air in it with him.
Me too.
I was also empty. He’d taken my soul, I swore it.
Then I wasn’t empty at all. There was a war brewing. Hatred and something else clawed at one another.
I somehow felt disgust, fury, and hunger all at the same time.
“Aghhh!” I screamed up at the ceiling with my eyes shut tight and burning. Even my nose burned from the effort to contain these emotions.
The dress that had felt so beautiful and elegant before had transformed into a funeral shroud—or a straitjacket. I crawled out of it and scalded every inch of my skin in the shower.
I drowned in my anger. I was furious at myself for enjoying his punishment. For wanting more. Needing it.
Removing my skin with a rough cloth and boiling water was me doling out my own punishment for falling into the trap that was Soren. The asshole didn’t even have a clan name that I could use in cursing him. Just two syllables that couldn’t be more precise in labeling him as severe.
Severely demented.
Severely intoxicating.
This time, I could see I’d done something wrong. I probably deserved his severity, his strictness. He was right that I put people in danger by using my Visex and not telling anyone about it. But was the way he touched me just a cruel lesson, or did he want to touch me like that?
He said he did.
But why would he?
“…if I’m in love with someone who isn’t good, then there really is no hope for me. You’ve gotta be my saving grace, Xiao Ying.”
“...I’m in love with someone...”
It’s me.
I’m someone.
Soren thinks he’s in love with me.
No, he’s messing with me. That’s what he does. He plays games with my head to keep me under his control.
Turning my face up into the jet of hot water, I screamed again, drowning myself in my own confusion.
I let the water bite at the marks he left on me much longer than bearable as I contemplated the secret behind Soren and what I was to him.
What was the prophecy he was trying to keep from me?
Did I hate what he did to me? Or did I want more? Did I want him to leave me alone? Or did his walking out leave me to sink into a lonely grave because belonging in his touch felt better than any possibility of belonging anywhere else?
Am I in love with someone, too?
Someone who is clearly not good and will never be my saving grace?
Someone who isn’t capable of truly loving others by his very nature.
My eyes drifted shut as I lay in bed after my impossibly long shower, wrapped in a towel, unable to bring myself to move. No thoughts could reach through the fog anymore.
The words blinked into my mind’s eye—cool and sterile.
Answer.
That wasn’t me.
I didn’t choose to answer.
The Visex did, acting on its own, which should be absolutely impossible.
But my body was too heavy to stop it. Too heavy to even sit up. Maybe I was dreaming.
“Eliana.”
The most beautiful voice I had ever heard floated into my head like notes on a piano played at the perfect pitch with impeccable timing and soul only a true artist could create.
“You do not know me, yet,” the voice continued, calm and gentle. “So I know you might be wary of this call, but I know you very well. I have known you and loved you from the day you were born.”
I couldn’t speak. Couldn’t form a single thought.
I wasn’t afraid.
I wasn’t anything.
I must have been dreaming.
But I knew I wasn’t.
“My only desire in life is to give you exactly what you want. I will deliver Azazel to you. All I need from you is for you to be who you are truly meant to be.”
That was it. The call didn’t even end properly. No Visex notification. Nothing.
Just silence and darkness.
My next dream was most likely something normal and silly. Something with waffles. Or me getting a perfect score on a test I forgot to study for. I didn’t remember the details.
Because of what came after.
I stood on a cliff I had never seen before, the earth beneath my bare feet cracked and bleeding with heat.
In the distance, The Tower burned.
Flames devoured it like hungry mouths. Black smoke coiled up into the sky like it was trying to strangle the stars.
Red blood poured from its windows, thick and endless.
Screams echoed up the hill, layered and dissonant, like a choir tearing itself apart.
I’d done all that.
Then it wasn’t just screaming. It was music.
The same song I had heard in the chapel—but now it was slower. Sadder. And this time, it had words.
“My marrow seeps like spilled wine,
My soul leaks through shattered skin.
Night falls with teeth, and I am pierced
By sorrow’s song again and again.”
“You cast me into the earth’s wide mouth,
And it did not close around me.
I cried to the sky, but the stars turned their backs,
And silence made its bed in me.”
“I was formed of fire and ash,
Now I unravel in stormlight.
If there is a mercy, it is hidden from me.
If there is a god, he is cruel.”
As the final words faded, so did the cliff.
I was no longer standing on stone, but waist-deep in a pool of blood. The surface clung to me, thick and hot like syrup.
The room was pitch black except for the wall in front of me—a great, glimmering arc of stained glass and stone, now glowing with fire.
The sanctuary wall of the Chapel.
The flames reached the front, and the light lit up what I hadn’t noticed before.
Bodies.
Dozens of them. No. More than a hundred. Hanging.
Their forms were strung up like grotesque marionettes along the walls.
Some I recognized.
Some I didn’t.
But I knew they’d all died because of me.
Because of what I was.