Chapter 42
I Choose Death
When I woke, sunlight leaked through the cracks in the curtains—bright white nearing yellow-gray.
Soren stood near one of them, staring straight at me, his whole body silvered by the light.
I spotted Salah asleep a couple of feet away, Adriel snoring like a dying beast in the far corner.
My joints popped as I peeled myself upright and made my way to the only other one awake in the room.
Soren’s eyes darkened the closer I came.
“Why are you up?” he asked, quiet and sharp.
“Where is everyone else?” My voice was still thick with sleep. I rubbed my eyes and squinted against the light. I was whispering, unlike him.
“Go get more sleep.”
“I’m fine,” I frowned and tried again. “Where’d everybody go?”
“Onezimuth and Ezra’s group left already.”
“What?!” I screeched.
Soren scowled and pressed a finger to his lips. Then his hand moved to my lower back, nudging me gently toward the door.
Even outside, he kept his voice low.
“They didn’t want to waste time. They’re heading away from The Tower anyway.”
I pouted. “What about Matty, Marigold, and Winifred?”
“Surveillance and foraging.” He nodded toward the woods, which looked less ominous in the waning daylight than in the black of night and the orange of burning death. “And his name is Matthias.”
“Salah and Marigold call him Matty.”
“Salah and Marigold don't belong to me,” Soren growled.
I huffed out a sigh before daring to reply with, “I don't belong to you either.”
Soren was quiet and still for so long, I almost believed I'd get away with that remark.
Then in a low, even tone that left no room for misunderstanding, he laid down his law as he stared at me with silver dancing in his eyes.
“Everything about you belongs to me, Eliana. The way you drink green tea with two spoons of honey. The way you never rinse the toothpaste out of the sink. Your inability to do your own hair and make up. Your murderous daydreams. Your mischievous night dreams.” He interrupted himself with a smirk and turned back to staring at the trees, but I watched his jaw move with the rest of his words.
“Your body. Your mind. Your soul. They all belong to me because I bought them.”
I allowed two beats of silence before I scrunched my brow and murmured, “What do you mean you bought them?”
“I am what I am because I gave up everything to have you.”
His words were quiet and soft, wrapped up in the breeze rustling through the leaves, and I knew that no further questions would get answered.
I wasn't even sure I wanted the answer to the only question on the tip of my tongue.
We stood in silence for a while, the forest whispering around us. I caught myself sneaking glances at him, fingers drifting to the necklace around my throat as I leaned back against the vine-soaked siding.
“Go back to bed,” he said eventually, not even chancing a look in my direction.
“Can I ask you something first?”
He studied me, eyes reading every twitch of my face. “You need sleep, Little Shadow.”
“What did Matthias mean about my necklace?”
The corner of his mouth tugged upward. In a blink, he shifted, caging me against the metal wall of the building.
His eyes flicked to my hands, still fidgeting with the pendant. Then up to my neck.
“Zuri did a good job,” he murmured.
I blinked. “With what?”
His thumb grazed the rising lump in my throat. My own hands released the charm of my necklace and dropped lazily to my sides.
“Getting rid of the bruises when she healed your other wounds while you slept.” With every word, Soren found a patch of skin to ignite with his touch.
I squirmed against the building holding me upright. But when I turned away, his fingers caught my chin, forcing my gaze back.
“But now that my mark on you is gone…” His voice dropped to a growl. “No one will know you’ve already been claimed.”
I inhaled too sharply. The burn coiled in my stomach like a struck match.
“Why do you do this?” I whispered.
“Hmm?” He leaned back, eyes flashing. “Do what, Xiao Ying?”
I glared. “Confuse me. And stop calling me that. I’m not following you. You’re the one always following me. If anything, you’re the shadow.”
I turned away, desperate to flee the heat crawling up my spine.
His laugh carried derision in its cadence. He pushed me back against the wall. And then his mouth was at my ear. “I don’t think you’re confused.” He moved to my other ear. “I think you know exactly what’s going on.”
His cold hand wrapped around my neck. Firm and familiar.
His lips brushed against the lobe of my ear and then down to my neck.
When he spoke, his mouth moved against my skin. “I guess I’ll just have to mark you again.”
I tilted my head back to try to loosen the tightness in my throat and get some air into my lungs, but I could see how that gesture might have been taken another way. And maybe a part of me had subconsciously meant it in another way.
Or maybe not so subconsciously.
His mouth landed against my pulse, teeth scraping veins and warm tongue brushing in their wake. I was trapped between the burning heat of him on me and the pressure bursting in my heaving lungs and pulsing much further down.
He dragged his mouth down my neck to the edge of my tank top…
…then nothing.
His lips were gone, but his hand stayed on my hip, his body still too close.
The moment dragged.
I waited for as long as I could be expected to, which was two seconds.
I opened my eyes.
Soren stared down at me, lips parted, breath warm.
But his eyes—
Silver. Blazing to an almost white.
Only his pupils remained black.
Even they were aglow with whatever was going through his mind.
“Do you want me to stop?” he asked. Soren always had a low voice, but the husk in it now bordered on catastrophic.
Stop…what?
I couldn’t speak.
His hand slipped under my shirt, palm searing against the bare skin on my waist.
“If you do, you need to tell me now,” Soren said, his voice growing hoarser. “Because I won’t be able to stop myself this time. I’ve already told you I want you. If you don’t want me back like this, then stop me, Eliana.”
Oh.
My first instinct was to say “no.”
No, I didn’t want him to stop.
But the louder part—the part of me that always had to argue with everyone about everything—almost opened my mouth to say yes, to stop him and pull away. To run for it. From it.
From him.
I didn’t have to.
Soren pulled away in an instant, every muscle snapping to alert.
He turned his ear toward the trees.
“What is—”
He looked back at me. The silver light in his eyes faded fast. Shadows devoured whatever glow he’d allowed moments ago.
He pressed a finger to my lips. Then he turned fully toward the forest. A handful of breaths passed.
“We have to run,” he said.
“Why? What is it?”
A faint barking answered from somewhere far off. Then a high-pitched sound. Perhaps a scream.
“Hell hounds are coming!” The volume of Soren’s voice rose only slightly, but the tone was a mark of urgency. “I need to help the others. You need to run!” He shoved me hard in the opposite direction of the incoming noise.
More barking.
Screaming.
Then a MagRay blast exploded nearby.
“But I don’t know where to go.” I grabbed his forearms, nails digging into his skin. “I don’t know the next Nest!”
“I’ll find you. Just RUN!”
That last word was a roar. He wrenched out of my grip, and I felt his skin give under my nails.
I didn’t see if I drew blood, but I imagined red streaks across his perfect marble skin as I turned and sprinted.
Then the next scream was audibly Marigold’s. “Noooo! Matty!”
Another blast from a magray shook the line of trees. Birds called out in their hastened flight for escape.
“Adriel, they’re coming!” Soren’s voice. “Get Salah out of here!”
The barking erupted into a chorus. A flame-glow flickered across the treetops as monsters closed in. The trees whined under the weight of the blasts. One tree snapped and crashed to the ground. Or, perhaps that was simply the Extermin’s footfalls approaching.
I didn’t look back. My eyes locked forward, watching my shadow flicker over the earth as I ran.
Stealth had never been my strength, but survival didn’t care.
I tore through the woods at breakneck speed. Still nowhere close to Soren-speed.
The chaos behind me blurred. I was so focused on running from that blur that I almost missed the noises directly in front of me. There was a shout.
The next shout came much closer.
“Over here!” a woman called. “We’ve got tracks coming this way on the terramaps. She’s heading right toward us.”
It was Prisca Ofer.
A male voice muffled by a Moderator mask shouted something back to her.
Her reply was closer than her last shout. “No matter what, we take her alive!”
My stomach turned over, and I looked left and right.
“Up,” said the still, small voice.
I looked up.
A towering tree with low branches loomed above me.
Nope. Not climbing to my death.
“Fear or death. You need to learn to trust. Climb up.”
Well, at least the small voice was being less cryptic this time.
“Movement’s stalled,” said the male Mod’s voice, now nearly on top of me.
“She’s hiding,” another muttered.
I looked up again. My stomach flipped. I was going to die.
I choose dea—
A blinding flash interrupted my suicidal thought process, my surroundings disappearing from my vision.
When I regained my sight, I sat in a hammock of thick branches and enormous leaves that’d grown together over thousands of years. But one look down to the left, and I saw that I was very much able to fall to my death now. I’d been blinded and transported to die out my worst fear against my will.
Something had gotten me into that tree.
Disobeying the laws of gravity and my own intentions, that something had moved me from the ground to the tree.
My fingers gripped the surface behind me, flecks of bark cutting into the flesh under my nails.
A whimper died in my mouth when I heard Prisca’s voice directly below me.
“Tracks have gone cold,” she said.
“Perhaps she climbed up,” a Mod replied.