Chapter 5
Belladonna
I woke with a scream trapped in my throat, my body launching upright like a drowning victim breaking the surface.
The remnants of the nightmare clung to my skin like cobwebs, but something was different.
The bedroom that had materialized around me—one of Aurora's countless fabrications—wasn't holding its shape.
The walls breathed, contracting and expanding with wet, organic movements that made my stomach lurch.
This wasn't Aurora's doing. Something was wrong.
My lungs burned as if I'd been holding my breath too long.
Each gasp tasted wrong… metallic and thin, like the air itself was dissolving.
The ornate four-poster bed beneath me had lost its solidity, rippling like dark water disturbed by an unseen stone.
Color bled from the silk sheets, black ink dispersing into nothingness.
"That's new."
Aurora stood at the edge of the disintegrating room, her perfect blonde hair unnaturally still despite the violent tremors running through the floor. Her blue eyes flickered like faulty lights, her usual mask of cold amusement cracked by something I'd never seen in her before, uncertainty.
I pushed myself up, biting back a groan as pain lanced through my body. Every muscle remembered the nightmare's last assault, a phantom echo of torture that hadn't actually happened to my physical form. That was the cruelty of this place—pain without marks, terror without evidence.
"What's happening?" My voice sounded distant, muffled almost. I didn't think physics worked the same here.
Aurora didn't answer immediately. Her gaze darted across the fracturing space, cataloging each new distortion with narrowed eyes. The pressure in the room dropped suddenly, making my ears pop. My head swam with vertigo as gravity itself seemed to reconsider its purpose.
"The nightmare is... rejecting something," she finally said, the words careful, measured. She glanced at me, her perfect lips pressed into a tight line. "Rejecting us."
Us. The word struck me like a physical blow. I remembered then… blood. My blood on her lips. Her blood on mine. The desperate, reckless moment when we'd done the unthinkable.
It had happened in the ruins of the old library, another fabrication of the nightmare, but more solid than most. Aurora had been weakening, the control of her prison slipping after a century of maintaining it.
The Sorceress had been drawing closer, her presence seeping through the cracks like poison gas.
We'd needed something to strengthen Aurora, to seal the breaches in her defenses.
"The blood bond," I whispered, the realization cold and heavy in my stomach.
Aurora nodded once, sharp and precise. "A mistake, perhaps."
It hadn't been planned, not really. More instinct than strategy.
Aurora's whispered suggestion, her cool fingers on my wrist, the small silver knife that appeared in her hand.
The thin line of red across my palm, the matching one on hers.
Our hands pressed together, blood mingling.
Her mouth on my thumb, the shocking heat of her tongue against my pulse.
My lips pressed against hers, the taste—copper and honey and something ancient that burned like liquor.
A ritual neither of us fully understood. A connection neither of us had meant to forge.
But I had wanted it. Even then, knowing what she was, knowing the danger, I had craved that connection like a drowning person craves air.
I still couldn't explain it—this pull toward her, this inability to walk away that went beyond mere enchantment.
I was a hunter. I had encountered supernatural creatures before.
I knew how to resist glamours and mind manipulation.
But Aurora was different. She was like gravity, a fundamental force I couldn't fight without breaking something essential in myself.
The floor beneath me jerked violently, snapping me back to the present. A spiderweb of cracks spread across the marble, glowing with sickly green light. The world buckled again, throwing me sideways. I barely caught myself, palms slapping against stone that shifted like sand.
"Belladonna," Aurora warned, her voice carrying despite the howling that had started from nowhere and everywhere.
The walls melted into shadows, the ceiling peeled away like burning paper.
The carefully constructed illusion of the bedroom vanished entirely, leaving us in what I recognized as the true form of the nightmare—an endless void punctuated by floating islands of broken memories and fractured dreams. But even this was unstable now.
The floating islands shuddered and crumbled at their edges.
The black emptiness between them flickered with flashes of something else—something golden and painful to look at directly.
Aurora moved closer to me, her steps unnaturally smooth despite the disintegrating ground. "This isn't supposed to happen," she murmured, and the admission of ignorance struck me as more terrifying than anything else.
I had seen Aurora in many forms since stumbling into her trap—the seductress, the victim, the queen, the monster.
I had seen her tear men apart with nothing but shadows and whispers.
I had watched her rewrite reality with a flick of her wrist. I had felt her remake me from the inside out with just a touch.
But I had never seen her afraid.
Until now.
The air changed suddenly—grew dense, electric. Every hair on my body stood on end as power rolled through the space like thunder. A scent hit me, so strong I could taste it—decay and dust and something rotting with old magic.
My heart slammed against my ribs. I knew that scent. I'd caught traces of it in every corner of this nightmare, lingering like a signature.
Aurora inhaled sharply beside me, her blue eyes fixed on a point beyond my vision. "She knows."
The world heaved again, but this time it wasn't shifting to another dreamscape.
It was coming apart. The ground beneath us split open, jagged fractures spreading like lightning strikes.
But the void beneath—the endless nothing that usually waited below the nightmare's stage—was gone.
Instead, brilliant light poured through the cracks, a golden radiance that burned my eyes.
It wasn't warm like sunlight; it was scalding, invasive, like being flayed by fire.
Reality. The actual world bleeding through.
Aurora's hand shot out, fingers closing around my wrist with bruising force. She yanked me sideways as the ground where I'd been standing collapsed into light.
"Move," she hissed, pulling me forward even as the nightmare fought to hold us down.
I stumbled after her, caught between trying to keep my footing and trying to understand what was happening. The air thickened further, pressing against my lungs, wrapping around my ribs like a closing fist. Each breath became a struggle, the atmosphere condensing into something almost liquid.
I'd felt this sensation before—in the ballroom memory, in the shattered reflections, in the whispering corridors of Aurora's past. It was the weight of observation, the pressure of malevolent attention. But stronger now. Closer.
My stomach twisted as realization hit me. The Sorceress wasn't just watching anymore. She was coming.
Aurora dragged me across the fracturing landscape, her movements frantic in a way I'd never seen.
The elegant predator was gone, replaced by something desperate.
The nightmare folded around us, space warping unnaturally.
Escape routes sealed themselves as quickly as they appeared.
The golden light surged through more cracks, blinding and burning.
My vision blurred, darkness creeping in at the edges. The pressure was too much. I couldn't breathe. My knees buckled, and Aurora's grip on my wrist tightened to the point of pain.
"She's using you," she gritted out, hauling me upright with inhuman strength.
I forced words through my constricted throat. "What?"
Aurora's eyes burned with blue fire, her face tight with something between rage and terror. "She's using our bond against us."
Before I could ask what that meant, the world above us tore open.
It wasn't dramatic… no thunderclap, no explosion.
Just a silent, perfect parting, like black silk cut by an invisible blade.
The rift widened, edges curling back like petals of a nightmare flower.
Light poured through, but not the burning gold from below.
This light was cold, silver-blue, beautiful in the way of frozen corpses.
A figure stepped through, and the nightmare bowed.
Shadows retreated from her path, curling away like there was something repelling just from her presence. The very air stilled, waiting for permission to move again. Power radiated from her in visible waves, distorting the space around her like heat rising from summer asphalt.
I couldn't breathe. Couldn't move. My body no longer felt like my own.
The Sorceress glided forward, each step impossibly graceful.
Her raven hair floated around her as if underwater, coiling and uncoiling in slow, hypnotic patterns.
Her gown of midnight silk whispered with voices—thousands of them, pleading, screaming, begging in languages I didn't recognize but somehow understood.
Her eyes found mine—icy blue, ancient, amused. They gleamed with something that wasn't quite human, a hunger that lived behind her pupils like a separate entity. The air around her shimmered with magic, pulsing in time with my racing heart.
Aurora went rigid beside me, her fingers still locked around my wrist. I felt her tremble, a minute vibration that terrified me more than anything else. In that moment, I understood something fundamental about their relationship—something beyond the stories Aurora had shown me.
The Sorceress hadn't just cursed Aurora. She had broken her.
And now she was here to finish what she'd started.
Her perfect lips curved into a smile that never reached her eyes. She surveyed us, her gaze lingering on our connected hands, reading the evidence of our bond with clinical interest.
"How sweet," she murmured, her voice rich and melodious, dripping with mockery. Each word felt like ice sliding down my spine.
She took another step forward, and the nightmare shuddered in response. Her attention fixed on Aurora, her head tilting slightly, an almost tender gesture that made me nauseous.
"You actually thought you could win."
The words hung in the fractured air between us, simple and devastating. Not a question. A statement of fact. I felt Aurora's grip on my wrist loosen slightly—not surrender, but preparation. For what, I didn't know, and that terrified me most of all.