Page 159 of Somno Slave

I have to see him again.

The thought horrifies me the second it arrives.

He opened a doctor like a body on an operating table.

He hunted therapists.

And still my body moves toward him like it’s searching for something.

Delaying only feels like torture.

The cold air hits me as soon as my front door slams shut. The world feels bitter today, like it’s in mourning. Even the sky isdarker, frosted over with looming clouds that swell. I glance up at the greyness and pull my coat even tighter.

The whole walk feels wrong. Every person in a white coat suddenly stands out to me. A paramedic crossing the road. A nurse outside the pharmacy smoking beside the bins.

My pulse spikes every time I see one.

Doctors.

Therapists.

The photographs keep forcing themselves back into my head in ugly little flashes.

The opened chest cavity. The blue thread. MERCY carved into stone.

My breathing turns shallow.

What if he only talks to me because I’m next?

I catch my reflection in a polished café window. For a second, I watch myself move through it too, my own reflection pale and tired, a woman wearing her skin badly.

And then my chest floods with heat so suddenly it feels violently.

No.

I’m different.

He said so himself.

He needs my help. I’m going to save him. I’m the only one who understands him.

Standing where no one should be, still enough to feel unnatural, his shape cutting through the reflection like something the mirror should have rejected. Even distorted through glass, I know the shape of him.

Tall in the way danger is tall—impossible to ignore once you’ve seen it. Broad shoulders beneath a long dark coat that falls almost to his knees, the fabric hanging heavy and severe. His hood is up, his face half-lost to shadow, disguised enough that no one passing would look twice.

But I know it is him.

I know it with the same certainty I know my own reflection.

My body stops before my mind does.

Oh God.

He’s escaped.

The thought detonates through me so hard my knees nearly lock.

Heat floods my chest instantly after, sick and humiliating because beneath the terror, beneath the horror, something else rises with it...relief.