Chapter 229: Darkness
The moment I heard his heavy footsteps fade into the distance, I leaped to my feet. I began feverishly feeling along the walls of the cramped pantry in search of anything useful. My fingers brushed against a cord hanging from the ceiling with a plastic pull-tab.
I yanked it sharply. A dim yellow bulb flickered, illuminating the space, and at that exact instant, right in front of me, I saw his face. Dark, nearly black eyes flecked with the glints of predatory, devilish fire.
"You can’t run away from me, breeder..."
With a piercing scream, I bolted upright in bed, my fingers convulsively clawing at the t-shirt soaked through with cold sweat across my chest. Air rushed into my lungs with a sharp, whistling hiss.
Goddess! Moon Goddess above, it was only a dream! Just another cursed nightmare... I had managed to escape, after all. I was home. I was safe.
Repeating these words to myself like a prayer, I blinked rapidly, trying to focus my vision in the darkness of my bedroom. Glancing at the digital clock, I groaned in frustration. Three in the morning—that cursed time again.
My mother always used to say that three in the morning was the hour when demons crawled out from the netherworld, crept into human dreams, fed on fears, and tried to destroy souls.
Right now, my mother’s words felt frighteningly close to the truth. This demon—this brute named Damian—had been invading my dreams every single night for a full month. His name might have been striking, but it suited a creature of the dark.
He was shattering my psyche, robbing me of sleep, and making it impossible to breathe or live normally. And it was all because a single memory of his empty, predatory gaze terrified me far more than the scum I had run from back then.
Lowering my shaking legs to the floor, I stood up and padded on tiptoe to the kitchen, carefully stepping around every creaking floorboard to avoid waking my parents. Mom and Dad were already surviving on antidepressants and barely sleeping after everything that had happened to me.
And yet, it had all started with such promise. We had moved to this city from our quiet countryside because I needed to enter university. With my high grades, I had a real chance at a state-funded tuition spot and a proper life at last. But the moment we unpacked our things... on the very first day, as I walked home after evening entrance exams, a black van simply pulled up beside me. I was dragged roughly inside and knocked out.
I woke up already there—in a place where dozens of other lost, terrified girls were kept. It was an absolute waking nightmare. We weren’t beaten half to death or starved, no. Far more humiliating things were done to us.
Forced medical examinations, cold instruments, and the indifferent eyes of doctors. And those of us who had already lost our innocence were immediately taken somewhere else. For good. None of the remaining girls knew what happened to them, which made it all the more terrifying.
New girls were constantly brought in, and the old ones taken away. I didn’t give up. I tried to escape several times, studying their schedules, and when fortune finally smiled upon me that day, this terrifying Alpha crossed my path.
Who he was, I didn’t know. Perhaps a hitman, Michael’s rival, or someone even worse. To be honest, I didn’t even want to know. But the fact that he had shoved me into that exact utility closet had become my lucky ticket home.
Someone’s spare clothes were hanging there. Yes, I acted like a true thief: I pulled on a huge men’s tracksuit, and scooped out someone’s crumpled bills and a push-button mobile phone from the jacket pockets. But in the scrap of fabric I had been wearing initially, I wouldn’t even have made it down the street. The perverts would have dragged me into the nearest alleyway, and that would have been it. Running away had been worth it.
All night I walked home, flinching at every rustle and expecting a massive hand to wrap around my waist again at any second and definitively crack my ribs this time.
Reaching the kitchen, I poured myself a glass of ice-cold water and drank it down in one go, feeling my hands tremble finely while the water crawled like ice down my chest from the inside. The silence around me thickened, and the hallway I had just exited frightened me with its darkness.
Tomorrow... or rather, already today, was my first day at university. Yesterday the lists arrived by email, and as it turned out, I had managed to get a state-funded tuition spot after all. My dream had come true. But how was I supposed to go there now? How could I force myself to step across the threshold of the house, if the mere thought of going outside twisted me with terror?
And these dreams about him... They were exhausting.
Placing the empty glass on the countertop, I wrapped my arms around my shoulders in an attempt to soothe the chill at least a little. Ever since we moved, I had started freezing much more than before.
Perhaps I would just get lucky, seeing as the city was huge and he hadn’t seen my face. What if he found me by name? I was foolish not to lie, of course, but was I really the only one like that in the whole wide world? Even if the name was rare, the city was massive.
Approaching the window, I shuddered, staring into the darkness where someone seemed to be standing. A week ago, hooligans had smashed all the lamps in the parking lot, and now looking outside had become even scarier. But I looked anyway.
Our neighborhood was on the outskirts of the upper town, and people with problems with the law frequently settled here. We, on the other hand, bought an apartment here because we didn’t have money for anything better.
I was so terrified of seeing Damian down there, yet during sleepless nights, an invisible pull drew me to look and make sure he wasn’t really waiting for me. Right now, everything seemed quiet, but what if a monster was lurking in that darkness?