Chapter 6
765 Words
Catherine’s POV
I didn’t wake up to light. I woke up to the sound of my own skull screaming.
Pain exploded in my head before my eyes even opened. I lay still, but my body felt alive in ways it shouldn’t… twitching, trembling, almost electric. The memory of marble striking my skull, the ditch, the mud, my father’s hands, Andrian’s effort… all of it replayed in jagged flashes. I tried to move, tried to breathe, but the air didn’t come. Nog the way it used to, my lungs refused to cooperate, yet I felt every beat, every pang, every pulse or what should have been one.
"Careful, Catherine. Your body is still learning its new limits."
I turned my head toward the voice, blinking against the blur of pain and disorientation. Shadows shifted at the edges of my vision, and for a moment, I thought I was hallucinating. Then I saw him.
A tall silhouette stood at the foot of the bed, motionless, commanding. His presence pressed into me like a physical weight, drawing the fear from my chest and twisting it into a raw, biting awareness of my vulnerability.
“They threw you away,” he said simply. No anger, no hesitation just certainty.
I tried to recoil, my body hollow and strange beneath me. Weak. Hollow. Uncontrollable. My legs wouldn’t cooperate, my arms refused coordination. I wanted to run, to scream, to collapse all at once.
The figure stepped into the firelight. Sharp, aristocratic features. Eyes like molten silver, glowing faintly in the dim room.
"Where... where am I?" My voice didn't sound like mine. It was lower, huskier, carrying a vibration that made the glass on the vanity hum.
"In my home. In my protection," he said. He stood up, and the shadows seemed to move with him, clinging to his long black coat. "And miles away from the men who discarded you like trash."
“Who… what are you?” My words were broken, my voice raw and alien.
“I am what you need,” he said, taking another deliberate step closer. “And you are what they underestimated.”
I felt a strange pull in my chest. My body shivered, but not from fear alone. Something else … hunger twisted in my bones, clawed through my veins, gnawing at my gums. I realized with a jolt that it was more than hunger; it was predatory, aching, burning, piercing.
“Your hunger is part of the pain,” the figure said softly, yet with undeniable authority. “It will dull what they have done to you, but it will not forgive them. You must embrace it.”
I groaned, my jaw tightening against the ache, my stomach twisting. The memory of Andrian’s hands and my father’s betrayal, the death all of it mingled with the searing, insistent need inside me. My body betrayed me, but even as terror gripped me, a part of me was drawn toward the predator in front of me, desperate for release, for guidance, for control I didn’t yet have.
He produced a crystal glass, thick with dark, metallic liquid. The scent hit me before my eyes could focus: copper, iron, life and death combined in a single breath. My instincts overrode logic. I reached, hand trembling, and took it.
The moment it touched my lips, a violent surge ripped through me. Bruises vanished, phantom pains faded, every muscle and sinew knitting together with newfound strength. My body, once hollow, trembled with power I didn’t yet understand.
As I drank, a flash of memory that wasn't mine tore through my head. I saw the man standing in front of me in a different century, screaming my name as I fell into a dark river.
I pulled away, gasping, blood staining my lips.
"What was that? Why did I see you... before?" His expression softened for a fraction of a second, a look of a thousand years of pain crossing his face.
"Because, Catherine," he whispered, reaching out to wipe a stray drop of blood from my chin. "This isn't the first time they’ve taken you from me but it is the last."
When I finally pulled the glass away, the world felt sharper. My reflection caught in the window, distorted by storm shadows, and I saw her or rather, me but not the me I had known. My hands were steady, my posture commanding, predatory.
“I’m… a monster,” I whispered, voice shaking.
He stepped closer, silver eyes holding mine. “No. You are my masterpiece. You are the reckoning they never saw coming.”
- Writer
