Page 200 of Somno Slave

“Don’t cry for me, Doctor.” He murmurs. “I’m a monster. I killed them brutally.”

His mouth tilts, barely a smile. “And you only found three of them.”

He leaves me alone, aching and used. My bottle tipped sideways on the sheets. Breathing like I’ve survived something and lost something at the same time. I stay here far too long, staring at nothing, feeling the ghost of his hand still on my body.

I should have been afraid of him.

Instead, I am terrified he’ll never come back.

Chapter Fifty-Seven

Rheda

I wake with my thighs locked tight and grief already sitting in my chest like something alive.

The truth reaches me before consciousness fully does.

He dies in five hours.

For a few seconds, I stay completely still beneath the sheets, staring up at the ceiling as though refusing to move might stop time from moving with me. Morning light bleeds weakly through the curtains, colourless and thin, washing the room into something pale and already dead.

My throat aches.

There’s a taste in my mouth I can’t swallow away. Metal. Salt. Like I’ve been crying in my sleep hard enough for it to reach my tongue.

Five hours.

The number keeps landing wrong.

Too small.

Too close.

My chest tightens so violently around it that I have to drag in air carefully through my nose. The sound of the city outside continues anyway. Cars somewhere distant. A door slamming. Someone laughing far below my window.

The world is still moving. That feels unbearable.

Because somewhere beneath concrete and steel and fluorescent lights, he is still alive right now. Breathing. Thinking. Existing. And by tonight—

My stomach twists so hard I press a hand against it instinctively.

No.

I squeeze my eyes shut.

No no no.

The grief arrives in ugly waves after that. It feels animalistic and wrong. A panic so deep my body doesn’t know where to put it. Every thought of him drags something raw open inside me all over again.

I see his face behind my eyelids immediately. The shadows beneath his eyes. The shape of his mouth when he almost smiles. The terrifying stillness of him when he looks at me like I am the only thing in the room worth ruining.

It will all be gone.

I roll onto my side too quickly, curling inward around the pain. The sheets twist around my legs. My ribs hurt. Everything throbs.

I don’t realise tears are sliding into my hair until one reaches my ear.

Five hours.