Page 116 of Juniper Unraveling

He repeats the same words over and over, his hips grinding into the blankets beneath him.

“Run.”

Each time the words become harsher, louder, broken by heaving breaths and the wild bucking of his hips.

“Wren! Wren!”

My blood turns cold, and I lie, paralyzed, watching him clutch the blankets in tight fists at his side.

He moans and grunts again. “Wren!”

There’s no mistaking it that time.

He called my name.

Curled into a ball on the ground, I stare at his twitching body, my mind racing with thoughts I can’t even begin to comprehend. Ones that negate the last six years of my life, making every tear I’ve shed suddenly a lie.

Thoughts of a boy I believed dead.

With the icy tendrils of realization creeping over me, I wait to hear my name again.

Chapter 32

A sconce flickers with light, and I lift my head, noticing the empty pile of blankets. It’s hard to tell night from day in the dark cavern, and I’m left wondering if I awakened too soon. I push to a sitting position, noticing the freedom of movement, and turn to find the chains have been removed.

Rhys strides into the room with a bottle of liquor clutched in his hand, closing the door behind him, and the sensation that blooms in my chest is the first of its kind in well over eight years.

It’s the same feeling that brought a smile to my face at seventeen years old, whenever I heard Six sneak into my window.

Instead of wearing the excitement humming through my body, I drop my gaze from his, my mind racing for something to say. Something that will erase the awkward twist in my gut.

An object lands in front of me—Papa’s journal. I lift it from the mat, holding it close to me.

“Grab something to eat, and we’ll head out. I’ve spoken with the others. They know you’re leaving.” He tips back the bottle, guzzling the amber fluid.

Still keeping my gaze cast away from him, I nod. “I … heard you last night. You had nightmares in your sleep.”

Silence fills the pause.

“What did you dream?”

“I don’t remember my dreams.”

With a second nod, I push myself to my feet, sliding up the wall. “That’s too bad. It seems you know my name, after all.”

Lifting my gaze to his, I take in the severe pinch of his brows, as I step past him and exit the room toward the main cavern.

But the momentary pleasant feelings give way to the ache in my heart, as I catch sight of the other survivors. It tells me he’s become a bad man. That whatever I knew of him is no longer there, and in his place is a bastard who snatches women, keeping them imprisoned as if they’re his property, and killing whatever gets in his way. The thrill of having found him is trampled by sadness, and the cold reality that I may have lost him, after all, that night by the Juniper tree.

The skulls themselves don’t frighten me, but his fascination with the aftermath does. Because the boy I remember possessed the ability to control his demons.

This man clearly does not. The sweetness of his youth has twisted into some sadistic perversion.

Sun filters through the gap onto a bigger crowd than yesterday’s. Some sit eating fruit and water. Others prepare the food, handing it out to those who wait. I catch the blonde girl from the day before, dressed in a new set of clothes, her face free of the dirt and blood she wore on her arrival to this place. She sits along the wall, snapping her fruit into small bites, eyes scanning the others.

When something hits my chest, I glance down to a plate of food, offered by the old woman from yesterday. Her eyes are upturned today. Sad. And they don’t seem to want to meet mine, as I accept the meal, and she walks off. Weaving through the crowd, I take a seat beside the blonde, who smiles back at me.

“Hi,” she says, and goes back to eating her food.