Page 35 of Marked By Him

The door slammed shut. For several long seconds, I stared at the shadow in the crack underneath the door.

He didn’t leave.

The room went still. My stomach twisted. My heartbeat felt like a whisper.

Come back inside. Talk to me. Tell me why you’re torturing us both.

I waited.

The shadow disappeared. Heavy footsteps sounded on the wooden stairs.

He was gone.

I curled into the bed and buried my cheek against the pillow. I waited for my heart to beat again. I listened. The silence suffocated my thoughts.

And then it came.

One beat. Then two.

Thwump, thwump.

Thwump, thwump.

My chest opened with one breath. Then another.

I counted them the way some people counted sheep until my eyelids grew heavy and I fell asleep.

* * *

I woke to darkness and the faint sound of chanting coming from outside my window. There was a foreboding hum in the air that I hadn’t felt before. It was almost as though the room was breathing around me, like the walls were whispering their secrets.

I peeled the covers back and climbed out of bed. My bare feet hit the cool wood floor. The sound drew me to the window. I closed the distance between the bed and the wall. My hand trembled as it held onto the edge of the curtain. There was a flicker of light on the other side of the fabric—something warmer than the moon.

My insides twisted and knotted. There was a brief second when common sense fought with curiosity.

Go back to bed.

I gripped the curtain.

Unravel his secrets.

Curiosity won.

I wrenched the curtain back, and my heart fell like a steel anchor to my stomach. My soul shattered. I grabbed the windowsill to keep my legs from giving out.

I couldn’t breathe.

I can’t breathe.

A fire in the middle of the stone circle I’d seen earlier blazed high and bright while people gathered around it. Naked people. Groping. Touching. Kissing. Fucking.

Women were on their knees, sucking off the men who stood over them. Others were bent over with their hands on their ankles while men devoured them from behind. Some had their legs wrapped around a man’s waist while being bounced around in the air like rag dolls. Those who weren’t fucking were chanting. They walked around dipping their hands into buckets, then spreading something all over the bodies of everyone else.

I squinted, focusing harder as the chanters dipped their hands into the liquid, then smeared it onto bare skin. The motion was ritualistic. There was a pattern—breasts, then stomach, then ass, ending with a symbol on the forehead.

In front of the fire circle was a large stone block shaped like a rectangle. I stood at the window, hand clenching the curtain, frozen in place as one of the men walked over to a woman and took her by the hand. He pulled her to the stone, then dipped his hands in one of the buckets. The woman laid back, letting him cover her in—

I sucked in a shaky breath.No.

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