Page 249 of Nemesync
I met Elijah’s gaze. He tilted his head like he was trying to see through me, but I just gave him a small smile, and whispered to him‘I love you’in silence, and he leaned in to kiss my neck — a small kiss. Then, he whispered back in my ear, loud enough to be heard even by Niko, “Ya lyublyu tebya nasmert’, moya lyubov.”
I didn’t even know what it meant, but I know I’d love to hear it again.
After the conversation shifted to plans and strategies for the Zennites, I stepped outside onto the balcony and sat down. The weight of everything happening in my head began to crush my chest.
I breathed softly, barely able to feel the air.
From the balcony, Elijah and Niko’s conversation inside the house seemed distant, with only a small voice growing louder and louder in my mind.
The memories made it harder to breathe.
He kept me holed up in his office for two days.
There was this dirty mirror, and he’d make me watch him with that sick smile plastered on his face, while his hand kept me from screaming, even though I wasn’t screaming anymore, even though I wasn’t crying anymore either. But he just left his hand there, like some twisted reminder that he had control over everything, even my voice. And he raped me over and over again.
While Luna was going through hell on the other side of that wall.
She was getting tortured, humiliated... and I couldn’t do a thing.
Two days.
Two goddamn days, but it felt like my whole life had just ended. I was a mess, covered in blood from where he’d punch me every time I tried to fight back.
I was filthy, inside and out.
And when they finally came on that day, those other men, they saved us.
Those strangers. Masked. I couldn’t even focus on their eyes because I wasn’t even in this world anymore. I was somewhere up there in the stars, lost in the sky.
With them, at least, I felt safe. Away from men.
It was Elijah and Nikolai. They saved us. They savedme. And it felt like destiny wanted to remind me that I didn’t even recognize them because Lukas killed me that night.
My hands trembled, my heart raced so fast that I felt my rib cage rise with each pulse, and a cold sweat beaded on my forehead. Everything seemed to close in on me, suffocating me—the walls, the city, the buildings.
My heart pounded erratically, the air was forcefully stolen from my lungs, painfully and slowly.Agonizingly. My limbs were trembling, and I couldn’t do anything to stop it.
I felt totally alone, imprisoned in my own mind, unable to escape while the world continued to spin around me, faster, with that formless ghost torturously gripping my throat, suffocating me with abuse and nightmares.
I tried to speak, to ask for help, but nothing came out.
I wanted to scream for Elijah to come. But I couldn’t.
I couldn’t scream again. I couldn’t breathe.Fuck! It hurts so much.
In my soul, in my head, in my heart. Everything hurts.
My voice was stuck in my throat, smothered by an invisible hand—Lukas’s hand. Panic surged through my veins like venom, lethal and harmful, and I reflexively looked up at the sky, begging the sky to save me.
Finally, the exhale came.
Zoning out, I began to play with the scars on my wrist, caressing the cuts and imagining a world where I didn’t have them.
My gaze fixed on the sky, the stars staring back at me. I hoped they were always watching over me.
Sometimes my mind needs them.
I cannot lie to the sky.
