Page 88 of Nemesync
“Lebanese may be my favorite thing to eat,” he asserted calmly before taking another bite from his meal without breaking eye contact.
Oh.
Oh?
He would always do something like that, a sentence with a double entendre, and I would always lose it because of his audacity.
After that, we stood on his balcony. My favorite part of this whole penthouse.
We could overlook the entire city from here. His intense eyes softened briefly, and he took advantage to continue staring into the void, contemplative while sipping his vodka. He said verysoftly, as if it were a whisper, “You bring chaos into my world, Zanae. But I like it.”
I looked at him and smiled without understanding what was happening between us. But I didn’t care, as long as this man stayed by my side even without speaking, I knew I’ll be fine.
Elijah scared the voices away. They stopped screaming around him. And that was enough for me; he brought me a semblance of peace that I hadn’t known in a very long time.
After a few days with the Zennites, I had to return to my father’s house, but that night when Nikolai took me back there, something happened.
A masked man was waiting for me at the entrance of the complex, just before entering my father’s place.
Without Nikolai noticing, he grabbed me, and I screamed and screamed, but it was too late; Nikolai was already heading back home. “Now, shut up and don’t scream. I’ll show you how to torture people,” the voice threatened.
I fought and fought, but when I turned around and met those eyes, I froze. He took advantage of my hesitation to drug me.
That night, I relived the biggest trauma of my life, the kidnapping, once again, but this time I wasalone.
24
ELIJAH
Iwas killing myself at boxing with Niko; since the beginning of this week, the routine was the same: training, Alonzo, my meetings, and Zanae.
The problem is, I could never calm down until I saw her eyes.
I kept for the longest time the necklace of my mother but only the star. I had it in my pocket, never letting it go. But the thing is when Zanae spent her time with me at the penthouse, she had this weird habit to zone out looking at the stars in particular. I had one with me at any time, but I couldn’t stop looking at her gazing at them.
That fucking monster wanted to come out, he was never satisfied until he had his dose of poison— that woman who feared my touch because of that asshole Alonzo who must have trigged memories in her mind.
I can’t imagine what she had to endure when I wasn’t here to protect her. When I fucking failed.
But even hitting him was no longer enough, and Niko forbade me from killing him until we had some useful information.
So, I hammered away at the gym.
Yesterday she didn’t sleep at home.
I didn’t get my fix of her, and I was in withdrawal, like a fucking junkie.
Niko’s phone rang while he was grabbing some water outside the ring. I scrolled through the message on his phone, reading it aloud for him to hear.
“Miranda needs to talk to one of us immediately. A woman came to her at the cafe asking for information about Zanae, and she hasn’t responded to her calls since last night when you took her back to her father’s house.”
Niko set his water bottle down with a sigh. He had that look on his face—the one that screams ‘this is messed up’—and you could tell he was contemplating the worst-case scenario.
“This doesn’t smell good, Eli.”
And I felt it. That freaking thing in my chest, that ball that prevented me from breathing normally, the worry, something I hadn’t felt in years.
The worst part was that I also felt the anger, the dark urges that crossed my mind, destruction and death if something happened to her.
