Page 93 of Claim the Twilight
I sense its flicker at the same time as the whip bites into my flesh. My body tightens, cock hardening as pain rocks through me.
She sucks in a breath and bites back a moan. “You disgust me.”
“Do I? Or do you disgust yourself?”
She answers with another lash of her whip, and I lose myself to the pleasure hidden in the pain.
There isno hot shower to cleanse my wounds. Nothing to dull the throb of torn skin. I lie on the flagstones wondering if I imagined the echo. Wondering if my mind is broken.
She was real.
The power inside me is real.
I can use it here.
If I can speak to Ezekiel, then maybe I can speak to Orina too.
A plan forms in my mind.
The grate that dispenses food slides open, and this time I crawl toward the plate of gruel.
If I’m going to kill Loviator, then I’ll need my strength.
Chapter 38
EDWIN
The corridors were white, and now they’re gray. Maybe I’ve lost them. Too many places, wrong places, but always back here. To the network.
A screech echoes down the corridor behind me.
I dash across worn gray flagstones, stone walls closing in as the passage narrows to diverge into two choices.
Left or right?
Left or right?
Another hair-splitting screech galvanizes me to decide.
Right.
The passage spits me out into a forest, the trees made from the broken, cracked spines of ancient texts. The leaves are scraps of paper fluttering in a phantom breeze. There’s no sky. No moon, and yet a silvery light spills across the forest floor, highlighting shards of bone, white and bare.
Lost ones like me.
No. Not like me.
I have time.
A howl and the sound of a horn penetrates the eerie silence.
They’re here!
I run once more, clutching my prize to my chest. I won’t let them have it. I have to get back to Padma.
The thunder of hooves fills my blood with ice. I run faster, legs pumping, breath huffing so that the forest blurs and the sound of hooves quietens, and the landscape of bone shards is replaced with soft earth.
A briny scent fills my nose. The scent of the sea.
