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Chapter Thirty-Three

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SOMETHING WRENCHED ME FROM the infernal darkness.

I thrashed toward the grey, desperate for light after so much black.

I’d made the choice.

I’d vowed to never make the same mistakes and find some way to atone.

I’d chosen to live.

To return to her.

To fight for happiness even if I might never earn such a thing.

But instead of granting me a second chance, something had grabbed my ankles and sucked me deeper. An entity, an evilness—something monstrous was inside this blackness with me, and it’d dragged me down, down, down until I’d been shackled inside a dungeon where no light, sound, or air could reach.

That cruel presence was still here, slinking in the shadows, gliding through my mind, but there was something else.

Something refreshing as rain and as life-giving as the sun.

Something that was the opposite of the evil within me and it smashed the shackles and hoisted me higher into consciousness.

It made me aware.

More aware and alive than I had been in weeks.

Eleanor!

I fought harder. I swam in muck and molasses. I kicked and crawled.

I opened my mouth and bellowed.

Eleanor!

Could she hear me?

Could she feel me fighting?

Could she see how much I wished to keep her?

I was trapped.

Trapped in this cranial cage with no fucking way out.

And I wanted out.

Fuck, I wanted out.

I wanted to make amends. To free those girls. To banish those guests.

I froze as sensation broke through the stifling silence of nothing.

Temperature.

I groaned.

I never thought I’d almost cry at the ability to differentiate between hot and cold. To know I had skin. To feel the body that hadn’t forsaken me. A body that I couldn’t manipulate or return to the helm, but a body that still fed me senses.

I gasped as it came again.

Coldness.

On my lips.

I groaned at the sheer delight.

Not just cold.

Ice.

Freezing snow upon my lips being pushed into the hot cavern of my mouth.

Stripped of every extremity and faculty, denied every pleasure receptor and passion within this vacuum of blankness, that single taste of sleet undid me.

I shivered with need.

I grew hard for a single sensitivity.

Hunger slammed into me with another sensation.

I had a stomach. I had muscles. I had an appetite that’d been denied for so fucking long.

The ice vanished on my tongue, melting into a non-distinguishable temperature.

I mourned it instantly.

I had nothing to break the monotony. Nothing to rip off my blindfold or pull out my gag or unplug my ears. I was empty without noise and sight and her. Empty and cornered, being pulled down into the blackness.

Things hissed and slithered. Nightmares rolled in. Numbness resettled over my awareness.

No!

Christ, no.

I wouldn’t survive if I slipped again.

That dungeon was my coffin. A coffin that would slam shut with a padlock that would never reopen. If I let the evil have me, I would never see Eleanor again, never talk to her, kiss her, look at her.

NO!

I went berserk.

I did my best.

I enlisted every weak skill and broken power to wake up.

Wake up.

WAKE UP!

Something cackled in my mind. The blackness thickened. And I—

Ice on my lip.

Oh, thank God.

It interrupted the suction; it gave me vividness to cling to. A violent tear in the never-ending ether.

I crawled toward the lighter grey.

More ice melted on my tongue.

More.

Please, more.

It came again, this time the frost didn’t just coat my lips but dribbled down my chin.

I felt that.

I tracked the slow-moving trickle. I relished in the intensity—in the sheer magnitude of survival.

I want to survive.

I want to wake.

I searched every crevice that I’d already searched before. I scratched at the blackened corners. I reached for the endless ceiling.

I lost myself to fighting and almost missed the gift that switched grey into red, granting the first blaze of colour in so long.

Colour!

I blinked at the blinding pigment.

Violent crimson and bittersweet scarlet.

Sanguine and vermillion.

Words spilled from my mind that’d forgotten speech and intellect.

A colour wasn’t just a colour. Colour was what painted the world with dimension and depth. It was what gave life purpose and precision—the honour of being alive to witness such saturation of self.

I inhaled with lungs I couldn’t see and bathed in the colour of red.

It felt warmer than black.

It promised to keep me awake, all while another sensation thunderstruck my anesthetized world.

Taste.

Sweet.

Sharp and fresh and perfect.

Berries.

I closed my eyes and allowed the third gift to wash through me. To grant another tear in my paralysis, to slowly bring me more aware.

So long since I’d tasted.

Just like colour, flavour gave meaning to the world. It made eating more than perfunctory but pleasurable. Flavour was a goal, driving us to cultivate and experiment, to create recipes and source new ingredients.

Flavour was another rung on my ladder, allowing me to creep higher from the darkness. To cling to the scaffolding. To have something tangible when the claws of darkness wrapped around my ankle and tried to claim me again.

I’d been reduced to nothing but three things.

Temperature, colour, and taste.

Three things that I’d always taken for granted but now were the three most important things to me.

My senses shook off their atrophy and craved more stimulation.

More!

Please, more.

I basked in the treasures.

I was grateful and in awe, but I was also greedy.

Greedy for sight and sound and touch.

For her.

Eleanor...please.

Slowly, the berry taste faded, the ice melted, and the redness around me snuffed out. The ladder I’d formed vanished from beneath me, sending me hurtling back into the starkness.

NO!

I couldn’t go back.

I couldn’t die down there.

I couldn’t detach myself from every precious gift that a body could give me.

I needed to touch again, laugh again, swim again.

I needed to marry the goddess I was fated to meet and get on my knees before her and offer her everything.

I owed her everything because I knew these flashes of awareness were thanks to her.

She was the one interrupting the midnight.

The one throwing me lifelines and trying to pull me free.

I didn’t want to let her down. I didn’t want to leave her alone.

Give it to me again!

The blackness thickened.

I slipped.

A diving belt lassoed around my middle, complete with weights and anchors, yanking me into the deep.

...

Blue lit up my world, drenching me in periwinkle, teal, and cobalt.

I was ready this time.

I charged toward the pigment. I harnessed a body I could not see and used colour as my instrument to feel it.

To slip into fingers and toes.

To focus on the softness along my back and the faint throbbing in my legs.

I gave up on swimming toward a surface that didn’t exist and instead fought to regain ownership of something that would have the power to keep me from the black’s grasp.

Ice returned...smeared gently along my lower lip before inserting just a little onto my tongue.

Flavour smashed through me, vicious and all-consuming.

It tasted like summer and sunshine.

Blueberries.

Ambrosial medicine making me want more and more and more.

I moaned with greed.

I tried to stick out my tongue for a bigger serving.

Nothing moved.

Why can’t I goddamn move?

I couldn’t do this anymore.

I couldn’t be trapped here any longer.

I wanted to open my eyes.

Open my eyes!

My furious heart pumped hard, filling the void with rapid drumbeats.

I lost it.

My heart had killed me, yet it was the only part of me still alive. It’d deleted me as its host and now existed in an empty chest, keeping an empty body the prison for a broken mind.

I couldn’t accept that.

I won’t!

It’s mine.

I went wild.

I sank into violence and beat up nothing and everything.

...

Another taste of ice.

Along with a fourth gift.

A gift that I’d had at the start of my incarceration but had lost along the way.

Hearing.

“...so hard, seeing you like this.”

That voice.

Like stardust and sand, like raindrops and satin.

Eleanor.

I stopped my endless war.

I hung in the darkness to listen.

“I’ve tried everything, Sully. I’ve argued with Louise about what I’m doing. She tells me I could kill you. That I might choke you by giving you a taste. But...the first night I ran my finger with berry smoothie along your bottom lip, your heart spiked. Did you feel it? Did it mean anything at all? Can you hear me, or are you fading, just like she warned?”

Silence slipped between us.

Speak again.

Please, for the love of everything fucking holy, speak to me.

“Three nights I’ve repeated myself. Three nights, I’ve made you a smoothie and fed you just the essence of it, knowing how dangerous it is to put something in your mouth when you can’t swallow. By trying to save you, I might just kill you, and you know what...I’m beginning to think you might want that.”

Her voice cracked, but she heard my plea and kept talking. “Jess is awake, by the way. She woke up over a week ago. Dr Campbell let her move into Cal’s villa yesterday. Her wounds are healing. She’ll never have children, but she’s alive, and I’ve never seen her so happy. She said you’re aware Cal had finally seen how she felt about him. Well, they’re taking things slow...obviously with them both wounded, but they’re together.”

A quick slash of blueberry on my tongue before her voice dropped with painful secrets. “I can’t be around them for long. Does that make me a terrible person? I’m happy for them, of course I am, but seeing them laughing together, touching...it breaks my heart, Sully.” Her voice was as tragic as I felt, heavy and hitched with grief. “I just wish...I wish you were here. I mean, you are here, but you’re not. I have your body, but without your soul...there’s nothing.”

I’m so fucking sorry, Eleanor.

“Almost six weeks you’ve been hiding. Six weeks of sleepless nights and endless hoping. I hate myself that I’m complaining when you’re the one trapped in there, but...it’s so, so hard. So hard not knowing how I can help. So hard thinking I’m not helping enough. So hard just letting time either cure you or kill you.”

I’m here.

I’m not going to die.

I give you my word.

I’ll find some way to get back to you.

“Louise said if you stay under much longer, your body will start shutting down. She keeps trying to talk to me about the end. Whether or not I’m prepared to sign documents that allow you to fade peacefully, or if she needs to have life support ready to drag out your catatonic existence forever.”

A sliver of ice danced over my lower lip as she ran her thumb with blueberry smoothie.

“I told her that it’s your choice. It’s always been your choice, and I have no power to make you choose, but...if you can hear me, I need to say something. I need you to know. After all, you can only make a choice on informed facts. You don’t know what I’ve done. You think the world you left is still the one you’ll wake up in, but...it’s not.”

What do you mean?

What did you do?

“Before I tell you, you have to promise me you’ll forgive me. Then again, if you wake and hate me, I can accept that. Wake and send me away and I’ll go. I’ll leave and I won’t come back because I’d rather live in a world where you’re alive and not with me, than a world where you don’t survive.”

You’re scaring me, Jinx.

What did you do?

“I keep wondering if I’ve gone too far, but...I did it because it was the right thing to do. And something tells me...you were ready to do the right thing.”

Tell me.

She paused and darkness crept from the shadows. Cloying and deleting, blackness came for me.

Speak, Eleanor!

Keep me with you.

“I went through your emails.” She stopped for a moment before continuing, “I cleared out anything that could be read as suspicious and saved correspondence from your company. Cal has been in contact with Peter Beck and your scientists are working as normal. And as far as your corporate life is concerned, your requests to your lawyer were wise. Cal is aware you’ve left Sinclair and Sinclair Group to him—not that he’s accepted that you’re gone, of course—but he is looking after your investments.”

She saw.

She knows I bequeathed—

“You gave me Goddess Isles.” Her voice cracked with tears. “You gave me Pika and Skittles.” Something thumped against my chest. A feminine fist. A bite of pain. “You chased after me all while knowing you wouldn’t come home, and I hate you for that. I curse you for putting me first because it was never meant to be that way. We were equals, Sully. You are not my master with the obligation to keep me safe. You are not my husband with vows to protect me in sickness and in health. You were meant to stay alive so we could be happy!”

Christ, Eleanor.

My beating heart splintered down the middle. Her sadness kept me shackled, not allowing the blackness to claim me.

“Anyway.” She sniffed back tears and kept going, “The police came back two days ago with a search warrant.”

What?

“Cal and I gave them free access to your databases, your laptop, and your office. They swarmed the island from the guest villas to the goddess villas and every pool and restaurant in between.”

Holy shit.

I would wake—if I could wake—in handcuffs.

What was the fucking point in leaving one jail for another—

“They left with a profuse apology. They wished you a speedy recovery and are satisfied that Goddess Isles is a simple respite for married couples who come for some sexual counselling and relationship advice. That was my idea, by the way.”

Her soft laughter undid me.

“I could wipe your emails clean and destroy any files that might have hinted at purchased goddesses, but I couldn’t hide the abundance of accommodation and the aura of paradise and perversions.”

Her lips pressed against my ear. “I stayed with the police as they did their tour. I grew wet as I led them through my villa and looked at the sink where you took me. I wanted to touch myself as we walked on the beach where you fucked me on all fours in the shallows. I answered their questions as we stood in the same place I watched you appear from the sea and strode half-naked toward goddesses who wanted you. I escorted them around the restaurant and onto the terrace and recalled every vicious thing I said to you after you made me sit on your fingers. So many places you’ve corrupted me, Sully, and now, all those sins are washed away. They found nothing incriminating because there is nothing. Not anymore. A fresh start.”

How?

How did she hide the goddesses? Were they still on Lebah? What about the girls’ files and their real names and—

“Cal burned almost every piece of paperwork in your office, and together, we sent the goddesses home. I memorised the files before they went up in smoke. Sailor, Trinity, Jewel, Diamond, and Blossom, also known as Danielle Scott, Selena Narce, Baylee Sharp, Alana Black, and Ashlee Colt. All five girls are free. They’re being watched, don’t worry, and they were paid their usual fee, but they are no longer prisoners, and you no longer have the curse of being a procurer of women.”

I hung in the darkness.

I couldn’t process.

I couldn’t reply.

I was blind to the ever-lightening grey around me.

“So you see, Sully? You can wake up because you’re no longer that man. You might have done things, you might have hurt people, but...I know in my heart that you aren’t that person anymore. You honour all life, not just wildlife. You love me, and by loving me, you can’t hurt humans because we are human. I have to believe that, and if you believe that too, then...you don’t need to be afraid of waking up anymore.”

I was dizzy.

Drowning.

Things swirled and collided, bouncing me around in the grey.

“While I’m confessing, I might as well tell you everything.”

Another slice of sleety blueberry on my bottom lip.

“You told Cal to burn the Euphoria villa, but I stopped him. The animals that survived on Serigala have been relocated here. They’re currently housed in Euphoria’s villa and being tended to by the two vets you’d sent for—one large animal and one small—along with Etti and Johan, who survived the bombing. The shipment of cows and donkeys that you agreed to take on is due to dock next week. I’ve contacted your usual feed suppliers and took the liberty of asking Peter Beck to replace the medical equipment and drugs that were lost in the bombing of Serigala. A clinic is due to be built when locals can source building materials.”

I couldn’t breathe anymore.

I couldn’t cling to one thing because she’d given me everything.

The greyness kept swirling, pinpricks of light spearing through the shadows.

Something warm spread along my side as if she’d lay down beside me. Another lash of blueberry before her sweet, liberating voice murmured, “Oh, one last thing.”

She yawned as if her confessions had drained her into slumber.

“I gave the order to kill Drake. He lasted three days in his illusion before a bullet was lodged into his brain. He’s gone. I watched it with my own eyes because I wanted to be able to tell you, with all the conviction in my heart, that he can no longer touch you, touch me, touch your animals, touch anyone or anything you care about. Everything you’ve been fighting, everything you wish you could undo is undone. His body is in pieces and buried...just like I buried you...Sullivan Sinclair. The man you used to be is dead.”

I faded.

The greyness blended with darkness, threading with splashes of reds and blues.

“If you do wake up, Sully...you won’t wake up as you.” Her soft lips pressed against my cheek, her voice slipping into sleep. “You’ll wake up as no one. You don’t have to be who you were. If you choose to come back to me...you can choose to be whoever you want to be because...you’re free.”