Nyx~
She’s breathing hard, and she is sure that her lungs might give out if he yanks her any harder as she’s running behind him. Her steps are growing careless, her strides far too big for her control, and she stumbles forward as she uses him for support. Calculations aren’t as useful as Jim has always told her, running like this, when the variables change far too fast for her to process.
(The sickening crunch of leaves under her feet is the first sign that it isn’t real, she tells herself.)
Outside. A forest – one she doesn’t recognise, one she hasn’t visited – and her hand is wound in a vice-like grip dragging her forward, beckoning her toward something she doesn’t quite understand as they plough through. She trips on a root of sorts, and yet she grasps his arm and she calls his name to slow down, nails digging into the sleeve of his jacket.
Liam, she realises once the name passes through her lips. He leads her through the trees, dragging her arm against the bark and scratching unmarked skin as he apparently leads her away from a house behind them. The house morphs, somehow, and she can see it for what it is.
Hers. Their cage, where she’d been trapped, where he’d been her prisoner. Liam continues to urge her forward, her fingers crushed in the clamp of his. He seems to be working to save them, however, and she can’t help the urge to follow him. How had they gotten free? Would they stay free?
(It isn’t real, she reminds herself. She is trapped in her room and he in his cell, and they will return to it when she opens her eyes.)
But he comes to a stop abruptly, and Alexis can’t help the way her weight barrels into his back, upsetting both their balances. She has to stumble forward, narrowly avoiding knocking him over, and she bites down on her lip as she releases his hand. There isn’t anything beyond that, without his hand in hers, and she tips forward, toward the edge, and it’s a hell of a drop down.
She wakes up, sweating, wholly and completely alone, but she digs her fingers into her temples an pretends that none of this has happened. She’s a captor, she reminds herself. The nightingale can’t free the cage, not that it would want to.
