A shiver danced down my spine, urging my feet faster as I ran down the endless corridor.
Nova Kingdom, I recognized, spinning in a circle, my mind dizzy. How? How am I here?
Another damn nightmare.
A warped reality.
Please. Please don’t let this be real. Not again. Not again!
“Oh, Zaya,” the deep voice taunted, causing my heart to race in my chest as I pushed myself to my limit, searching for a way out, a door, anything, to end this lengthy torment. “You can’t escape the inevitable, little one. I’m inside you. I made you what you are. Don’t try to run from it. You’ll never be free from me.”
I stopped, my lips curling down.
I’m so tired of running.
Why not just… face him?
He’s not real.
He’s a nightmare.
He existed in my head because I allowed him to stay. But what if I forced him out?
I turned slowly, exhausted from the fight, tired of my surroundings, and ready for a new beginning. To escape my new prison hell, I needed to defeat the monsters of my mind once and for all.
Necros grinned, his vile words floating around me in an intoxicating wave that demanded submission. His lecherous guards stood by waiting, all wanting to intimately destroy me. But I no longer feared them. The majority were dead. The other three would die by my blade.
This isn’t real.
“You’re not real,” I told Necros. “You’re dead.”
“Am I?” He reached for me, but his hand went right through my skin as if he were a ghost.
“You are,” I confirmed. “You don’t scare me anymore.” This prison terrified me more, the very idea that I might end up here for eternity.
Grigory wasn’t going to save me.
Just as he didn’t join my nightmare now.
He’d given up on me, left me for dead, but I was a fighter and I would survive this, just as soon as I finished battling the demons of my mind.
A knife appeared in my hand, my brain conjuring the item out of thin air. I glanced at it, contemplating my next move. Then I looked Necros directly in the eyes and slit his fucking throat.
His smirk died.
And his men began to run, but I was already moving, my training kicking in as I fought them to completion, their blood creating a river in the hallway that stuck to my feet.
I was no longer the woman they tried to break once upon a time.
I’d grown.
I knew how to survive now.
On my own.
Without him.
Rewind.