Chapter 39: Chapter Thirty-Nine

Saffron woke up with a start, her body tingling with sensations of warmth and vitality.

The warmth spread through her entire body, leaving her with the feeling of bliss and contentment.

A soft sigh of joyfulness left her lips as she reveled in the sensations that circulated through her body, allowing it to lull her once again into a state of deep comfortable slumber.

Well, that was until her mind began to question what was happening to her, and how it was possible that she was feeling all the things she was feeling in that moment.

‘What the hell is going on?’ she wondered, her thoughts gathering in her head before floating away in a sea of dust, leaving her confused and without a possible answer.

It felt like her thoughts were deliberately escaping her.

But how?

And why?

What was happening to her?

It was an odd sort of feeling that encompassed her in that moment. While she was worried about what was going on, there was a sense of a cocoon of warmth that enveloped her, making her feel safe and bringing her panic down a notch.

Where was she?

And what was going on?

The questions swirled in her mind, but the feeling of safety made her questions disappear just as soon as they appeared in her mind.

She felt happy, content, safe, and… and loved.

Loved.

She felt loved.

Saffron could not remember the last time she felt that emotion.

It was heady and intoxicating. She wanted to revel in that feeling for as long as she could before she had to return to the real world.

She wanted to embrace this feeling of being wanted, of being loved, and keep it with her.

She wanted that feeling to last for as long as it could.

But alas, she knew that all good things must come to an end, no matter how hard a person tried to hold on to them.

There was nothing in the world that lasted forever.

So, even though her heart tugged at her to still stay a little while longer, the stronger part of her heart willed herself to awareness, attempting to claw her way out of the strange cocoon she had found herself in, but it seemed like something was deliberately holding her captive, refusing to let her go.

She found herself relaxing once again, burrowing into the warmth she felt, her thoughts escaping her in a rush.

On and on it went, Saffron fighting a losing battle for days on end, her body refusing to obey her command, her thoughts fracturing into minuscule pieces of matter, too hard to grasp onto.

She fought a war she didn’t understand nor had the means to win properly. But still, she fought for her freedom, even when her thoughts disappeared from her, as soon as she grasped onto them.

It frustrated her and made her want to claw at whatever was holding her captive.

But today, something had changed. Something important had happened. Something that tipped the scales into her favor.

Her nostrils flared, a healthy dose of that spice and woodsy scent that felt so close yet so far away hitting her. It made her feel safe and loved.

She needed more of it. She needed to bath in it and revel in its…

The thoughts fractured then, eliciting a panicked outburst from her.

‘Oh no!’ she thought. ‘Not again. Please!’

Saffron didn’t return to the land of sleep in that moment, however. It felt like something out there was pulling her out, tugging at her consciousness and tethering her to the waking world.

Was it the scent?

Did it have something to do with the scent? Saffron thought.

But there was no way of knowing.

So, without preamble, Saffron took a greedy inhale of the scent that was all Ryder Oscura, her nose wrinkling when she found something else mixed with the scent, something that smelt different, something that smelt all wrong to her.

‘Who are you?’ she wanted to ask the owner of the scent, but her lips refused to move. ‘Go away!’

Her eyes finally responded to her plea by snapping open and allowing her to see the mirrored canopy above her.

Her eyes widened, as she took herself in, the red silk pajamas she was wearing and the black silk sheets she was tangled in.

She swallowed a lump, as she fingered the sheet, her mind racing a mile a minute.

Where was she?

Whose bed had she woken up in?

And why did it somehow feel familiar to her?

Her eyes flicked past the engravings on the bed posts—the low lighting making it hard for her to see the details on it—towards the headboard and the other furniture in the bedroom.

Yet as she perused the bedroom, nothing about it seemed familiar to her. There were no memories that came to mind when she thought about it, nothing about it that made her feel like she had been there before, yet the feeling of familiarity never abated.

It was odd and confusing.

As she browsed the room with her eyes, the scent that had woken her up assaulted her once again, making her jolt upright, her nostrils tickling in disgust with the sense of wrongness that had mixed in with it.

“Ryder?” she called out his name, as she slipped off the bed and padded towards the first door she saw.

She huffed when she found herself in a closet full of men’s clothes, that wrong scent all over it, making her stumble out, her eyes watering at the strong stench of it.

‘What the hell was going on?’ she wondered for the thousandth time today.

Why was she reacting this strongly towards a scent?

Was she the only person who could smell the wrongness of it? Or was it just a normal cologne and something was wrong with her?

She tried the second door, but it opened up into a spacious bathroom. The third door, however, led her outside the bedroom and into a hallway with a sprawling staircase that led down somewhere.

The scent was stronger out here than it had been in the closet, however. Saffron ran back into the bedroom, her nose stinging with the burn of it.

She pressed her back against the door, closing her eyes and inhaling a lungful of air, grateful that the scent was dulled a bit inside the bedroom.

A knock came from outside the door, followed by a voice that had her releasing a gasp of relief.

“Saffron?”

Turning, she opened the door and jumped into his arms, throwing caution to the wind, as she buried her face into the crook of his neck, his hands banding over her waist.

“You saved me,” she whispered into his neck, refusing to let him go, as memories of the attack came back to her and the moments after that. “Thank you.”

‘The world isn’t yet ready for what I will become or the hell I will wreak upon it when you stop breathing,' he thought, as one of his thumb brushed over her pulse when his hand found its favorite place on her body. Ryder kept his lips shut, though, refusing to admit it out loud.

When he released her and she took a step back into the bedroom, Ryder could have sworn that her eyes had flashed gold for a second, but maybe he was just seeing things.