Chapter 11 Eleven

Chapter 11 Eleven


Zinnia's POV

I kept counting down. Today, there were two days until Friday and as every minute stretched into an hour, I grew anxious.

Luke thought the problem was just money now. A huge, scary amount, but just money. He tried to be normal without the threats hanging over his head.

He made pancakes in the morning and tried to kiss me on the neck while I was pouring coffee.

I flinched, I couldn't help it. His touch felt wrong, it felt like a question I didn't have an answer for anymore.

He pulled back, his face falling. "What's wrong with you?" he asked, his voice tight.

"Nothing," I said, staring into my coffee. "I'm just tired. And stressed."

"You're more than stressed," he said, putting the spatula down. "You're acting like I have a disease. You haven't looked me in the eye since you saw that lawyer."

"That's not true," I snapped, but it was. Every time I looked at him, I saw the lie; I saw the debt I was supposedly paying and I saw the future we were supposedly fighting for crumbling.

It was all a show I was putting on for him, and it was exhausting.

"It is true!" he shouted, sudden and loud. The sound made me jump. "You're pulling away! You look at me like I'm a stranger! Like you're already gone!"

"Maybe I am!" I screamed back, all the fear and pressure of the last week exploding out of me. "I'm terrified! I'm exhausted from carrying this! From carrying you! Do you have any idea what that feels like?"

The words hung in the air, cruel and final. His face went white, then red. "Carrying me?" he whispered, the anger gone, replaced by a deep, wounded shock. "Is that what I am? A burden?"

"I didn't mean it like that," I said, but the damage was already done.

"Yes, you did." He looked at me, and for the first time, I saw something close to hatred in his eyes. "You think you're the only one who's scared? You think you're the only one who's tired? You signed us up for ten years of slave labor and now you're mad at me?"

I had nothing to say. He was right, and he was wrong, and the truth was so much worse than he could imagine.

He grabbed his jacket. "I can't be here right now." He slammed the door on his way out.

The silence after was worse than the yelling. I leaned against the counter, my whole body shaking. I loved him. I was doing this for him. Why did it feel like I was destroying us?

To calm down, I started washing the few dishes in the sink. My hands were trembling. The glass I was rinsing slipped and cracked against the faucet. A sharp pain shot through my finger. A clean slice across the pad of my thumb. Blood welled up, bright red.

I cursed, grabbing a paper towel. I wrapped it around my thumb, applying pressure. A strange, warm pulse thrummed in the center of my chest, right under my breastbone. It felt like a second, deeper heartbeat.

It was weird, but the cut stung. I held the towel tight for a minute, then, figuring it had clotted, I slowly unwrapped it to look.

I stared.

The cut was gone.

Not closed, not scabbed over, gone like G-O-N-E!

The skin was perfectly smooth and unmarked like it had never happened.

A tiny smear of blood was the only proof that I wasn't hallucinating

I turned my hand over, searching for a seam, a scar, anything. There was nothing. My blood ran cold. This wasn't possible. People didn't heal like that.

I stood in my silent kitchen, staring at my unmarked thumb, and a new kind of terror seeping into my bones.



That night, Luke didn't come home. I didn't call him. I just sat in the dark, looking at my hand.

A knock at the door made me jump. When I opened the door, it was a delivery person with a long, white box and I numbly signed for it.

Inside was a bouquet of white roses. Dozens of them, perfect and cold. There was no card.

I lifted them to put them in water, and the smell hit me.

Frost and sandalwood.

His scent was soaked into the petals, as if the flowers had grown in his room.

I dropped the box with shaky hands the roses spilled across the floor, their perfect heads scattering.

My phone buzzed on the table, it was a text from an unknown number.

I picked it up with my still-tingling hand.

The text was simple: The body remembers what the mind has forgotten. Sweet dreams, Zinnia.

I threw my phone across the couch like it was a spider. I didn't sleep at all. I sat on the floor, my back against the door, staring at the roses on the floor and the smooth, unmarked skin of my thumb until the sun came up.

Valois's POV

The fight had to happen, things were so tense they were about to snap. Her guilt and his sense of helplessness were a dangerous combination. So I pushed, just enough.

Her cruel outburst was perfect: it tore them apart and he walked out.

The physical separation is just the beginning, the emotional break will follow.

Now she is alone and her stress is at its peak, the magic that has bound her since she was a girl is like a dam holding back a river.

Fear, pressure, and our approaching union are making it crack.

That little cut was all it took, her body's own power, a Vossen trait of fast healing, burst through the blockage for just a second. It was a small moment, but for her, it shattered her world.

Her confusion and horror are exactly what I needed.

The first real crack in her reality.

Now she cannot even trust her own body, everything she thinks she knows is crumbling.

She is questioning her sanity, which makes her soft and open, ready to be guided by me.

The roses were a quiet reminder, their scent ties directly to me and to the dreams I have woven for her as an anchor in her chaos.

She can throw them away, but the smell will linger in her apartment, a constant reminder of my presence.

Then, the text was the final touch that reshapes that terrifying moment not as something strange but as a remembering.

It tells her she has forgotten something vital.

It suggests I am not giving her something new, just waking up something old.

She will not sleep tonight. Good.

Exhaustion wears down walls and makes the mind more malleable.

By tomorrow, she will be raw, tired, and deeply afraid, not just of the debt or what is coming, but of herself.

Everything is falling into place and I am becoming her only constant, the only one who seems to understand what is happening to her.

She is floating now, stuck between two worlds. Tomorrow, on Friday, I will pull her firmly into mine.

The wait is almost over.