Chapter 31: Unwanted Desire
The cold of the stone seeped through my leggings, a sharp counterpoint to the heat coiling in my belly. Xenon’s eyes held that flat, assessing look. The moment stretched, brittle. I wanted to disappear into the rock.
Then his expression softened, the corners of his mouth lifting into something resembling his usual easy smile. It didn’t reach his eyes.
“Alright,” he said, his voice a low murmur that seemed to blend with the distant drip of water. “But can I touch you? Without going further?”
It was a concession. A boundary. The part of me that was raw and aching and desperately lonely latched onto it. I nodded, a quick, almost imperceptible jerk of my chin. I wanted the heat of the kiss back, wanted it to burn away the memory of Ren’s gentle, devastating words. I needed to feel something, anything else.
He kissed me again, hungrily. His tongue swept into my mouth, claiming, and he sucked my lower lip between his teeth with a gentle pressure that sent a shocking bolt of sensation straight down my spine. It was foreign. Overwhelming. A direct line to a part of me I’d ignored. I welcomed it.
That’s when I felt it. A push.
Not physical. It was inside my skull, a pressure against my will. A sudden, swelling wave of desire that didn’t feel like it had grown from within me. It felt planted. Artificial, yet pushing so strongly it blurred the edges of my own feelings. For a moment, I stopped fighting it. I let the current take me, let it drown out the heartache and the humiliation. My muscles went lax.
He felt the change. His hands slid from my waist to my hips, and with shocking ease, he lifted me. I gasped into his mouth as he brought me over to straddle his lap, my boots scraping on the stone. The position was intimate, bizarre. I had never done anything like this before. The reality of it—sitting astride my commander in the dark, forbidden catacombs—was so surreal a hysterical thought bubbled up: I am actually doing this.
I could feel him. The hard, undeniable ridge of his erection pressed against me, even through our clothes. A fresh jolt, part shock, part that artificial heat, sparked through me.
He started to move, a slow, deliberate grind of his hips against mine. The friction was exquisite, immediate. Two warring parts of me fractured.
One screamed in silent protest, a fading echo from the core of who I was.
The other, amplified by that external push, whispered in a velvet, addictive voice. Give in. Give in. Let him take you. Let him make you forget. Forget Ren. Forget the pain. Just feel this.
I groaned, the sound torn from my throat, thick with a pleasure that terrified me. I broke the kiss, my head falling forward, draping over his shoulder. I stared out past him, into the profound blackness between the pulses of sickly fungal light. I needed a second. I needed to breathe.
My eyes focused on a deeper shadow, a human shape standing motionless between two jagged pillars.
It was her.
The shadowed woman from the vault. From my weapon choosing. Her form was less substantial here, woven from the darkness itself, but her eyes held the same piercing intensity. She looked directly at me. Her lips formed the words, silent, urgent.
Run.
Run.
RUN.
A cold chill, pure and sharp as a shard of glacier ice, sliced through the fog of forced desire in my head. It was clean. It was mine. In that instant, the alien heat vanished, snuffed out like a candle. The hunger left my body, leaving a hollow, violated chill.
I realized with cold, staking clarity. My emotions were being controlled. By him. By Xenon.
“No,” I breathed, the word a puff of frost in the damp air.
I tried to push against his chest, to lever myself off his lap. His arms, which had felt like a cage of warmth, now felt like iron bands. He held me down, his grip tightening. He sought my mouth again, his lips grazing my cheek.
“Easy, Flower,” he murmured, the nickname now a disgusting parody.
“Let me go!” I snarled, the force coming from a place of pure, undiluted survival. I shoved with all my strength, a strength fueled by panic and a rising, volcanic fury. My still-tender ribs shrieked in protest. For a second, his balance wavered.
I scrambled, a clumsy, graceless animal, pushing off his thighs and stumbling backward. I fell hard onto the wet stone, the impact jarring my teeth, but I was free. I crab-walked away from him, putting several feet of jagged rock between us.
My breath came in ragged, visible plumes. I stared at him, my heart hammering against my ribs like it wanted to break out.
He didn’t look surprised. He didn’t look angry. He looked… curious. He rose smoothly to his feet, dusting off his pants with a casualness that was more frightening than any threat.
“Are you messing with my mind?” My voice was low, shaking with the effort to control it.
He took a single step forward, not to advance, but to meet my level, his figure towering in the bioluminescent gloom. The ghost of a smile played on his lips, but his eyes were voids.
“Do you know what my special ability is, Flamed Flower?”
I was stunned by the odd question at a time like this. I shook my head, a pounding pressure starting behind my eyes. “Uh, I don’t know. Bone weaving and…maybe something with emotions? I’ve heard mixed things.”
He chuckled. He raised his hand, and a small, familiar orange flame appeared in his palm.
My breath hitched. It was a perfect mimicry of the flame I’d shown everyone, the one I’d created to hide the gold.
“My power is unique,” he said, the flame dancing in his reflectionless eyes. “In that no one else is like me, and no one really knows what I am.”
I saw the woman appear behind him again, the shadow form closer now, her mouth opening wide in a silent scream. Run run run run run!
I blinked, trying to fight the sudden dizziness overtaking me. The world tipped sideways for a second.
He laughed, a soft, terrible sound. “I like to compare my ability to a sponge. When I touch someone, I absorb their abilities. Just a simple touch gives me temporary access.” He took a step closer, the flame in his hand winking out. “But sex… ooh, sex gives me a more permanent grasp of your ability.”
Suddenly, I understood.
Everything clicked into place with the finality of a coffin lid slamming shut. He knew what I was. He had seen my golden flame that day the wards were breached in my fourth year, before I had dulled it down. He knew who and what I was. The Guardian. The prize.
“The only downside,” he explained, his voice conversational as he took another casual step forward, “is I can only hold one ability at a time. I had hoped you’d give it to me willingly so I could come back again later and take more, but…”
Suddenly, I saw them. Vines, thick and gnarled and black as the catacomb stone, growing from the earth itself. They slithered toward me like serpents.
“This could still work.”
Run.
I scrambled away from him, my boots skidding on the damp stone. I turned and fled, not back toward the barracks, but deeper into the labyrinth of jagged pillars and bottomless pits. I ran faster than I ever had in training, faster than I’d run from the shade-beast in the forest, faster than my heart had run from Ren’s rejection.
My lungs burned. My ribs screamed. The world narrowed to the next footfall, the next panicked gasp of air thick with mold and old death.
I didn’t look back. I didn’t need to. I could hear the dry, rustling scrape of the vines pursuing me, faster than anything rooted should move.
I leapt over a fissure in the floor, my arms windmilling for balance. I rounded a corner sharp enough to tear my sleeve on a jutting crystal.
Then my foot caught.
A root, or a vine—it didn’t matter—snaked up from a crack and twisted around my ankle. The world upended. I slammed down onto the solid stone floor face-first.
The impact was a white explosion of pain in my nose, my teeth, my already-screaming ribs. I tasted blood, hot and coppery. I kicked, I thrashed, trying to break free, trying to access my fire to burn it. I clawed for that golden heat in my core.
The flame was silent. Dormant. Smothered by pure, undiluted terror.
More vines came. They wrapped around my other ankle, yanking my legs apart. They seized my wrists, pinning them above my head with incredible, inexorable force. The rough, bark-like texture bit into my skin. I was spread-eagled on the cold ground, utterly immobilized.
The slow, deliberate sound of boots on stone echoed through the dark.
He walked into my narrow field of vision, his form backlit by the pulsing fungal glow. He crouched beside me, his face a mask of calm consideration.
“See?” Xenon said softly, almost kindly, as he reached out a hand toward my cheek. “This could still work just fine.”
His fingers brushed my cheek, a mockery of tenderness. I flinched, a full-body spasm that rattled my bones against the stone. The vines held fast.
I strained against them, every muscle corded and shaking. I threw my consciousness inward, screaming at the silent, golden ember that slept in my chest. Wake up.Burn. Burn them away. Nothing answered but a hollow, leaden ache. My power was gone, swallowed by the thick tendrils constricting my limbs.
“A handy trick I picked up from a lowly gardener in the Eastern Territory,” Xenon said, his voice conversational as he traced the line of my jaw. “A vine that numbs magical abilities. It’s a shame she wasted her life away as a gardener, but I can certainly use it to my advantage.” He smirked.
Tears welled, hot and furious, mixing with the grit on my cheeks. They blurred the eerie, pulsing light of the fungi above into sickly green smears. The stinging in my eyes was nothing compared to the ice flooding my veins.
He unbuckled his belt. The sound of the leather sliding free was a sharp, definitive rip in the world.
I thrashed, a wild, jerking animal motion that accomplished nothing. The rough bark of the vines scraped my wrists and ankles raw. “Stop,” I gasped, the word a dry crack. “Xenon, don’t—”
“Ren!” The name tore from my throat, a raw, guttural scream that echoed off the trees. “Ren, please!”
Xenon laughed, a hard, genuine sound that bounced around the cavern. He finished with his belt and crouched on the ground between my spread legs. His posture was casual, like a man about to examine an interesting insect.
“It’s just me and you here, dear,” he said, his smile wide and utterly empty. “No one is coming for you.”
My frantic gaze darted past him, searching for an escape that wasn’t there. That’s when I saw them. The trees—the twisted, blackened things growing from the catacomb floor—were glowing. A faint, etched luminescence pulsed within their bark.A familiar marking.
Ren had drawn it only twice for me, his finger tracing the complex, intersecting lines in the air. ‘It doesn’t exist in any textbook,’ he’d grunted. ‘A personal project. It doesn’t just mute sound. It contains it, swallows it whole.’
The silencing rune shone brightly on every tree surrounding us.
He had planned this. He had come here, to this forgotten place, and prepared this cage for me. The realization was a final, silent shatter inside my skull.
Xenon hooked his fingers in the waistband of my leggings and pulled them down. The cold, damp air hit my exposed skin. I went perfectly still. I looked up, away from him, past the glowing trees, past the canopy ceiling and towards the large bright moon of the night sky.
I stared at a fixed point in the jagged black bark above, where a single drop of water gathered and fell. I counted its rhythm. My tears streamed down my temples, into my hair, into the dirt.I blinked.
I was walking.
The crunch of gravel under my boots was the only sound. A deep, resonant numbness had settled in my chest, a thick void where feeling had been. A different, more specific pain had settled low in my body, a raw, hollow ache.
I stared straight ahead at the path, not really seeing the trees or the gradually lightening sky. My leggings were stained. Dark, muddy smears blended with other, rust-colored patches. The fabric chafed against the burns on my wrists and ankles, angry red lines where the vines had held me, but I didn’t feel it.
The sun was rising. A thin, gray light was bleeding into the world. I didn’t have my phone to tell what time it was. My hair was matted, a tangled nest of orange-red stuck with twigs and dried leaves.
I trudged up to the iron gate of the squad barracks. My body moved on its own, a hollowed-out machine following a pre-programmed route.
Across the training yard, the others were sprinting laps. Alex, Hannah, Aria. Their forms were blurred by the morning mist and the sheer, impossible distance that now separated me from them. Ren stood like a dark pillar, his voice a distant, angry bark. “Faster! You move like corpses! Is this the best my squad can do?”
Aria stopped in her tracks.
They were all facing away from me as I stepped through the gate, but Aria turned. Her caramel-colored hair swung. She looked straight at me.
Tears filled her violet eyes instantly, as if she knew. As if she could see the entire, silent horror written on my skin, in the slackness of my face, in the dead void of my gaze.
I looked at them. Alex puffing out a breath, Hannah pushing a strand of hair from her face, Ren’s sharp profile. They seemed like characters from a story I’d read long ago. They belonged to another life. A past Arisa.
I walked on. My boots made soft, shuffling sounds on the flagstone path. I headed inside, toward the showers, toward the water that could not possibly be hot enough, toward the inevitable punishment for missing curfew, for missing morning drill, for existing.