Page 109 of Sage Haven
But I wanted to.
I wanted to be the thing that made it stop.
So, I went to her room and I sat down on the edge of her bed and watched her breathe. Watched her fight. Watched her survive.
I reached out, smoothing the damp hair from her forehead, my fingers lingering too long.
“You’re safe,” I murmured, even though she couldn’t hear me. “For now.”
But Klay was coming.
And I didn’t know if I could keep her safe from him.
Or even from me.
One week.
That’s all I had.
One week until this game ended.
Or until it destroyed us both.
25
SAGE
“Look what we havehere, gentlemen.”
The voice crawled into my skull like smoke slipping beneath a door—thick, suffocating, and impossible to ignore. Muffled at first, distant, but with each word, it sharpened. Clearer. Closer.
I tried to move. I tried to run. But my body… it wasn’t mine anymore. It felt foreign. Heavy. As if I’d been submerged in quicksand, dragged under by invisible hands. My limbs refused me, weighted by an unnatural stillness that made my mind thrash in its place, screaming orders that my body would not obey.
I was paralyzed.
A cold surface pressed against the length of me, biting into my skin with a cruel indifference. Dirt. I could feel it now. Damp and gritty beneath my cheek, sapping the warmth from my bones. My breathing rasped out unevenly. Shallow, jagged pulls of air scraped through my throat like broken glass. Every exhale burned.
What happened?
Where was I?
How had I even gotten here?
Fragments of memory flickered in my mind. Footsteps in the hall. Being given some punch from the party. Fingers on my skin. Then nothing. Until now.
A shadow moved in front of the dim, moonlight that shined above me, blotting it out like an eclipse. I blinked, struggling to focus, my lashes sticky with tears I hadn’t realized had fallen. And then… a figure crouched beside me, his shape distorted by the haze of half-consciousness. His hand came up, rough fingers prying one of my eyes open. I flinched as much as I could, which wasn’t much.
His gaze raked over me—cold, clinical, unfeeling. A predator assessing the weight of its catch.
“She’s alive,” he said after a beat, his voice dark with something that wasn’t relief. It was hunger. Satisfaction. A malicious kind of glee that made my stomach twist violently.
I wanted to close my eyes. To disappear. But I couldn’t.
“Where… am… I?” My voice cracked, a ghost of a sound. It hurt to speak, like dragging words across raw flesh. My chest ached under an invisible pressure, every shallow breath a battle I was steadily losing.
“Don’t worry about it,” another voice snapped from behind him. This one was sharper. Younger. Meaner.
“You’ll be in hell soon enough,” sneered someone else, this time from my left.
