Page 53 of My Kind of Monster

Chapter 14

SUKI

I wake up from the deepest, most calm and safest sleep I have experienced since April, since I was captured. Come to think of it… since long before that. Bright sunlight is streaming in and the air feels light, peaceful.

After last night, after what happened in the bathtub, what I did… I know that the change is permanent. I felt it afterward, but not like I feel it now. It’s almost like last night’s sleep solidified what my mind barely knew then. A confirmation. This is permanent, his mark on my soul, the demon I created in his. No matter what will happen in the future, no matter where I will be, this will never change. And I fear it, I fear the meaning of this, because it’s a destruction of hearts and souls and I don’t know if mine can absorb anymore chaos.

I turn on my back, my palms flat against the soft cotton sheets. I squeeze them lightly in my fists, and take a deep breath, slowly shutting my eyes as the air reaches deeper into my lungs. I hold it in. The rush is coming. The pressure building. My lungs are pulsing. My heart is speeding up. And there… in the darkness, I see them. Always clearer than those glimpses I catch in the mirror. The demons come out one by one.

I feel this change in them as well. Their familiar, uncontrollable, chaotic movements long gone. What I see now is pure contempt, satisfaction, control… power. It scares me, it is like they know something I do not.

I feel the warmth. I feel the fire that brought the demons forth long ago… back when the dreams were my only escape. The dreams that started it all. The fire is brighter now, it burns hotter, but the flames are calm, like in the dead of the night, devoid of wind, they burn silently. I wonder if it is because they do not need to crave the danger anymore.

No, it’s because it got its first taste. The hunger is sated… for now, and no one else will ever taste the same.

I exhale the deathly breath I was holding in, clutching the soft sheets in my fists, panting heavily. When I turn my head towards the window, my body instantly relaxes. This… this view... No matter how many times I open my eyes and see it, no matter how much time I spend absorbing every tree, every crevasse, every mountain… it’s not enough and it cannot just become… normal.

This guest bedroom window is, as the bathroom, at the back of the house and the landscape is only slightly different from what you see at the front. Here, all the lines seem sharper, the mountain peaks higher, and the incline down the mountain steeper. It’s wild… well and truly wild. No road, no access, no nothing. Walking in that direction means certain death for whoever doesn’t know this mountain. Maybe even for those that do.

My breaths are calm now… my hands relaxed, my body is sinking into the comfortable mattress, and I realize that if I don’t get up now, I’ll end up drifting away again. I need it, I do… but my stomach needs food as well.

I throw the covers off my body and sit up on the bed facing that calm view, pushing myself to peel my eyes off it. I like this room, cozy and calm, dominated by neutral, soft colors and minimal furniture—a double bed close to the window, a dresser by the door and a mirror, armchair, and wardrobe opposite the bed, all made from light ash wood to fit the soft neutral theme.

He left more clothes for me as I was sleeping.

A rollercoaster, this is what this experience feels like—a rollercoaster. Demons dominate everything he is, the monster lurks in the shadows of his soul, yet sometimes he is… different, and what happened last night, the new emotion, the demon that smiled at me, tells me he is only different with me. It scares me that I want to believe that.

I grab the neatly folded pile of clothes from the dresser—a hoodie, t-shirt, boxers, socks, and a pair of joggers that could potentially cover my whole body head to toe. I decide to risk it and wear everything but the joggers, since the hoodie reaches my knees anyway.

The house is silent. There is no sound coming from his bedroom or the bathroom I walked by before that, so I step carefully down the stairs as I head to the kitchen, since I’m not sure if by any chance he is still sleeping.

This silence, this beautiful peace and quiet, this warm house filled with wood and furs, this mountain… it spreads shivers from my toes, traveling up my body, to the base of my neck and I burst into goosebumps. But when I think of the man that owns it all… I shiver for a whole different reason altogether.

Shaking myself mentally, I turn my attention to the French press to make some coffee before I pull out some ingredients for breakfast. It’s funny really. This is something I never thought that I would miss—cooking. So many months with no access to a kitchen and here I am, doing this perfectly mundane task of cooking pancakes, bacon, and eggs… I cannot quite believe how satisfying this feels.

Twenty minutes later, breakfast is cooked and this damn house smells like home. Not like my apartment back in South Dakota… no, it smells like home. If Niklas doesn’t scare me enough, this… this does. I shake the thought away, because I know how heartbreakingly impossible this is. Purely suicidal thoughts.

After I split the food between two plates and put his in the oven to keep it warm, I feel the need to get out of this house for now. Walking out on the snowy porch, I take a deep breath that floods my lungs, and I can’t help but moan. It’s exhilarating. Fresh, cold… it smells like new beginnings. I sit on the steps of the porch with the plate on my thighs and quietly eat as the sun warms my bare legs. This view is like seeing the visual part of those sound machines some people play to fall asleep.

This is it… the birds fluttering their wings as they fly above the trees, the sounds the branches make as they gently sway in the breeze, the frozen snow falling off them and hitting the ground, running water somewhere far away in the background… even the sun seems to make a sound.

This could almost be too much, after months of being in complete darkness, in a dungeon, underground. It’s not… it’s just right.

I’m halfway through my breakfast when I feel the intensity of his gaze searing itself onto my skin through the two layers of clothes I’m wearing. I turn my head slightly towards the right, stopping just for a second, just enough so he knows I know he’s there, before I continue eating. I know it’s Niklas, I felt that searing gaze in the woods when he found me, I felt it when he chased me outside… I felt it in the shower. It seared itself into my mind and my body now recognizes it.

I hear the door open and close, before his enormous figure sits next to me on the steps, casting a large shadow over me and I feel the echo of a shiver running through my body.

“Thank you.” I hear his sleepy, thick voice that sounds even rougher than normal. Sometimes I feel that if he would yell loud enough, he could split the blankets of snow from the peaks looming in the far distance and create avalanches.

I turn to him and for the first time since he found me… I smile and it reaches my eyes.

NIKLAS

I’m trapped.

She stopped time. With a smile. She stopped time and now, bathed in my shadow, the sun casts a halo around her and the siren looks… empyreal. I would believe it, I would believe she could have come from heaven if I didn’t know what I know of her.

But I can see her now like never before, in the calm of the late morning on this snowy mountain, on my territory, I see her—she fits. Her soft, pale skin belongs with this snow. Her unnaturally light green eyes belong with the trees. Her smile… it belongs with me. I see the smile lines in the skin at the outer edge of her almond shaped eyes, the freckles that dust her nose and fade on her cheeks, the shiny line that defines her Cupid’s bow, making her plush lips stand out.

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