Chapter 201: Something Is Wrong With Me
She pressed them flat against the mattress and then took several deep breath to calm herself down.
The warmth under her skin was worse than it had been when she fell asleep.
She looked at the connecting door.
Looked away.
Got up. Drank a glass of water. Stood at the window and looked out at the dark grounds until her heartbeat came back down to something manageable.
Then she went back to bed.
The moment she closed her eyes and the dreams pulled her back under again.
***
The second day was harder.
She could feel them before she saw them. That was new...a constand awareness of where they were in the estate, like something in her had been glued to them. She knew Sebastian was in the corridor before he opened the door. Felt the shift in the air when Lucian passed the library.
And when Nicholas walked into a room her entire body went tight.
She started avoiding them.
Not obviously. Not in a way she thought they’d notice. She rearranged her timing, came to breakfast earlier, left before they finished. Found reasons to be in different parts of the estate. Spent two hours in the kitchen with Agnes because the kitchen was the one room she was certain none of them would come looking for her.
Agnes didn’t ask questions.
Just put her to work chopping vegetables and talked about the estate’s history.
But even in the kitchen, even with Agnes’s steady presence and the smell of woodsmoke and herbs, the warmth didn’t ease. It sat under her skin like something with a pulse. Something alive and insistent and completely uninterested in what she wanted.
***
That night the dreams were worse.
She woke up at three in the morning with her hand already moving between her thighs before she was fully conscious.
She lay there in the dark and was breathing hard.
Her body was burning.
Not a fever.....she pressed the back of her hand to her forehead, felt her own pulse. Not sick. She didn’t have a fever.
She decided it was something else.
She took care of herself in the dark with the sheets twisted around her legs and her face turned into the pillow. Came so hard her vision blurred. Lay there afterward breathing like she’d been running.
Still the warmth didn’t go away.
She pressed both hands flat against her stomach and stared at the ceiling.
Then she came to the conclusion "Something is wrong with me."
***
The third day she could barely be in the same room as any of them.
It was Sebastian who noticed first.....not the way Lucian had noticed in the corridor. Sebastian noticed that she was acting differently, Then decided to find out what was happening. He walked into the sitting room where she was reading and stopped three feet inside the door and just....looked at her. His dark eyes moving over her face. Her hands. The way she was sitting.
"Lilith."
"I’m reading."
"You’ve been reading the same page for twenty minutes." He said it gently. "I walked past the door three times."
She hadn’t known that.
Her grip tightened on the book.
"I’m fine." she replied without raising her head from her book.
He was quiet for a moment, then he said "You’re not fine."
"Sebastian....."
"I’m not pushing." He stayed where he was. Three feet away. Like he’d calculated the exact distance that wouldn’t send her bolting. "But I need you to know that I can see it. Whatever is happening." A pause. "We all can."
She looked up at him.
"I’ll talk to Nicholas," she said.
"When."
"Soon."
He looked at her for a long moment. Then he nodded once and walked out of the room.
She sat with the unread book in her lap and the warmth pressing in from every direction and thought about how she could feel exactly where he’d gone.....down the corridor, up the stairs, through the door above her head, like he was a signal her body was tuned to receive whether she wanted it or not.
She put the book down.
Pressed both hands over her eyes.
"Tomorrow," she told herself. "Tell Nicholas tomorrow."
***
She didn’t make it to the next morning.
She woke in the middle of the night to heat so intense it took her breath away.
Not warmth anymore. Not that crawling restless undercurrent she’d been managing for days. This was a fire.....starting in her core and radiating outward until her skin felt too tight and her thoughts dissolved the moment she tried to form them. She pushed the blankets off and it didn’t help. Opened the window and the cold night air hit her bare arms and still...it didn’t help.
She was burning from the inside.
She tried to get up. Made it to the edge of the bed. Sat there with her feet on the floor and her hands gripping the edge of the bed and her vision swimming at the edges.
"This is not normal," some distant part of her thought. "This is not the warmth. This is something else entirely."
She reached for the glass of water on the nightstand.
Her hand shook so badly she knocked it over.
The sound of it hitting the floor was the last thing she remembered before the room tilted and she fell to the floor beside the bed and lost consciousness.
***
Nicholas’s POV
Kael had been restless and agitated since midnight.
Pacing back and forth in a way that Nicholas didn’t understand and couldn’t explain. It wasn’t the usual curse restlessness. That he knew how to manage. This was different. This felt urgent in a way that had no reason behind it and Kael couldn’t tell him why because Kael didn’t know why either. He just kept pacing and pushing at something Nicholas couldn’t see.
Nicholas had been awake the whole night because of it.
By five in the morning he stopped trying to sleep. Got up. Got dressed. Made coffee he didn’t taste and sat at his desk and tried to work through correspondence until the sky outside got light.
By seven he gave up on the correspondence too.
He mindlinked Sebastian. "Training ground. Thirty minutes." Then grabbed his jacket and headed for the stairs.
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