22. Determination

[Carys]

‘You can’t leave me. Where do you think you’ll go? You cannot run away from me, Carys. I “am” your cage. No matter how far you fly, where you go, I will always have a leash on you. You will find yourself confined back within my bars.’

I was floating naked in a blank space with nothing but those haunting, distorted words and their incessant echoes. The darkness around me crackled itself around me until I found myself locked in a gold cage. I tried to step out, but the shackles caught me crawling around my ankles up my legs.

Like thunder, thorny rose vines crept into and around the cage.

The bars of the cage slithered into golden snakes, baring their fangs at me as they slithered all around my body. They coiled tight until I felt my skin sever and heard my bones crack.

‘If not my beta, what the hell are you? If not mine, you are no one’s!’

I fell to my knees, panting as the thorns of the vines stabbed right through my skin. In no time, I was kneeling in the puddle of my blood.

‘