Page 107 of Somnium

A strangled sob tore from her throat. She ripped the hoodie over her head and hurled it across the room before pulling her knees to her chest, grief seeping into every atom.

The lingering trace of Elias in the fibers of his sweatshirt, the home she had found in his arms …

It had all been twisted into a nightmare.

32

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

ELIAS

Elias paced back and forth, his arms crossed tight over his bare chest, eyes locked on the black screen of his phone where it rested on the counter. Minutes bled into eternity as he waited, willing the damn thing to just ring, chime, fucking anything to let him know Cadi was alive and somewhere safe.

She could be anywhere. Every instinct screamed at him to go after her, to find her. Only the jagged memory of the terror in her eyes when he had reached for her stopped him.

He was the last person she wanted to see.

A sharp trill cut the silence. Elias lunged for his phone. “Cadi?”

“No, but I’ve got her,” Sera replied.

He let out a shaky breath as a new hollowness settled in his chest. It wasn’t Cadi, but at least she was safe. The stone counter bit against his elbows as he slumped forward and pressed his forehead into his palm.

“Is she okay?” The words scraped out in a ragged whisper.

“No, she isn’t fucking okay,” Sera hissed, her voice low. “Her boyfriend just had a gun to her head. She’s traumatized.”

Elias fisted his hair as a sob broke from his throat. “Fuck, Sera, it wasn’t—you know what she means to me. I could never⁠—”

“I need you to take a breath. I know it wasn’t you, and so does she.”

The air rushed from his lungs, his fist thumping against the counter as he pulled another breath in slowly through his nose.

“Now. Tell me what you saw,” she demanded.

The words poured out: how Oneirios had appeared in his dream, his threats to take Cadi, how Elias had been trapped in his own body when he woke. His voice broke off when he reached the bathroom, the memory of what he had watched himself do still raw and bleeding.

“Elias,” Sera said when he finished, the urgency in her tone making his hair stand on end. “Did he see any of your thoughts? Anything that would compromise you?”

Elias swallowed hard and shook his head. “No. The door held.”

Sera’s sigh sounded in his ears, and he felt a very small piece of himself echo her reaction. He was suddenly exceedingly grateful that she had insisted on training with him over the years on ways to compartmentalize and protect anything related to their plans or his involvement, just in case Oneirios ever decided to rifle through the sleeping mind of his high priest.

“Sera,” he said, “how was this possible? He’s been in my dreams before. Talked to me. Shown me things. But he’s never been able to fully control me. Not even the binding gives him that much power.”

The line hummed with silence. “I don’t know.”

Elias swore and pushed off the counter, resuming his pacing.

“The logic of it doesn’t make sense,” she continued, “dreams aren’t what we would normally consider sentient, but in a way, they are almost like a type of mythic in their own right. They have rules and limits … the dream would push back at that kind of violation. Even against him.”

Elias’s steps stilled, his eyes snapping up to lock on his own reflection in the tinted window. “I think it did,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

His fingers wove into his hair as he resumed his path through the kitchen. “At the end, right before he woke me up, he seemed … I don’t know, fragile. Weaker. And he was bleeding. Like it was hurting him.”

Sera was quiet for a moment, and Elias forced himself to be patient while she worked things out. “That would make sense. He’s never been able to do this before, so who knows what kind of toll it would take on him. But he’s getting stronger.”