Enemy Basis | ✓

bonus chapter 6

I sat in a room alone.

The room was dark, it was cold and it was claustrophobic.

There was no door, no windows, only a suffocating darkness that threatened to pull me under.

I couldn't escape no matter how much I wanted to, needed to. It was hopeless. My life was doomed just as I was forgotten and there would be no story. I would be alone and die.

I heard a sound, a horrible sound, to the right of me.

I didn't dare open my eyes but I knew who it was even though I tried to close off my senses like I had been trapped in this room.

"Stop pretending," Mathew's voice haunted me, "You aren't this innocent little girl, you're worthless."

This was when I opened my eyes.

Not to look at him but to look at my hands.

Small, delicate and unscarred holding onto my knees that were covered by my little nightdress.

I was back to seven years old.

Scared and alone, holding onto her family that didn't want to hold onto her.

I felt worthless and all the old feelings began to build in my chest again until it was all I could think of.

This was a dream. I tried to tell myself but I couldn't compute it, Everything was so blurry, too confusing for me to make sense of it.

All I could focus on was the fear that always managed to haunt me.

Mathew's face, full of danger stared me down until I felt as little as the little girl in the room, powerless.

That was when she walked into the room.

Blonde hair, lithe figure and lips cherry red with the most beautiful eyes.

My saviour.

Claire.

Except she wasn't and never would be.

Eyes I once thought were loving and beautiful turned vicious and so cold as they trained on my broken figure on the floor.

She scoffed and wrinkled her nose as if the sight of me, her daughter, brought her the most intense displeasure as if I was nothing more than the dirt beneath her feet.

My little heart grew colder in my chest, the feeling so overwhelming I thought I was going to die.

But that was when it got worse.

Both Mathew and Clarice turned to me, standing side by side.

Their physical appearances were so contrasted with Clarice's shorter, thinner physique to Mathew's impenetrable solid muscle and height but that were the differences ceased to exist.

Everything else about them in that moment was the same.

Dressed so perfectly, money tailored into the outfit but that wasn't the thing to note. The power that made me want to crawl in a hole and hide away was woven into their gazes, a look so malicious, so cold and so evil I couldn't bear to be under their stares.

They both took a step closer and I wanted to take a step back but I found that I was limited, my body frozen with my heavy limbs, leaving me unable to move, to seek shelter.

I tried to tell myself that it was a dream, that this was silly but the closer they got, the harder it was for me to convince myself.

I was that little, hopeless girl again that was too trusting in her parents that would never love her.

"Darcy," a voice said from somewhere deep in my mind but I could heed it no attention.

No, I didn't want to hear any of it, no matter how soothing, not when soon I'd be hearing Mathew and Clarices' jaunted curses, shot like poisoned arrows from them to me.

Instead, I brought my tiny hands to my ears and closed my eyes so hard as I rocked back and forth, trying to get myself out of this nightmare, this once lived upon reality.

"Darcy," the voice said again but I wasn't having it. The less I was aware, the less this would hurt when I woke up.

But the voice was persistent and it wasn't going to stop.

"Darcy!" It shouted one last time before I came to my senses.

Dorran.

My dream started to fall apart, like a force field that had created the most realistic picture, only to come apart by its pieces, allowing me to wallow in the effortless beauty of its destruction.

It was only a dream.

I was safe.

I was loved.

And when I opened my eyes and saw a concerned Dorran looking down at me as he held my face in his hands like I meant more to him than anything ever would, the panic of that nightmare started to fade away and those horrible feelings disintegrated into the background.

How could I dispute being loved when someone looked at me like this?

"I'm so sorry," I told him as I realised I had probably woken him up, worried him to death.

"Don't ever apologise," he ordered, grey eyes serious and unforgiving but so warm and so relieved.

He brought his strong hand and so contrastingly softly, he wiped away the tears that I hadn't realised fell from my eyes. I never cried but it felt as if nightmares were the one time you couldn't pretend to be strong. They got you down when you were weakest and there was no hiding the fear, the horror.

"I hate how you have to go through this," Dorran muttered as he kissed my forehead and brought me closer until I felt cradled in his arms, "If I could bring him back to kill him again, I would. The same thing goes for her."

And despite his words so dangerous and threatening, I had never felt safer because, in those words, he repeated to me things I always feared I'd never have.

That he cared for me.

That he didn't like when I hurt.

That he'd go to the ends of the world for me.

That he loved me.

I turned my face so it looked up at him.

He stared back down at me and his eyes were like molten shards of the galaxy, offering me beyond the world to the stars.

He would never know how grateful I was for him but looking up at him now, I promised myself that I'd spend my life showing him as he showed me every day.

The pain of the past was easing up with every day I spent with him and there was going to be no better feeling the day his gift helped me let go.

He moved his head to plant the sweetest, smallest kiss on my forehead, brandishing the enemies of my head away with his protectiveness and love, letting me be able to drift away to dreamland where no horrors haunted me again.