Looking For His North Star

Chapter twenty

When she woke up, she was in her own room, back at the mansion.

Weird.

Seher got out of the bed, frowning down at herself. She was wearing the same pale blue dress she'd thrown away earlier, but there were no blood stains on it now. She looked around.

The room was freezingly cold.

Rubbing her arms for some warmth, she walked over to the window and peered outside. Even in this summer, the sun looked like a dying ember in a cloudless gray sky, painting the outside world in a sickly orange light. There was no sign of Ziya's beautiful garden. The once green grass was now yellow and withered and the trees looked like skeletons, stripped of leaves.

Seher suddenly felt uneasy. Something didn't feel right.

She opened the bedroom door and walked outside, only to be stopped short in her tracks.

There was a man standing in the middle of Yaman's office, a man whose tall frame and the salt-and-pepper hair instantly made her blood run cold. He was standing with his back to her, but when he heard her footsteps he turned around.

Seher stifled a scream. It was Aksak- there was no mistake, but also it....wasn't.

He was inhumanly disfigured.

He looked like he was summoned straight from the hell, face crisscrossed with scars, and where his eyes should have been, only black holes remained. There were blood stains on his white shirt, but the stains were twisting and turning like live serpents, curling all over his body.

She stumbled back and tried to open the bedroom door again, only to find it mysteriously locked. Tears sprang into her eyes and she held up her hands to ward him off.

That was when her gaze focused on her own hands. Reddish patches bloomed on her white skin like someone was cutting her with an invisible knife. She started hyperventilating. When she looked down, they were spreading across her pale blue dress too, in a river of old, dried blood.

"No...." She whimpered.

Aksak took a dragging step forward. When he opened his mouth, to her surprise, Yaman's voice rang out.

"SEHER, WAKE UP!"

Seher came up, gasping for breath, fighting through a cocoon of sheets and blankets that was tangled around her. Someone was holding her wrists in a tight grip. Her eyes snapped open, vision blurry with tears. Through the fog, a pair of blissfully calm brown eyes came into focus and she stared, until she brought the first breath of oxygen into her lungs.

"It's alright," Yaman said softly. "You just saw a nightmare. It's gone!"

God. Seher pulled back, tugging at his hold on her wrists. He released her, his gaze all too knowing. She placed a hand on her chest, over her racing heart.

"Aksak?" Yaman asked.

Seher nodded, avoiding his eyes.

"He will press charges, won't he?" She asked in a small voice. "I shot him. He will press charges."

Yaman's expression was hard.

"Let him!" He said, ferociously. "He doesn't have the upper hand, even if he did."

Seher closed her eyes.

"He was going to kill Arif-" Yaman stiffened. "- he said my little boy was taking his last breaths. I don't know what came over me then. I just know that I....that I wanted to kill him at the moment. I wanted him gone!"