☘︎ Jᴇɴɴɪғᴇʀ Rʏsᴏɴ ☘︎

I am drowning.

Bubbles form in my peripheral, the evidence of silent screams as I thrash against the hand holding my head firmly under the tub. My eyes burn from the foamy liquid onslaught, hair a floating halo around my face and arms flailing about pathetically. Water enters my mouth, my ears, my nose. I can't get out I can't get out.

Just when my eyelids grow heavy, drooping with wet lashes, the man loosens his grip, releasing me. The energy in my body is so depleted I can't even lift my body enough to rise from the surface of the water.

I try once, twice and the third time I can barely manage to get my hands out. There's a distant sound of a door opening, making heavy footsteps shuffle away from near the tub, the noise of someone jumping down the roof. A minute later, new, urgent footsteps approach me. My ears are so stuffed with water, my mind so boggled from slipping consciousness, I don't even know whether I'm making up those too. I'm far too tired to care.

I just want to sleep....

In a flash of movement, someone grabs my hands and I'm being pulled out of the water. I cough up a fit, my eyes barely open and my chest constricting from the sudden oxygen pressure. A hand rubs my back soothingly, holding my hair out of my face and letting me throw-up the water from my system.

Dunking his arms into the tub and looping his hand firmly around my waist, he rises me completely from the tub. My feet wobble, my head feeling way too heavy. I rest it on the broad shoulder of the person holding me. It's a guy.

"Oh fuck!" He curses, whoever he is, as if in sudden realization of something. Oh right, I'm naked.

His arm is still tightly wound around my waist, but there's a tension in them now. I feel him try to hold my weight on one arm. A second passes and another. Then, a soft, pure cotton material drapes over my bare body. He helps me into the clothing, holding me upright with strong, lean arms while trying to fit my arms into the sleeves. I think it's a shirt. It smells really nice. It smells of first rain and cologne. It smells of someone I know.

A frown starts to form between my brows. I try to lift my head off the guy's shoulder, but he stops me with a warm hand on my cold cheek and rests my face back on his shoulder. Before I can attempt to raise my head again, I'm being lifted from the floor, cradled into strong arms. The person carrying me starts walking in a direction exiting the jacuzzi area.

My frown deepens, my eyes can't seem to open anymore. A cough escapes my mouth when I speak, rasping in a croaky voice, "Lykas?"

Gentle hands run along the length of my hair, "You're going to be okay, sweetheart." He kisses the top of my head.

Nodding in a snail pace, my cheeks flatten against his hard, bare chest. His arms tighten around me, and I feel him hold me closer.

"You're going to ruin me, Jenna." His voice is so pained, emotions I don't understand coating them. He sounds like devastation poured into a human being.

I want to ask him what he means but my fleeting consciousness finally slips, and the world goes black around me.

***

☘︎ Lʏᴋᴀs Vɪᴛᴀʟʟɪs ☘︎

There's a nagging sting in my eyes when I lower Jennifer's worn-out body on the comfortable mattress of my bed. The stinging sensation grows as I tuck her under thick blankets, brush hair from her face and notice how blue she looks.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, I hold her hands in mine, rubbing them to create warmth. My other palm extending to caress the apple of her cheeks, my heartbeat hammers in my chest like I've run a marathon. I'd never been more panicked in my entire life.

She could've fucking died.

My heart clenches in a way as if I am going to die, just thinking about it. If I hadn't felt terrible for spooking her in the club earlier, hadn't been so crestfallen when she refused to talk to me after, hadn't waited one hour before caving in and come looking for her in the jacuzzi area. . . .

I don't let the thought finish. Instead, I sit there watching her slumber for hours into midnight.

There's a scowl on her beautiful face even as she sleeps, it makes me smile.

I lean down to kiss away the deep furrow of her brows. She sighs in her sleep, making me smile wider. I kiss her cheek and she lets out another satisfied sigh. Grinning, I kiss her nose. She scrunches it for a moment before her whole face relaxes. My eyes soften, and I lean in one last time to kiss her forehead.

When I pull back, those green irises are open and she's looking at me with that hawk gaze, an imaculate brow raised, "That could be considered taking advantage while someone is sleeping."

I open my mouth, shut it then snap myself out of getting caught red-handed. Despite the inner nervousness, outwardly I'm all easy grin as I raise one of my own brow in retaliation, "You seemed quite content with it."

"Says who?" Her voice is still croaky from how she'd coughed up so much water, but there's the glint of her intimidating tone in it. I feel my shoulders relax the slightest bit.

"Your sleepy self." I retort with a charming smile.

"Shut up, Lykas. That was lame." I could bet I saw the twitch of her lips though.

"Nah." My hand tucks away her hair behind her ear.

I feel her eyes following my movements ever so inquisitively, but she doesn't tell me to stop. So I let my fingers linger on the planes of her face, studying her features with keen precision like any moment she'd dissappear. That damn sting in my eyes returns. I don't want to cry like a baby in front of her.

But I can't help the slight catch in my voice when I whisper, "How did you end up drowning in the tub?"

"I think I imagine-" Jennifer freezes, making me pause and stare into her eyes. She looks conflicted, confused as if she's not sure what to say or believe.

"I. . ." Jennifer starts again, stops, "I don't know." She looks lost in her mind, as though she's trying to figure out something, as though she can't differentiate real from fiction.

"Jenna?" Her eyes divert back to mine, "You don't know?"

"I just. . .I was inching lower and lower into the tub until I went too low. Water entered my mouth. I remember for a moment, I didn't mind but then I tried to sit and. . ." Her speech cuts short, her expression shutting down completely at whatever happened next, "I don't know what is real anymore. The last few days have been messing with my head. I seem to make up things, people who don't exist when it's my own mind losing its sanity. Maybe I just wanted to drown. . ."

That confession. The very last one.

It snaps something inside of me.

There's very few instances when I loose my patience. But that confession undoes me.

"How could you?" I hate how accusatory my tone is, but I'm angry and terrified.

"Have you thought how someone who cares for you would feel if you just gave up?" A single tear rolls down my eyes against my will. I can't loose her. I just. . .can't.

Jennifer's eyes widen in shock at the tear trailing down my cheek. Her hand bellows towards me as if to wipe it away but at the last minute, she pulls back, unsure what to do.

"Why are you. . ." Crying. I know she wants to ask that.

"Because I'm an emotional idiot. And I just fucking care for you. So much. It hurts me to even think I'd loose you. As if the clown wasn't already trying to take you away, you want to leave me too now?" It's embarrassing how whiny I sound, but I can't help it.

"All my life, I clung to the prospect that if I was successful enough, my father would maybe approve of me. My mother. . .she does love me but she has her own skeletons holding her back. She couldn't move on without letting them out of her closet. I'd long given up hope trying to win her. The only thing I thought expressed they cared for me was the inheritance they'd kept for me. As conceited as that sounds, I'd made up my mindset that it was the token of my parents love for me. Losing thr inheritance, would've been like loosing my parents completely. That's why I'd done everything Dad asked me to do so that he doesn't take it away from me, take their token of love from me. It was the only thing that kept me going. Stupid I know." I let out a bitter chuckle.

Jennifer is watching me with complete focus, brows bunched together, hand closing into a fist then opening, then closing again. But she listens. She always listens. I love that about her. God I love everything about her. Even her constant frowns and icy glares and cutting words. Her eyes, her nose, her lips, her voice, her rare smiles, her.

I love her.

I don't express it. Jennifer will close off on me if I do that. I don't want to scare her off with my feelings. What I can express though. . .

"Now I'm very much on the path to loosing my entire inheritance but for the first time, it's fine. It's not as much a horrifying prospect as before. Then, I knew I'd have nothing if not that. Now though. . ." A warmth spreads in my chest, "I have you." Emotions clogs my next words, "And you just want to leave me. I might've been fine with losing the token of my parents love. But you, loosing you would ruin me. . .I can't lose you, Jenna-"

"Stop." Jennifer cuts me off abruptly.

I look at her, finding her eyes hardening, "Just stop."

My mouth moves around a sentence, even though no words come out. Shit shit shit. Did I talk too much?

"I'm sorry if I was too outright-"

Jennifer sits up and inches closer to me. In a quick movement, her lips are on mine. Hands holding my jaw, she kisses me hard, like a woman starved-lips and tongue and teeth, before pulling back.

"I don't know what's real." She mumbles, breathing labored, our lips just a hairsbreath away, "I just. . .don't know. But you. . ." Her hands swine into my hair pulling my face closer, stealing a quick kiss, "You always feel real. You keep me grounded."

"And you, me." I smile, hooking an arm around her waist, pulling her onto my lap.

"I need to feel something real." Jennifer rests her forehead against mine, "I need you."

My hand cup the side of her neck, the other arm careening her closer so that every inch of her is snug against every inch of me, "Yeah?" I ask, running a finger along her pulse, they quicken under my touch.

I lean in to kiss her thumping pulse, making her hands tighten in my hair, tugging at the strands, "Yeah." She says, a breathless request.

Turning us around, I lower her body onto the bed, my form hovering over. Her legs wrapped around my waist, my hands on either side of her head on the bed, I kiss her lips and declare, "Then you shall have me."

***

☘︎ Uɴᴋɴᴏᴡɴ Pᴇʀsᴏɴ POV ☘︎

Dark hair billowed in the winter air as the girl standing on the terrace of the guest house squinted her eyes, her calculating gaze tracking the lone figure of a buffy man sneakily leaving Jennifer's mansion right across the guest house. Her eyes narrowed in annoyance, fists clenching where she'd rested them on the rail of the balcony.

"I'll do everything you've told me to," A voice spoke from behind her, edged in fear. She didn't have to turn around to know who it belonged to. Nathan.

Jennifer's head of security. Quite undeserving of the job she'd say, since he wasn't even loyal. And fell greedily for offered bribes. But wasn't that what made the evil stronger anyways? People who were easy preys.

"When will you let my wife and daughter go?" The fright in Nathan's words turned to unrestrained anxiety.

The girl on the roof didn't retort.

All she did is smile into the night, cunning and sinister, while her mind worked on how to execute her next move.

--------᪥♔︎᪥-------

HAHAHA WHO IS THE MYSTERY GIRL? WHAT ARE HER INTENTIONS?

Aight this is random but important info for me. Do y'all want me to make the book mature as in add in spice scenes or keep it YA?👀

Lemme know your thoughts or theories on the chapter!