Page 43 of Somno Slave

And those eyes—God.

They don’t look human. Black enough to swallow the light around them whole, endless in a way my brain can’t settle around properly. Looking into them feels wrong immediately, like standing too close to the edge of a cliff and realising something down there is looking back.

My lungs forget how to work.

I feel exposed suddenly.

My breathing breaks mid-inhale and doesn’t recover properly. For a second—just a second—I feel it again. Something drags low along my spine, slow and deliberate, like it knows exactly where to go.

Every nerve in my body ignites.

His mouth shifts, curving into a smile. A slow, devastating slash of lips that carves me open. He edges forward so slowly, so minimally, that I’m convinced I imagined it.

I don’t breathe.

Ican’tbreathe.

His lips part.

He’s going to speak. I know it with the kind of certainty that makes my whole body tighten around the moment. My body leans into it without permission.

God help me, I wait for him.

A bead of sweat slips down the back of my neck. My gaze flicks, quick to the others—Peter, the monitors. They’re distracted. Not a single one looks up.

I try to find my voice, but it fails.

There is a wrongness to it now, something I can feel even as I stay exactly where I am. This isn’t anticipation. It’s something deeper, something that doesn’t belong to me. But the silence stretches. My attention snaps back to him, but then...he looks away.

Like he’s finished with me.

Boredof me.

The thought drops hard enough to feel physical.

The edges of the room suddenly feel closer. The lights sit wrong against my eyes, too bright, too clean, like they’re pressing down instead of illuminating.

I draw in a breath. It doesn’t go deep enough. I try again but it’s still wrong. It catches somewhere halfway, like my body has forgotten how to complete it properly.

I look back at the men, at the computers. I open my mouth to tell them, but nothing comes out.

Because the second I try to say it out loud, it already sounds impossible.

He looked at me.

My pulse stumbles hard enough to make me feel briefly sick.

Because if I say it now, if I break the silence just to tell them the prisoner briefly lifted his eyes, Peter’s going to look at me like I’m overreacting again. Like I’m letting him get into my head. And the humiliating part is that I can already hear how thin it sounds compared to the weight it had inside me.

He looked at me. That’s all.

Except my body won’t believe that’s all it was. Because I can still feel the exact weight of his attention like it was marking me. The ache under my ribs deepens, slow and insistent, something that feels uncomfortably close to wanting, and the realisation of it makes heat rise up my throat, sharp and humiliating.

I shouldn’t feel like this.

Not here.

Not about him.