Page 88 of Souls We Rip

The chair scraped the stone, the sound making me jump. I felt his warm breath over the nape of my neck. I cursed myself for tying my hair in a bun. Just being in his presence made my body burn.

Without him, I couldn’t breathe. With him, my lungs seemed to malfunction, and my mind was focused only on his presence.

“Now,” he breathed over my head, making my pulse jump, “we search for a way of getting out of the mess I created.”

I turned around, my nose bumping into his chin. “Sorry,” I whispered. I knew my feelings were written in my eyes, so I closed them. His fingers touched my chin, lifting it. Warm breath grazed my lips, parting them.

“Are you still afraid of me?”

“No, Tiberius. But of me,” I admitted, squeezing my eyelids.

“Why is that?” he whispered.

Swallowing, I took a deep breath. Opening my eyes, I got lost in his. “There’s a fight between what I feel for you and what God taught me.” My fingers touched his arms, his lean muscles clenching under my fingertips. “I cannot choose between you two.”

He blinked, slowly. “What is it that you feel for me?”

I couldn’t tell him the truth when a new threat loomed over our heads.

He continued, keeping me under his spell. “My name in your voice can build me a heart out of nothing, Ana. Somehow, by making you sign the contract, I also signed for a want of mine.”

“What is that?” I asked, my voice low.

“A person I could spend my humanity with.”

The declaration warmed my blood, a heat I felt only with him, captivating both my body and mind.

“But how?" As he explained before, there was no going back for me. I would have to remain in this eternal body.

“I am not sure how, but before you collect your tenth soul, we need to stop him from taking more as yours,” he said, his eyes moving from my lips to my eyes.

“I don’t know if I’m that pure anymore.”

He took a step aside, releasing me from his agonising embrace. “Ana, just because you took six souls, it doesn’t mean you’re not a good person anymore.”

“I wasn’t referring to that.” Tears welled up in my eyes.

Tiberius took my hand in his. “Somehow, we will do it. And if we do not, we will meet again in death.”

The Goat Man

The loud neighing of my horse awoke me from my restless slumber. My eyes would not, by any means, pry open, and my body resisted my mind’s urge to check what was happening outside.

It was harder to sleep with a curious child running on the rocky floor, following me around the cave, and demanding multiple stories from me. Like him, Ana wanted to hear everything. She winced at every sentence that contained the words decapitated, broken, or blood.

As if she hadn’t taken six souls already.

In honesty, I liked the setting she had created in my absence. I did not mind that my feet would step on finely crafted wooden cubes that Andrei had sculpted and gifted to the child as a toy and for him to build the largest tower in the village, as he put it.

I surprised myself in the past few days watching Ana with Eugen. She was a woman born to be a mother. And I took that from her with my selfish act. With each glance at the child, I saw the remorse in her eyes, the nose flaring, followed by a killer look. And every time she did that, my pulse jumped, the guilt eating me alive.

Another neigh broke the tender silence of the morning.

With a grunt, I stood up, my naked body travelling to the chair where I had left my robe. The soft fabric glided over my skin, my pale fingers tying the knot at my waist.

I wandered to the kitchen, where Ana kneaded dough on the wooden table.

“I’m making pogăci,” she announced, moving to a small basin where cheese waited to fill the dough. I peeked over the rim, pulled by the scent.