Chapter 4: Trapped
The sun had long since sunk behind the ridge, leaving Blackwood Academy in the embrace of a thick, starless night. Inside the winding labyrinth of second-floor corridors, darkness crept faster than the night’s shadows ever should have. Iris hurried along, her breath coming fast and shattering the silence of the endless hall. The corridors suddenly seemed to change shape, stretching and twisting on their own, carrying her farther and farther from Room 204. She had lost her way.
The temperature plummeted within seconds. From the gaps between the wooden floorboards and the seams in the marble, thick white fog began to creep upward, lazily curling around Iris’s ankles before rising high enough to cover the ancient walls. In a matter of moments, her visibility shrank to mere inches. The world around her seemed to vanish, leaving her alone inside a boundless hollow in reality.
The fog was unnatural. It felt so dense, wet, and heavy. Each time Iris took a step, the billows of vapor coiled tightly around her thighs and the curves of her body, creeping upward toward her waist and shoulders as though they possessed a consciousness of their own—an unseen pair of hands patiently exploring, caressing, and locking down every inch of her movement so she could not escape.
“Damn it... where’s the way out?” Iris hissed, her voice catching in her own dry throat. She felt along the wall to her right, hoping to find a door or some kind of marker, but the stone surface now felt slick with the dampness of the night.
“You’re lost, sweet girl...” The deep, low, mesmerizing baritone suddenly echoed from every direction, slipping softly into her ears and triggering a hot tremor in Iris’s lower abdomen.
“...or did you deliberately let yourself be found by me?”
Iris froze where she stood. Gooseflesh rose across her entire body, while her blood suddenly seemed to boil. “Who’s there? Show yourself! Don’t hide behind this cheap fog!” she shouted, though her voice trembled violently amid the surrounding cold vapor.
“I have never hidden, Iris,” the voice whispered again, this time so close—so close that a breath scented with sandalwood and a snowstorm brushed her exposed nape. “You’re simply too blind to see who has owned you since the first night you set foot here.”
Panic mixed with a strange wave of arousal slammed into Iris’s chest. Without thinking, she spun around and began running blindly through the suffocating thickness of the fog. Her feet struck the corridor floor in a chaotic rhythm. She ran faster and faster, charging through the white vapor as if it were deliberately stretching itself across her path to stop her.
The corridor seemed to grow narrower, as though its walls were closing in to trap her. Struggling to keep running, Iris suddenly collided with something hard.
Crash!
It did not feel like she had hit wood or a stone wall. Iris staggered backward, letting out a soft groan as she realized she had run into a broad, solid chest, firm and hard as a pillar of black marble. The overpowering scent of sandalwood immediately filled her senses, clouding her reason in an instant.
Iris lifted her dizzy face, gasping for breath as she tried to determine what—or who—she had just collided with in the dense fog of the corridor.
She looked up and stared at the silhouette of a tall man in a black suit, towering before her. Through the faint, dying glow of the emergency wall light beside them, Iris shifted her gaze toward the glass wall on the right—but her heart stopped beating.
The figure standing directly before her cast no reflection whatsoever on the glass wall beside the corridor light. Nothing. He was perfectly devoid of any physical reflection, as though the man himself were part of the darkness.
Before Iris could scream or step back in terror, a pair of icy hands suddenly wrapped tightly around her slender waist, gripping her with absolute strength.
Those hands pulled Iris’s body in with a firm, merciless motion, pressing their chests together without a gap and holding her up so she would not crumple onto the cold marble floor. Beneath the darkness of the fog as it swallowed more and more of the corridor, their breaths collided in a silence heavy with danger and pleasure.