Chapter 280 The other side

“Can I sleep here with you then? By the moon, the thunder is so loud tonight.” Zoe asked, hugging her pillow against her chest.

Viola closed the album, setting aside whatever that unsettling feeling was, and felt genuinely glad for the company. “Sure. Hop on.”

Zoe grinned and padded into the room in her pink nightdress. She hopped onto the bed and burrowed under the blanket, fluffing her pillow with great satisfaction.

“Ooh, you smell like my brother.”

“Because I’m wearing his shirt.” Viola murmured, smiling. “By the way, where is your dog? I haven’t seen it since we got here.” She asked curiously, settling into the soft mattress, but she caught the sheepish look that crossed Zoe’s face immediately.

“I don’t have a dog.” She muttered. “It was actually Seb who licked you and probably left a hickey on you that day. I had to play along because he warned me.” She said, reaching over and taking the album from Viola’s lap.

Viola found herself smiling. That sneaky devil. Even back then when he had acted like he wanted nothing to do with her, he had crept into her room and licked her in her sleep like some sneaky wolf, and she had believed all this time that it had been a dog. She suddenly felt the weight of missing him and found herself drifting back to the previous night without meaning to, to his body warm and close against hers, moving with hers, moving inside her, and she flushed quietly and pulled her thoughts back to Zoe flipping through the pictures.

“Sometimes I used to think that the brother who was married to Natalie was a completely different person…” Zoe muttered, her eyes moving slowly across the open pages of the album.

“Why do you think that?”

Zoe pursed her lips. “He loved her so much and yet after her death he moved on from it so quickly, like she had never existed at all. Is love really that easily forgotten? He doesn’t even talk about her.”

Viola lifted her eyes toward the ceiling. She had felt that exact thing herself, how he never spoke about the woman he had supposedly once given everything to.

The photos in the album said enough about the love they had shared, and it stung her heart to see it.

“He told me a potion was used on him to make him forget her…” she muttered quietly.

Zoe scoffed. “I don’t buy that. I have always had this feeling that he is hiding something, both about Natalie and about Alex’s death. That’s why I always hoped that one day you would be the one to get the answers out of him and share them with me.” She closed the album and set it aside on the nightstand. “A day where he finally tells you exactly what happened. Don’t let my words make you doubt that he loves genuinely, he does. In his own way perhaps. He is just secretive, and I hate that about him.”

“Hmm.” Viola hummed, unable to shake the strange feeling that had crept over her looking at Alex’s picture, and she found herself turning it over quietly in her mind alongside another thought entirely. “I wonder where he is right now…”

Outside, the rain continued to fall heavily, drumming down on the paved roads below. Everyone had retreated into their apartments and homes to keep away from the unusually heavy summer rain. The holographic screens around Silver flashed and blinked under the torrent of water, and below the ground a water creature moved like a snake, circling the Zo Fashion House to protect the master who had sent it away.

Its eyes, made entirely of water, looked up at the building with something that carried the weight of sadness and loneliness, because it had been formed to be hers, and if she didn’t accept it, it would dissolve into water forever, never taking form again.

In another part of Silver, deep in the rural areas where tall trees grew close together and the rain was only a drizzle, a black car came to a stop in the dark. Its headlights cut off.

The man inside didn’t get out immediately. He sat staring at the large iron gate before him, wrapped in electric wire that glinted faintly in the dark. The silver eyes that had carried the look of tender love in them when he left his wife now carried nothing at all.

Sebastian reached out and opened the car door, his polished black shoe stepping down onto the muddy ground, and without bothering about the drizzle falling on his shoulders he stepped out and walked toward the iron gate. It flashed red, scanned his face, and cracked open with a heavy grinding sound.

He hadn’t looked forward to today. But it wasn’t something he could escape either. He shoved his hands into his pockets and walked down the muddy path through the gate as it closed heavily behind him.

The moment Sebastian was inside the perimeter, one of the warriors lurking in the tree line came and drove his car away from the premises, leaving no trace that he had ever been there.

Meanwhile, inside the building that was behind the gate. To many it was just a small building that didn’t need the heavy protection around it, but to Sebastian it was more than that, because the main building he protected was underground and the small one was cover for the one below.

He walked into the small disguised building and just like the gate, there was a special scanning, a full body scan, before the ground opened and a tube rose from below, opening for him.

Sebastian stepped into the tube and when it closed it took him downward through tunnels and passages until it reached the final destination. The moment the tube opened he was welcomed into the coolness of the atmosphere he had been used to and had lived in for years in the past. Cool steam hovered around him.

His body could not withstand heat, so cool steam vents were installed in every corner, releasing chilled mist into the air.

Sebastian kept his eyes and ears alert as he moved through the polished hallways with cool steam drifting around him, a pleasant castle built into the ground. Just as he was entering an open door he felt the shift in the air but acted like he didn’t, until a fast swift movement swished past him and he was slammed into the wall, the wall caving in as a hand wrapped around his neck pinning him to the brick.

Sebastian didn’t fight the strength pinning him there. A slow smirk formed on his lips instead as the steam cleared from the face in front of him, a face that was identical to his in every sense, down to the set of the jaw and the silver of the eyes.

“Hello, brother.” He said. “And you are still too slow.” With that he twisted the hand at his throat, turned his weight and tackled the other man cleanly to the floor, pinning him down.