The promotion landed like a guillotine blade.
Smithen didn't celebrate it. How could he, when Kiren's eyes followed him with something worse than envy—confusion, concern, the kind of look that peeled back layers Smithen had been trying to seal shut?
Three more weeks. That's what they gave Kiren. Three more weeks of training before he could even knock on the VIP section's door, while Smithen was ushered upstairs the very next morning, handed a silver badge that weighed nothing and everything.
But Kiren noticed things. Kiren was observant. He noticed things that others missed. And lately, he was seeing things that defied explanation.
It started with Akanya.
The woman moved through the training floor like smoke given form, her assignments always landing on Smithen's desk with extra zeroes, tighter deadlines. She'd stand too close, her perfume a weapon, her smile a blade wrapped in silk.
"The VIP section has standards, trainee," she murmured one afternoon, her breath brushing the shell of his ear as she passed him in the narrow, dimly lit hallway. "Let's see if your pretty little body survives them."
Smithen said nothing. He had learned that silence was his only shield. He kept his head down, his fingers gripping his clipboard, forcing himself to ignore the women who crushed his very life, decided to never care.
But Kiren saw. Of course he saw.
Thebathroom incident happened on a rainy Thursday afternoon.
The air in the restroom was thick with the scent of industrial bleach and steam. Smithen stood before the wide, polished mirror, washing his hands. The cold water ran over his trembling fingers, but he just stared down at the drain, watching the whirlpool as if it held the answers to his fractured reality.
Kiren came in quietly—too quietly, the way he always moved when something was wrong. He didn't use the sink. Didn't pretend. Just stood at Smithen's shoulder, gaze fixed not on him, but on the mirror. Hesimply stepped up right behind Smithen's shoulder, his gaze still fixed entirely onthe glass reflection.
"Tell me something, Smithen," Kiren whispered in a tensed tone.
Smithen's hands froze beneath the rushing tap. The water pooled in his palms, icy and numbing.
"That shadow behind you." Kiren's voice was low, vibrating with a subtle, terrified trembling, the kind of tone reserved for someone who had just looked a ghost in the eyes. "I've been watching it for three days now. It's not human, Smithen. It's looks like an animal's shadow. Huge. Feral. It's casting itself onto the tiles in the mirror like it's standing right behind you, perhaps like watching you."
Smithen forced himself to look up into the glass.
Behind his own pale, exhausted reflection, there was nothing but sterile white tile and the flickering glare of fluorescent lights. There was no beast. No phantom shadow. Just empty space.
"What are you talking about?" Smithen asked, his voice cracking slightly. "There's nothing there."
"You really don't see it?" Kiren's jaw tightened, his chest heaving with a shallow breath. "That's what scares me the most. It's there, man. It's always right over your shoulder."
The same night, around 12.44am
That night, sleep didn't come. It took him.
The moment his eyelids grew heavy, Smithen fell into the dark like falling into the abyss of his own mind, and the dream wrapped around him before he could fight, wrapping his senses, thick, suffocating, and terrifyingly intimate.
Viran's lower glossy lips.
He remembered them—no, his lips remembered, hismind had tried desperately to forget them, but his body remembered.
The phantom press of lips, how it's warm slickness grazed his neck. The way the invisible thing had caressed him in that room, fingers skating down his spine like silk cords, and pinning him like a crushing magical lock that bound his wrists above his head, pinning his body to the bed. The kiss came back to him raw, and how, how— he trembled uncontrollably under the heavy, unseen pressure.
It pressed harder, its invisible tongue tracing again and again hislower lip, demanding entry, claiming him with a possessive hunger that madeSmithen's entire body tremble uncontrollably.
Smithen moaned in his sleep—Mmmmm—low and deep, sheets twisting between his fingers. The phantom's mouth dragged down his throat, his collarbone, leaving no mark but leaving everything changed. Smithen gasped—Haaah—tried to push away, but there was nothing to push. Just air. Just him.
Viran came invisible, but even before he could finish those thoughts in the dream—
Smithen woke—gasping Ahhh... fading into silence., drenched in sweat, heart slamming against his ribs—
He sat bolt upright, his chest heaving as he stared into the dark. The room was empty. The moonlight filtering through the window was ordinary, casting pale, normal shadows across the floor.
Slowly, He pressed a hand to his lips.
They felt swollen. Bruised. Heated.
"It was nothing," he whispered to the ceiling. "Kiren words of blabbering about shadows are still in my head. That's all. Don't worry"
He almost believed it.
Across the city, in a room with no windows, Viran screamed. It looked so painful.
Thesound was agonizing, stripped of any civilized pretense. It wasn't a humannoise, a torn primal roar. It came from somewhere deeper—somewhere the blood remembers and the bones refuse to forget.
Viran bent over on the concrete floor, his massive frame shaking violently. Heavy iron chains rattled against the iron loops anchored deep into the ground. As his body convulsed, his expensive silk sleeve caught against a sharp metal link, tearing open from wrist to shoulder., Luxan saw them.
Red veins.
Not inside the skin. Outside. Crawling up Viran's forearms, threading across his elbows like living wire, pulsing with something dark and hungry. They weren't veins anymore. They were roots. They were breathing.
Standing a few feet away, Luxan gasped, dropping his flashlight.
"Sir—" Luxan's voice cracked with pure terror.
Viran raised his head. His eyes were the same—cold, controlled, indifferent but it was infinitely terrifying—Viran's hands trembled, yetsomehow retaining a razor-sharp core of absolute control. His hands shook witha terrifying power as he gripped the heavy chains even tighter, it was the one he had ordered Luxan toprepare weeks ago. He had known this night was coming. Whenever the feral,hybrid curse inside him began to awaken, he had to be ready.
Despite the agony ripping through his body, Viran's voice was impossibly steady. "Tie me. Now."
Luxan's hands shook so violently that the heavy iron links clinked and clashed together in a frantic rhythm. For six years, he had served as Viran's personal assistant. He knew his master wasn't normal. He knew Viran wasn't entirely human. He had witnessed unexplainable sights, whispered rumors, and late-night disappearances.
But he had never seen anything as horrifying as this—the way Viran's veins pulsed outside his flesh, the way his breath came in controlled increments as if each one cost him something vital.
"Tighter,"Viran growled, as Luxan looped the chains around his wrists, his ankles, his chest, Viran's voice dropping into a low, vibrating register that shook thevery air in the room.
"If I break these tonight, Luxan," Viran warned, his crimson eyes locking onto his assistant's pale face, "I will tear you apart. Lock it and leave."
Luxan didn't doubt him for a second.
Luxan breathe came more uneven.
The dark room swallowed them both. Only one long mirror stood against the far wall, angled just so—so Viran could see himself.
Luxan stepped back. Locked the chain to the floor anchor. Took the key and retreated to the door, standing, his heart a frantic drum.
"Lock it," Viran said. Not a request.
"Sir, please... let me stay, let me bring something to ease the—"
"Lock it."
Luxan retreated, pulling the heavy steel door shut. The deadbolt turned with a heavy, definitive thud.
The door closed.
The lock turned.
And Viran was alone with the mirror.
He watched his own reflection as the red veins crept higher—up his arms, across his shoulders, curling toward his throat like vines searching for sunlight.
His lips parted, revealing elongated, razor-sharp fangs that glinted in the half-light. His pointed, wolf-like ears—the feral mark of his hybrid curse—flicked violently against his dark hair. As the pain multiplied, Viran didn't weep. He didn't beg. But—
Slowly, his lips curved into a terrifying,dangerous smile.
Outside in the corridor, Luxan pressed his back against the steel door, trembling. What he heard next wasn't the sound of a monster breaking free. It was the absolute, suffocating silence that preceded the storm.
Then, a single, sharp rattle of iron chains echoed through the steel.
And finally, the real screaming began.
Kiren actually saw something that he shouldn't, Did Smithen just had a dream or did Viran visit him again, Why is Viran smiling despite the terrifying pain, What will happen if Smithen is caught by Viran, How will the curse unfold? Let me know your wild theories below! I read every single comment! 👇
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