Tempted | Kai Parker

twenty eight: admission

The last few nights of January were bitter and blustery.

The ground was blanketed by a thick coating of frost, and even on the days where the sun shone bright, its rays were deceptive. The sparkle of sunbeams on icy sidewalks was pretty enough to tempt someone to move outdoors, but the wind would soon bite, and the cold would mercilessly creep through your body.

And all of the days were like this. They all just merged into one wintry mess, and before I knew it the days were slipping away from me as I spiralled into a sea of uncertainty.

Kai hadn't been in touch at all.

Every single night when I closed my eyes, I hoped that I'd wake up to a text, or even a missed call, anything to show that he still cared. And then every morning I yawned awake to bitter disappointment.

That bleak cycle never ended.

I found that getting through winter was easy if you were warm inside. The icy gusts and twiggy trees didn't seem to matter so much when you were happy. But for those of us who just felt so alone, the cold made matters so much worse. We watched the world decay before our eyes, and often felt like we were dying too.

The long winter nights made me beg for human touch. Desperate for another body to curl into as the bitter wind whistled against my windows. Just some company to temper the sing of my loneliness.

But the cold evenings dragged by and nothing came to stem my misery.

What I possibly found the hardest, was that enough time had passed now that the hot-headed fury that remained from my bust up with Kai had now completely simmered away.

And without the rage controlling my mind, there was room for other emotions to slip in and take charge. Before I even realised that my anger had subsidised, I found myself craving his company again.

In fact, my desire for him had grown so desperate that I was tragically close to drawing up some sort of master plan in order to see him again.

And if I had known how he spent his days maybe I would've. I often thought about the prospects of accidentally running into him at The Grill, or The Square, but I hadn't even seen a glimpse of him lately. No one had.

And the longer that passed without so much as a word from the siphoner, the more I found myself on edge. And not just because I missed him. I was actually beginning to get a little worried about him.

I mean, one thing about Kai was you could never get him to shut up. He was always yammering away no matter what. Even when it was inappropriate, or irritating, or when I was mad at him, he always had something to say. I seriously believed he would outlive god trying to have the last word.

Yet out of nowhere, there was just radio silence on his end.

Plus, shortly after we came back home, he had informed me that he was going to begin his plan to merge with Jo. And he seemed extremely eager to lead the coven – yet nothing had happened.

I hadn't heart so much as a murmur of any interaction between Kai and Jo at all.

He had just fallen off of the face of the earth.

And that scared me.

The height of my anxiety over Kai's safety came last night, however. My own screams jolted me awake in the middle of the night, snapping me out of a hellish nightmare. Even once I bolted upright, and frantically gulped air into my lungs, it took me almost a full minute to convince myself that what I saw wasn't real.

In the taunting dream, my mind had been plagued with images of Joshua torturing Kai. Just like what I had seen from Kai's own mind. Except this time Joshua was telling Kai that he would never lead the coven, even threatening to send him back to the prison world.