Hotel del Luna

Chapter 26:Convene

Y/N found herself floating in cold darkness.

There was a terrible pressure filling her ears and crushing her chest, as if the entire world was coming down on top of her. It felt like dying in water, similar to drowning in the deep vastness of an unforgivable ocean.

Help me, she thought desperately, as she sank further into the dark. Coldness was slipping into her lungs like a fog. I can't die like this.

"Leave me!" a voice cried, penetrating the dark.

Y/N's feet hit hard packed dirt, shocking her into taking a deep breath. The strange pressure of drowning alleviated, and her surroundings marginally brightened.

The smell of blood was thick in the air, invading her senses and clouding her head.

Y/N forced herself to breathe through her nose as her eyes adjusted to the image of the palace prison.

In the occupied cell before her, a shadow shuffled violently in the dark, rattling the thick iron chains clamped around her wrists.

Y/N refused to meet the prisoner's eyes, focusing instead on the metal cuffs chafing into the prisoner's raw wrists, her cracked lips splitting open from the violence with which she screamed her final words to her.

Though Y/N was no longer floating adrift, she felt even more keenly now as if she were being swallowed into an immeasurable black sea, all the words she wanted to say clogged tight in her throat. She wanted to tell the prisoner to stop fighting, to make sure she knew she was loved, to hold the prisoner's face in her hands and let her know that every moment she had spent with her was a gift -

But once Nayeon had finished, Y/N only looked up to meet her intense gaze with equally as hard eyes.

"To do that," Y/N said in answer to Nayeon, "You'll have to stay alive."

And the darkness swallowed her whole.

Y/N woke up in Nayeon's office with a start.

It was late evening, and the world was dark outside the tall arched windows.

A cold sweat had broken out over her skin and she shivered, running her hands over her arms as she sat up on the couch she had fallen asleep on.

Y/N knew that she had just had a nightmare, but as soon as her eyes had opened, it had already drifted from her memory like a blocked thought.

The feeling of fear remained, but of what she could not remember.

The office doors opened, startling her out of her reverie.

"You awake?" Nayeon's voice came from the other side of the room.

Y/N relaxed and gave an absent wave of her hand in response. Nayeon crossed the room with a mug of coffee in hand, a sight that Y/N eyed with thinly veiled jealousy.

"Do dark spirits need coffee?" Y/N asked snidely.

"I can throw it away if you don't want it," said Nayeon, sitting beside Y/N, "It's for you, idiot. Since you keep falling asleep in my office."