The Female Hybrid Everyone Hated Chapter 12

The Female Hybrid Everyone Hated Chapter 12

He came through the window.

Of course he did. Zane a Vampire King came through a window in the dead of night like it was the most natural thing in the world, landing soundlessly on the stone floor of my cell, dressed in black, not even slightly out of breath.

I stared at him from the bed.

We’d been college classmates in this world. But more importantly he was another one of my assigned male leads. But I’d never been able to get close to him. He always avoided me.

He looked exactly as I remembered from the few times I had seen him over the years – always at a distance, always near Rose, always looking somewhere just past me like I existed slightly outside his line of sight.

Eventually I’d given up on him and moved on to Dorian.

Seeing him now felt surreal. It had been years.

His eyes still held that familiar gentleness.

That was why I’d chosen to try with him in the first place

He had dark eyes. That stillness that ancient vampires carried like a second skin. The kind of face that gave nothing away until it gave everything.

–

He looked at me now taking in what the Hollow Tower and the wolfsbane and the fall had done and something moved behind his eyes that he didn’t bother to hide.

“Zane? Have you come to join them to torment me?”

“Yara, why would I?” Zane said and smiled. This was the most warming smile I had seen in years now. It felt strange, especially coming from him.

“I’m sorry I’m late,” he said. “I have come to take you out of this place.”

I opened my mouth.

“Don’t apologize,” he said quietly. “Don’t thank me yet either. Just

–

can you stand?”

I could. Barely. He helped me anyway – one hand steady at my elbow, not making a fuss of it, just there.

We went out the way he came in.

His hands wrapped around my waist gently and firmly and I had no idea why I felt safe but I did.

Then we jumped down and landed softly thanks to him, despite how high it was from the window to the ground.

The night was extraordinary.

I had forgotten what outside felt like after days in that tower. The air tasted different. The dark had texture My suppressed senses were still muffled a little by the last traces of wolfsbane but even at a fraction of their normal reach the world felt enormous and alive and nothing like those stone walls.

Zane had horses waiting. We rode without speaking until the tower lights were gone behind the treeline.

He took me first to the place I had loved most in this world – a clearing in the deep forest where the trees grew so old and so close together that their roots had made a kind of natural room, the canopy above opening just enough to show the stars. I had found it when I was maybe nine years old, running from something I couldn’t remember now, and I had been coming back to it alone ever since.

“How did you know about this place,” I said.

“I’ve been watching over you for a long time, so I know you love this place” he said simply.

We sat together in the root room and he told me about the years in between. Not everything – not yet but enough. That he had been there. That the anonymous messages telling me to hold on had been him. That the times trouble had seemed to find a resolution just before it became catastrophic that had been him too, working quietly from the outside.

–

When I was searching for Brian, because he was always not easy to find, someone approached me and told me where he was.

Zane told me he had been the one that compelled a human to do so.

I listened and felt something I hadn’t felt in so long I had almost forgotten the word for it.

I felt seen and understood.

After a while he stood and held out his hand.

“There’s somewhere else I want to take you.”

He took me to the night market at the edge of the borderlands – a place neither wolves nor vampires officially acknowledged but everyone used, where the stalls burned with lantern light and the traders sold things you couldn’t find anywhere respectable. We walked through it slowly, shoulder to shoulder, not touching but close. He bought me food – actual food, warm and good, and I ate all of it without fighting it for the first time in days.

He bought me something else too. A small carved wolf in dark wood, its eyes set with chips of amber.

“You collected these when you were small,” he said. “I saw one in your room once. You had a whole shelf.”

I held it in both hands and laughed, joy immediately filled my face.

Such a feeling was rare and emotional for me.

“Tyson broke them,” I said. “When Rose told him I had done something awful. He went into my room and took the shelf down.”

Zane was quiet for a moment.

“I know, I managed to take some away before he ruined it,” he said.

And I smiled holding it tight.

We walked until the market was behind us and the dark forest was around us again and the stars were everything overhead.

Then he stopped.

He turned to face me, his smile suddenly faded away and became serious and I knew something was about to go down.

I tightened my fist, slowly took my breath and focused my eyes.

But deep down I knew I wasn’t ready for what was next to come.