The sky was raining against the shattered glass windows...
And Lama was shivering.
Not from the cold, but from his voice, his shadow, his breath that drew closer until it stuck to her neck.
He said in a rough, trembling voice, punctuated by gasps of sick longing:
"Didn't I tell you... don't run away?"
He lifted her arm up, pressed her against the cold wall, and stared into her eyes without blinking, as if looking at her gave him life.
She cried out, sobbing:
"I don't love you... understand that!"
He laughed.
A broken, distorted laugh... full of pain and stubbornness.
Then he pounced on her, biting her violently on the shoulder until she gasped in pain.
"You're lying..."
He whispered close to her ear, her blood staining his lips. "I saw your blood... I was the first to see it, and I'll be the last to touch it."
He pushed her roughly onto the bed. She stumbled and fell, and sat there groaning in pain, begging, trembling...
But he didn't see her tears, nor her pleas...
Rather, he saw something else.
He saw what he owned.
He saw her breathing, her trembling, her looks... as if they were all created for him alone.
He said in a voice almost delirious, "If you're not mine, why does my heart beat whenever you say my name? Why do I remember your voice when you cry?"
She tried to get up, but he grabbed her hair from behind, pulled her violently, and shouted in her face, "You're mine! Do you understand? I love you... but my love is different!"
And before she could say a word... he took her face in his hands,
pulsed closer...
then kissed her.
A long, crazy, sick kiss. A kiss like war. A kiss in which he practiced love... as he practiced pain.
As if he was pouring all his madness into her mouth.
As if he was trying to forcefully implant himself inside her.
Lama stopped resisting, not because she had surrendered, but because fear had become heavier than her body itself.
She stared at his face, at those features she had once memorized through love... which had now become a nightmare throbbing with a deadly obsession.
Zain whispered, his fingers playing with the strands of hair scattered around her neck:
"You don't understand, Lama... You are my illness, my cure, my torment, and my madness."
He suddenly pulled her to him, until her chest was pressed against his, his hand squeezing her waist as if preventing her from escaping even her own thoughts.
Then he added in a deeper voice, almost a moan:
"The more you try to escape... the more I love you."
She raised her head to him, her eyelids trembling, her tears still falling silently.
She said in a weak voice, barely audible, "You're hurting me, Zain... This isn't love."
He froze, as if her words had stabbed him in the heart of a heart that didn't recognize mercy.
Then he smiled... that twisted smile that boded no good.
"Rather, it's love, but in my way... the way that knows no mercy, and accepts nothing less than complete possession."
He slowly reached out, touched the traces of tears on her cheek, wiped them away with his fingers, then leaned closer to her lips and whispered, "I will reshape you anew, until there is nothing left in you that doesn't recognize me."
He kissed her again, but this time, it wasn't a kiss of war, but a kiss of declaration...
a declaration of possession, a declaration of a woman who had been taken to a world unlike life, unlike death.
A world called the obsession of hell.