Heart of Stone - Stone and Fire #1 [17+] (REWRITING)

Chapter 28

enjoy todays chapter cutie pies ❤️❤️

Adriana's POV

I woke up in the middle of the night, a cold sweat lingering on my forehead.

It wasn't a fever, but I hadn't been having nightmares since I dipped into a nice, deep sleep with the imprint of two strong hands around my waist.

Nikolas.

My body snapped up in half. I wasn't sitting on the stairs anymore, but tucked into my sheets with my arms out, just the way I liked it.

And then I realized. I wasn't wearing the dress anymore. Instead, the familiar silk of my black pyjamas graced my skin, ingraining confusion into my brain. 

It couldn't have been anyone other than him.

The sheets around me were all mussed up and uneven. Aurora would hate to see a wrinkled bedsheet like this. Like the perfection she so easily inhabited, her life revolved around it. Perfect hair, perfect clothes, perfect pink all around. I'd be lying if I weren't worried for her leaving to go study abroad.

I rushed out of bed and into the hall, hearing nothing but the whoosh of air conditioning and the steady, anxious thump of my heartbeat. Peering down the hall, a part of me drowned in relief as his door lay open just a smidge, darkness seeping from beneath it.

Was he sleeping?

I scoffed at the thought. No way that nocturnal bat would voluntarily put himself to bed. Didn't he spend these hours doing boring paperwork, or calling Luciano?

I made my way across the hall, pushing the door open slightly. A body's silhouette took up nearly the whole bed, and, if I was being honest, I stood there a minute admiring the way his back muscles bulged and rose with each breath.

But, the longer I stood there, the quicker I realized how irregular the rise of his back became, how him twisting and turning in the bed could only mean one thing.

With soft steps and concern knitting my brows, I stepped into the holy matrimony of his room, feeling like I was walking into a corpse's death cabinet. I tread over to his side, kneeling on the floor. 

Sure enough, I could spy the nightmare from a mile away.

Sweat coated his forehead, making his black hair look charcoal, and the sheets wrangled his body until they hung low, just above his hips under the dim moonlight streaming in from the window. 

"Fuck.." He groaned, and the sheer grit of his teeth and tense shoulders told me all I needed to know. He was in pain. The psychotic kind. The one that drove someone crazy in their sleep and replaced consciousness as whole, getting rid of all the surroundings.

I should know- I lived through the same process every night.

His face screwed up in a tension -maybe pain-, and I lost my breath at the sight. He was... normal. For once, I could see the stress pounding through his heart, I could see the trembling of his fingers as they gripped the black sheets.

God, did he have these every night?

I brought a gentle hand up and grazed it across his shoulder. 

Nothing.

Then, I pressed my thumb onto the pulse point on his neck, and he stirred. 

"Nikolas."

I pressed harder, brushing away the strands stuck on his forehead. He was burning up.