Chapter 137-Switch it off

Chapter 137: 137-Switch it off

Zolani threw her blood mirror onto the bed and began pacing across her room. Back and forth, back and forth. She couldn’t make herself stop.

Her chest felt unbearably tight, and every breath seemed poisoned, as though the air itself had become too heavy for her lungs. Her thoughts collided with one another, racing so quickly that she couldn’t hold onto a single one for more than a second.

Her heart stumbled painfully in her chest. The emotional agony wasn’t staying inside her mind anymore. Her entire body seemed to have become an extension of it, every part of her reacting to the turmoil she couldn’t control.

Zolani stumbled toward the mirror. She barely recognized the vampire staring back at her.

Her eyes were unstable, their pupils shifting restlessly through the colors associated with the different parts of her blood. Crimson represented her true identity before it became red, which represented her human side, and eventually, it settled on an eerie white.

The cycle repeated with every surge of emotion: crimson, red, white, and back to crimson again. She couldn’t settle on an identity to give herself solid ground to fall on.

She looked like a stranger trapped inside her own reflection. This wasn’t who she had imagined she would become.

The girl she had once been would never have deliberately used someone else’s pain against them. She wouldn’t have manipulated Addessa or helped set a trap that could destroy someone who had done nothing to her personally. And she certainly wouldn’t have carried this much hatred inside her.

Yet here she was, angry, bitter, and consumed by grief. Part of her wanted to set the entire world ablaze just to make the fire inside her disappear.

She didn’t care who got hurt anymore, especially not if hurting them, bringing her one step closer to Maisa, but that was the cruellest part of all. She couldn’t truly bring herself to destroy Maisa because somewhere along the way, her heart had betrayed her.

It had fallen in love with the very person she she was supposed to hate. The person who took the colour out of her world and turned it colourless, only to fill it with new colour just to bring her back to the broken state.

"Why?" Zolani whispered. Her voice cracked.

Why did Maisa have to be the one who took Zoe away from her? Why couldn’t she simply hate her and forget all the good times she had with her? Why couldn’t revenge be easier?

Her legs finally gave out. Zolani sank to the floor, curling in on herself as the strength drained from her body. She squeezed her eyes shut, but the crimson tears continued to fall.

Her lips trembled. Her heart hurt so badly that it no longer felt like it belonged to her.

"Zoe..." her sister’s name escaped her like a broken prayer. "I promised you..." her voice dissolved.

Zolani covered her face, shoulders trembling as everything she had been holding inside finally broke free. "I promised you I’d make her pay..."

She struggled to breathe through the tears. "But how am I supposed to kill the huntress who took you from me..." her voice became barely more than a whisper. "...when my heart just had to fall in love with her?"

And that realization shattered whatever remained of her composure. Zolani broke down completely.

Like her soul, even Zolani’s tears were unstable. They changed colour as they fell, reflecting the chaos tearing through her.

She curled into herself on the floor, arms wrapped around her knees as her mind relentlessly dragged her between two worlds, Maisa and Zoe.

The images came one after another. She remembered her younger sister’s smile. The sound of her laughter. The little moments they had shared, the ordinary days that had once felt so precious simply because Zoe had been there. The world had been beautiful when her sister was in it.

Then, the memories changed to Maisa. Every moment since she had entered Zolani’s life, every conversation, smile, and feeling that had quietly grown until Zolani could no longer pretend it wasn’t love.

Her head throbbed as conflicting emotions crashed into one another. She was torn between two impossible choices.

Choosing Zoe meant betraying the person whose name she had willingly carved into her heart and choosing Maisa meant turning her back on the truth that the person she loved was responsible for her sister’s death and refusing to choose either of them was a choice too.

One that was slowly tearing her apart. Zolani squeezed her eyes shut as a thought struck her mind.

Her eyes snapped open. "Wait..." her voice trembled. "Maisa knew..." The realization hit with devastating force. "At Zoe’s grave... and every day since we met..."

She remembered the way Maisa had looked at her. The way she had recognized Zoe’s name and acted strange. "And she still..."

Zolani couldn’t finish. Her heart seemed to fold in on itself. She had trusted Maisa, loved her, and all that time, Maisa had known.

Her eyes continued shifting restlessly as tears silently streamed down her face. Eventually, even the tears began to change. The crimson gradually softened into a delicate ruby pink, mirroring the exhaustion that had settled over her soul.

Her hair transformed with it. The roots remained their familiar crimson, while the lengths deepened into dark red before fading toward ruby pink at the edges.

Zolani stared blankly ahead. "You knew what you were doing," she whispered, her voice hollow. "You knew how much it would hurt me..." A tear slid down her cheek. "And that still looked me in the eye... and lied."

Her lips trembled. "I was lied to, betrayed, made to question everything when my intentions were pure..." she pressed a hand against her chest. "My love was genuine," the words were barely audible.

"I hope what you’ve done to me haunts you forever, Maisa."

Silence followed her wish. There was no anger left in her, no tears, and no desperate struggle between love and hatred.

The emotions had burned through everything until there was simply nothing left to hold onto. Zolani’s mixedblood nature reached its breaking point, and then she made the choice she had once believed she never would.

She took vampire’s last resort and decided to switch off her humanity and put an end to her suffering.

She shut away the part of herself that could feel. The change was immediate as the turmoil inside her fell silent, and the tears stopped.

Her eyes settled into a pale, diluted pink, as though the crimson light within them had been washed away.

For the first time in what felt like an eternity, Zolani felt nothing. There was grief, rage, guilt, love, or pain in her heart. It was empty and light and strangely enough, she welcomed it.

She slowly rose from the floor. The vampire who had been drowning beneath grief was gone.

Zolani walked toward the mirror and stared at her reflection. The last traces of the warm-hearted mixedblood with crimson eyes and hair, the girl who had always tried to do her best for herself and everyone around her, had disappeared.

In her place stood someone else. Empty pinkish eyes stared back at her. Her hair carried three distinct shades, crimson at the roots that stood for her crimson blood, deep red through the middle for her human side, and ruby pink at the ends which represented the emptiness and cracks in her soul.

Zolani tilted her head. A small smile curved across her lips. "Hmm..." she examined her reflection for another moment. "What an improvement."

With her humanity silenced, the pain she had carried every day suddenly seemed meaningless. Her sister’s death, the revelation that Maisa was the one responsible for it and the love that had blossomed in her heart for the redblood, none of it mattered anymore.

None of it deserved another tear, thought, or breath. Zolani inhaled slowly. "Even the air is fresher."

~

Across the other side of the hacienda, Maisa was still searching for Addessa. She hurried through the corridors and grounds, calling for Addessa and following every possible path the blackblood might have taken.

She didn’t stop, slow down and she felt nothing out of the ordinary. No sudden ache in her chest, no racing heartbeat and no warning from the flower of fate.

Maisa had no idea that one of her mates had just reached a point of no return. The medication she had been taking to suppress the backlash of her bond had done exactly what it was designed to do.

It had protected her from the pain of her mates but the protection had come at a cost. The bond had grown quiet, too quiet.

Their emotions no longer reached her the way they once had. Their happiness, their fear, their grief... everything had become distant, muffled behind the effects of the medicine. Even the flower of fate remained still unable to surpass the block created by those medicines and warn Maisa about Zolani.

So Maisa continued searching for Addessa, completely unaware of what had just happened. She didn’t know that while she was desperately looking for one mate... another had slipped farther away from her than she could possibly imagine and getting Zolani back might no longer be a matter of simply finding her. It might be impossible.