Housebound with the Blackridge Heirs novel Chapter 87

Chapter 87

Leo

There were moments, in the beginning, when I thought I might eventually wake up.

There were moments when the sky in the dream shifted, when the scent of smoke thickened, when my wolf snarled and pushed at the inside of my skull as if we could somehow force the world to

change.

There were moments when the ground cracked under my feet, and I told myself that cracks meant instability, and instability meant something might eventually break open and free me.

But nothing broke.

Nothing changed.

Nothing ended.

The nightmare went on.

I stood on the ridge overlooking the valley of my childhood home. The air was always cold here, colder than it ever was in real life, and the trees below were always stripped bare as if winter had hollowed them out long before the fires came. The first scream always hit the same way too, a faint

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note curling through the smoke that wrapped around my throat like a rope.

It belonged to someone I used to know, but the dream made the sound stretch and warp until I couldn’t tell if it came from a packmate, a stranger or myself.

The bodies were already there the moment I blinked.

Sprawled in the grass. Torn open and lifeless.

My mother always lay closest to the river. My father always beside her with his hand reaching toward hers but never quite touching. Every warrior I grew up admiring was scattered across the clearing in the same position they fell the night the rogues destroyed everything. The dream never changed those details. It simply froze them in place and forced me to walk among them again and again as if I had not memorized every face the first time.

I called out for them every cycle. I shouted until my throat burned and cracked. I dropped to my knees beside each body, lifting heads that would not lift, shaking shoulders that never responded. I cried until the tears dried on my cheeks and my eyes started to swell from the smoke. But nothing inside the dream ever moved. Silence always followed, thick and merciless, like the world had swallowed every voice but mine.

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Then the rogues came.

They burst from the trees with the same speed every time, jaws snapping, eyes glowing with that unnatural amber light that never existed outside my memory. I fought them. I threw myself into them. I felt their teeth sink into my arms and my legs and my ribs. I felt my claws dig into flesh that never yielded beneath my hands. Every strike I made slid through air as if I were a ghost trapped inside my own memory, invisible and powerless to change even a single second of the past.

Sometimes I screamed for help. Sometimes I begged the dream to stop. Sometimes I laughed in that bitter way someone laughs when they stand in the middle of their own tragedy and realize they cannot die here, cannot live here, cannot do anything but stand still while hell circles them.

I did not know how long I remained trapped. Time dissolved.

It stopped measuring itself in days or nights and instead began counting the cycles of my own helplessness.

Wake.

See the bodies.

Hear the scream.

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Fight the rogues.

Fail to save anyone.

Fail to even be touched by the world I lived inside.

Fall to my knees.

Scream again.

Then start over.

A loop… like punishment.

At some point, I stopped trying to break it. Not because I accepted it, but because I could no longer tell where the nightmare ended and where I might have existed outside it. The forest grew hazier each repetition. The faces of the dead blurred into shapes without names. Even my own wolf quieted until he was a shadow pacing somewhere deep inside me, restless and grieving.

The only constant was the cold.

It wrapped around my bones and settled there, numbing everything except the weight of memory. I could not feel warmth. I could not feel comfort. I could not feel anything but the ache of loss replaying itself without mercy.

But then, in one of the cycles, something changed.

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It happened slowly at first, so subtle I thought the dream was playing tricks on me. A faint glow shimmered on the edge of the riverbank, far behind my mother’s body. It wasn’t the red of fire or the white of moonlight. It was something else entirely. Soft. Pale. Almost quiet. It flickered gently like a heartbeat that had been waiting centuries for

someone to notice it.

I blinked, and it stayed.

I took a breath, and it brightened.

Then the loop stuttered.

Only for a second.

Only long enough for me to realize something impossible.

The glow was not part of the dream.

Something outside was calling.

For the first time in what felt like years, I felt a tug deep inside my chest. It wasn’t a pull like pain or a shock like fear. It was something warm. Something steady. Something I had not felt since the moment before my neck snapped and the world went dark.

I took a step toward the light.

The bodies did not disappear. The rogues did not

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charge. The nightmare still breathed around me. But none of it touched me now. The glow grew stronger as I approached, unfolding like a soft ribbon that stretched across the ground, winding closer with each step I took.

It felt familiar.

Not in a way that made sense.

Not in a way I could name.

But familiar in the same way a voice feels familiar even when you have not heard it in years. Familiar like an instinct. Familiar like the first breath after almost drowning.

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