Chapter 4 — They Are From My Dream.

Eliana's POV

As the students rushed out to feed their eyes, I wouldn't be the only one left behind.

I grabbed my bag and followed, though slower than the rest of them …. I was the last to get there as they all left before I did. But for real, I really wanted to know what they were fussing about. Because the noise levels alone told me it was worth seeing. Besides, if I didn't show up, how would you know what eventually played out right here? LOL

And it was really a sight to behold, for real.

The convoy that rolled through Bentley High's gates was not subtle about itself. Not even a little. We're talking a Rolls-Royce Cullinan leading the pack, followed by a blacked-out Bentley Bentayga, a Mercedes-Maybach, a Range Rover Sport, and what I was almost certain was a Lamborghini Urus bringing up the rear … all moving in slow, deliberate procession like they owned the road and every road adjacent to it. The revving sound of the car tires when it was about to finally pull up was really out of this world.

I also noticed something that the others around me seemed to miss in all their excitement; it was two different sets of convoys, coming from two opposite directions, almost facing each other. Like two separate worlds arriving at the same destination at the same time and probably neither one of them is happy about it.

That detail sat in the back of my head and didn't leave, even though I couldn't prove that as it was more like what I felt about all of these.

When it finally pulled up, the bodyguards came out first … different ones, from both convoys, moving with that quiet, professional efficiency that told you they weren't here to be seen, just to make sure everything went smoothly. They fanned out without a word between them.

And then the two guys stepped out.

One from each convoy.

You didn't need anyone to tell you they were the ones. The bodyguards, the cars, the whole production … it was all framing. These two were the real deal of whatever was going on. Uniquely dressed, unhurried, the kind of presence that didn't announce itself because it didn't need to. Without a second thought you would definitely know that they were the guys of the moment.

The students were already buzzing and shifting around, trying to get closer, phones raised, voices overlapping. Sara was right in the thick of it … thriving, naturally, already positioning herself where she'd be impossible to miss the moment the guys started walking. That was Sara's gift. She always knew exactly where to stand.

I knew for sure that Sara would be wishing she had one of the guys to herself or even both of them … with the facial expression she had on and the way she was gushing non-stop. And I knew she would definitely find her way to make that happen, because she didn't stop at anything until she had what she desperately wanted. I'd learned that firsthand.

I stayed near the back of the crowd, arms crossed, telling myself I was only here because leaving now would've looked strange. Not because I was curious. Definitely not because something about those two convoys arriving from opposite directions had made the back of my neck feel strange.

I watched them from where I stood, half a head shorter than most of the people in front of me, getting my view in the gaps between shoulders.

The moment I had a second and closer look at their faces … even though they were both in fancy dark eye shades — I recognized them instantly.

My stomach dropped straight through the floor.

‘Wait.’ The thought arrived before I could stop it. ‘Are those guys…’

Everything from the dream came rushing back at once. Not in pieces but all of it, at the same time. The corridor. The grip on my shoulders. The way their eyes had shifted color right in front of me. The short, thick horns that had appeared at the sides of their heads. The teeth. The feeling of both of them bending toward my neck simultaneously, and the mark…

‘They are from my dream.’

I stood completely still while the crowd moved and buzzed around me, my brain running laps trying to find a rational place to put this information and coming up completely empty. Because that was impossible. People didn't just walk out of your dreams into your school parking lot. That wasn't how anything worked. Dreams were your brain processing stress and fear and all the things you couldn't deal with while you were awake and so they weren't previews. They weren't warnings.

They weren't ‘real.’ I forced myself to believe that.

Except these two were standing twenty feet away from me and I knew their faces. I ‘knew’ them. Not from anywhere I could point to in my waking life, not from social media or school files or anything that made sense … but I knew them the way you knew something that had already happened to you.

And that feeling wouldn't go away no matter how hard I pushed at it.

On meeting face to face with each other, the one on the left pulled his eye shade off first. He looked at the other one with an expression that was already somewhere between bored and irritated.

"Morning, mutt."

The other one pulled his eye shades off too, unhurried, like the greeting had landed exactly as expected.

"What's up, blood sucker?" he replied.

The crowd around me went a specific kind of quiet … the type that meant everyone heard it and nobody knew what to do with it. There was nothing warm in that exchange. Nothing even remotely close to a normal greeting between two people who knew each other. It was the kind of words that had history behind them … layers of it, compressed into five words on each side.

With every indication, this wasn't a genuine exchange of pleasantry.

Something had been going on between these two long before they got to this school. Some kind of tension, some kind of competition or unfinished business that had followed them both through those gates this morning. I couldn't wrap my head around the full shape of it yet … but I could feel the edges of it from where I was standing, and those edges were sharp.

The crowd felt it too. I could tell by the way nobody moved.

And then … somehow, at the same moment, without looking at each other or coordinating it in any visible way, they both turned their faces in my direction.

Simultaneously.

Like something had pointed them at me.

Honestly, that made me a bit uncomfortable, and I looked down immediately, my thoughts firing off in every direction at once. ‘Do they recognize me?’ The question landed hard and sat there. ‘But how would they recognize me — from a dream? My dream? That doesn't even make sense. Unless…’

I stopped that thought before it could finish itself.

Just at that moment, they walked toward me and I closed my eyes as the memory of them marking both sides of my neck flashed through my mind all over again, sharp and vivid and way too real for something that had happened while I was asleep.

But they simply walked past me and went straight inside the school's administration block.

I let out a breath I hadn't realized I'd been holding.

The crowd started moving again. Side conversations picked back up about who the guys were, where they came from, whether Sara had made eye contact with the taller one, whether the cars were rented or owned. The usual Bentley High School ‘autopsy’ of anyone new and shiny that walked through the gates.

I paid less attention to all of that than I normally would have.

Because I was too busy being grateful. Relieved, actually … more relieved than the situation probably called for, which told me something about how rattled I actually was underneath the surface.

‘Of course they can't recognize me,’’ I told myself firmly. ‘Besides, it was just a dream from my own end. And so, there was no way they could recognize me.’

I tried to hold on to that and tried to plant my feet in it like solid ground.

It was a mere dream. Nothing more.

That was what I kept telling myself, anyway, as I turned and walked back toward the school building.

Whether I actually believed it was a completely different story.