**Ch 332: Illusion [R-21]

[Viewer Discretion Is Advised. This chapter will be very gruesome and disturbing. Read at your own risk.]

My eyes stirred as I heard. "Good morning, my darling."

My heavy eyelids fluttered apart before I found myself gazing up at these ocean-blue eyes staring lovingly back at me. "I thought you had to work in the office today?" I questioned my husband Orlando, who overlapped his arm and upper body from above me on the bedside with his hands resting on the mattress between each side of my figure.

"I've called off to be with my lovely wife and our beautiful babies." Orlando gleamed, and then he kissed my lips tenderly.

I giggled as his lips trailed along the side of my neck. "What about your meeting?"

"I canceled them," Orlando informed me before his head lifted toward my face.

"Your father is going to have a fit." I giggled again, and he nonchalantly shrugged his shoulders.

"He's a retired CEO, which makes me and my brother the new CEOs of the company. We make the rules now," Orlando declared.

For an orphan girl who once had nothing, Orlando provided me with a beautiful mansion of my dreams, and I got to be a stay-at-home mom to our babies. The second he proposed to me, I threw away my dreams and never flew to Egypt. I thought as my mind seemed to drift to the horrible dream I had last night.

"What's wrong?" Orlando asked, worrying about me. "You seem stressed."

"It was only a silly dream I had." I swallowed a non-existent rock down my throat because it felt realistic.

"Tell me about it?" Orlando passionately smiles.

I started to giggle. "This is going to sound silly, but I dreamt you were an evil Alpha vampire, and I was married to another Alpha vampire named Kai. There was this huge battle. And I know it sounds crazy, but it felt real."

Orlando chuckled at the irony. "I told you not to watch those scary vampire movies last night."

"I know! But you know I love them." I laughed with a fake whine.

"You have a bad addiction!" Orlando teased me, and we cracked up.

"Mommy!" our daughter swung the bedroom door open before she jumped over to us.

"Good morning, baby." I sat up and gave her a big hug and kiss. "Did you sleep well?"

She bopped her little head. "Daddy, can you make pancakes for breakfast?" She blinked her round ocean-blue eyes at Orlando, which of course, suckered him in. She had an ultralight blonde hair color, and she looked more like me, while our three-month-old son looked more like Orlando.

"How can I say no to that pretty face?" Orlando chuckled as he tickled his nose on hers. He was such an amazing father.

"I need to get up to get ready," I announced.

She got out of the bed with Orlando. As I was putting on my laced black robe over my shoulders, I peeked at the baby in the crib that was away from the round balcony. He was still sound asleep as he was smiling about something in his dreams. Just as I faced my daughter and Orlando, I noticed he had whispered something in her ears before she came flying over to me.

"Mommy, do you promise not to leave us?" she whimpered as a teardrop dripped from her watery eyes as she held in her cry.

I kneeled to her short level, and hugged her tiny figure into my arms. "Of course." I peered at Orlando before a creepy clown smirk curved his mouth. "What did you say to her?" I questioned him almost at a loss for words as goosebumps crept along my skin.

"Come stand over here, sweetie?" he called to our daughter, and I didn't understand what he was doing. He wasn't being himself. I thought as I stood up whenever she stood near him.

"Orlando, why are you acting strange?" I eyed him cautiously. It was like I didn't know him right now.

Orlando sinisterly chuckled before he broke things down. "What if I told you the dream you had was real, and this reality you think you're living in right now is only an illusion I created within your dream."

"What are you saying?" I trembled at the thought.

Orlando snapped his fingers as it echoed into my ears. It was like the drums went off in my head as my memories came emerging back to me. My real pregnant belly became visible while I rubbed it. Inside my womb, I felt my unborn vamp babies kicking and wiggling with life. Like whiplash striking my brain, I remembered Orlando was nothing more than a wicked vampire.

"This isn't real," I whispered more to myself as the dream girl, whom I thought was my daughter, began to cry.

"Mommy, please don't leave us!" the girl outcries. "Please, Mommy–"

I screamed and blenched into the mattress behind me as her skin crumpled into ashes. Her lower jaw fell off, shattering to the carpet. With crackling shrills, her body shriveled up as she decayed. Her bones crepitate with crackly noises as her body breaks apart, and she withered to ash before her skeleton and her pink nightie collapsed onto the carpet into nothing more than a cone-shaped pile of ashes and dust.

"Now, that was a horrible death even for an unrealistic daughter I created, but I can do better," Orlando humorously remarked as the true vile vampire he is. Unmoved from the position he stood in, the entire room was engulfed with flames that moment after he spoke.

"Waa! Waa!"

The illusional fake baby's crib was encased with flames. I saw him wiggle briefly before his body was fully eaten up by the fire.

"This is only a nightmare!" I tried not to get hysterical when I stared back at Orlando as the beige paint was burning off the walls from behind him. Talk about being in a Nightmare on Elm Street, which is what this was beginning to feel like.

"If you didn't wake Kai, this could have been our future!" Orlando angrily hissed. "Our unrealistic children died because of you!"

"None of you are real! This is only an illusion!" I heaved in a whisper. "I'm only having a nightmare."

"As if they aren't real?" Orlando laughed, and my round belly deflated to a flat stomach.

Toward my right, three white-colored rocking bassinets appeared on the opposite side of the bed. Fire engulfed them while I heard my real babies crying inside them.

"Leave them alone!" I exclaimed. "There only unborn vamp babies."

"As if I care!" Orlando hissed.

"This is only an illusion!" I tried to tell myself aloud as their helpless cries tormented me.

"Your right, babe, this is only an illusion I made. I'm like Freddy Krueger, who snared you in your dreams. Only I'm hotter looking." Orlando tauntingly laughed as the fire surrounded us to no escape.