I stared up at the ceiling, unblinking but also unseeing, lost to the depths of my mind.
I needed to get up. I needed to feed myself and my kids. But I couldn’t.
Eventually I would. I couldn’t let my children go hungry, but that would be the only thing to rouse me to move. Well, that and maybe wetting myself.
God, I was fucking pathetic. Things were finally going right for me, and I was letting it all crumble between my fingers. I managed to text Giselle three times a day, as was our usual, but that was all I could manage. She kept trying to reach out, and while I desperately wanted to bask in her presence, I also couldn’t let her see me so fuckingpathetic.
I wasn’t worthy of happiness.
I’d thought I was ready for it, that I’d found a way to honor those I’d lost and move forward for me and my kids. What an idiot.
To think that it all had started with a simple change of the calendar. One month sliding into another like they were permanently doomed to do. And just like that, everything hit me all over again.
It started with the night terrors. I had three in one night, then another two back-to-back when I’d tried to go back to sleep, and one in the middle of the day when I’d lain down with Veronica, exhausted by the terror my subconscious cooked up.
But it had progressed from there, getting worse and worse with each day. I was chained to the past, and those bonds were growing ever shorter, pulling me back into that festering blood I’d only recently begun to escape from.
I was ruining everything. It seemed to be the cycle of my life. I truly deserved nothing. I was too weak to ever protect what I truly wanted.
I wanted to cry, because at least crying would be expressing some sort of emotion rather than having them boil me alive from the inside out, but my body wouldn’t let me. I was my own worst enemy, unable to allow myself the most simple catharsis. I was caught in a hell of my own making, and?—
Did I smell bacon?
The thought that Benny was trying to cook on his own had me vaulting out of bed. I nearly stumbled from the head rush, and I belatedly remembered I hadn’t had anything to eat or even drink in over a day, which was fairly detrimental to a shifter with a high metabolism.
I regained my footing and ran down the stairs. Although I didn’t care one lick about myself and often wished I could escape from the curse of existence, the thought that my child was sodesperate that he was cooking unsupervised was the override I needed. All that grease splatter could start a fire.
When I got to the kitchen, I stopped in my tracks. Benny wasn’t cooking. Standing in front of the stove, dressed in a soft sweater dress with my apron over it, was a familiar willowy figure.
“Giselle?” My throat sounded raw, as if I had been screaming endlessly for the past few days, and my voice was barely more than a croak.
“Hey there!” she said, using tongs to set the pieces of bacon on a cooling rack. It was only then that I realized she’d pulled them from a baking sheet from the oven rather than frying them in a pan. Huh. I hadn’t known it could be done that way. “I wasn’t planning on waking you until the food was ready, so there’s still a bit of time. Would you like to take a shower in the meantime? I’ll have it all plated up by the time you’re done.”
I waited a moment for what had to be another night terror to shift into something truly horrific, but her pleasant gaze remained on me, like everything was normal and I wasn’t a disgusting, greasy, useless shell of an alpha standing in front of her.
“Where’s Natalie?” I asked finally.
“Off getting a well-earned spa day. I called in some favors and managed to land her a mani-pedi as well as a hot stone massage and a facial. That you’re paying for, of course. An alpha provides and all that, so I was sure you wouldn’t mind.”
My inner wolf raised his head for the first time in days; he’d been so buried under the flashbacks of everything I wanted to forget. No, not forget, just not be constantly haunted by.
Provide?
It was like a beacon of light in my primal instincts, but it still wasn’t quite enough. I could still hear the gurgling in Jon’s chest as he drew his last, ragged breath. I could still smell thesmoldering embers mixed with stale blood of my home when I returned. I could still feel my wife’s cold, clammy skin against my palms. There was no escape from it. No respite.
I thought that I had found it in Giselle, but that had just been a momentary reprieve, making me remember what it was like to be content, to be happy, to have hope, only to rip it all away again.
“What the hell are you doing?” I asked without an ounce of passion in my voice. It was flat. Almost lifeless. It had taken an extraordinary amount of effort to text her the few times I had, but I wasn’t an idiot. I knew she could tell something was wrong; I just couldn’t bring myself to explain it to her. I wasn’t sure if I even had the words, let alone the energy to type them all out.
“Making breakfast,” she said as if everything was perfectly normal. Which it wasn’t. I didn’t think that normal was something that I could ever have again.
“Why?”
“Because one of my students asked for help. Isn’t that right, Benny?”
I finally looked over to the kitchen island and realized my son was sitting there, Veronica on the floor at his feet, playing cars and unicorns. I never was quite solid on what the rules of that game were, but Veronica seemed to know them pretty well.
“You asked her here?” I said shakily. While I knew that I looked a mess, I’d made sure that my kids had meals whenever they needed, as well as help with their homework, with Natalie pitching in as well. I thought that that might have been enough to fool them, but clearly, I was an idiot.
