Pillows.
So manypillows.
I'd bought three more this week alone, I realized with dawning horror. Three more, bringing the total to, I counted, my lips moving silently, eleven. Eleven pillows on a bed meant for one person. Plus the throw blankets. The fuzzy ones from Target, soft as clouds against my skin. The weighted one from Amazon that felt like being held. The cashmere throw I definitely couldn't afford but had purchased anyway in some kind of dazed state, handing over my credit card without even looking at the price tag.
All of them arranged in a specific pattern around my mattress. A wall of softness on every side. A barrier between myself and the world. A?—
No.
I wasn't building a nest. Iwasn't.
The suppressants had killed that instinct years ago. I was just... cold. The apartment was drafty, the heating unreliable, the windows single-pane and ancient. Anyone would want extra blankets in a place like this. Anyone would rearrange their bedding seven times in the past three days.
Anyone would wake up at three in the morning with an overwhelming urge to reorganize their closet by texture, spending two hours sorting sweaters from softest to least soft and not understanding why it mattered so much. Anyone would find themselves standing in the home goods aisle at Target, piling throw pillows into their cart with shaking hands, unable to explain the desperateneeddriving them.
"This is fine," I whispered to the empty room, to the pile of soft things that definitely wasn't a nest, to the Omega instincts I'd spent six years trying to suppress. "I'm fine. Everything isfine."
My phone rang. I jumped so hard I nearly tripped over the ottoman I'd moved in front of the bedroom door. For no reason. Just because it looked better there. Not because some deep, primal part of my brain wanted a barrier between my sleeping space and the outside world, wanted to make my nest defensible, wanted?—
Stop it. Stop.
I grabbed the phone from my bag with trembling hands.
Unknown number. I shouldn't answer. Unknown numbers were never good news. Unknown numbers could be telemarketers, could be scammers, could be?—
Could bethem.
My thumb swiped across the screen before I could stop myself, some suicidal impulse overriding three years of carefully cultivated survival instincts.
"Hello?"
"Ava? Sweetheart, is that you?" The voice was warm. Familiar-ish, in the way that certain vocal patterns triggered half-buried memories. Female, older, with that particular cadence of someone who'd known you when you were young, when you were different, when you were still innocent enough to trust.
"Who is this?"
"It's Carol! Your Aunt Carol—well, not really your aunt, but you know what I mean. I was a friend of your mother's, back before... well. Before."
My grip tightened on the phone until my knuckles went white.
My mother.
My mother had been dead for two years. Cancer, quick and brutal, discovered too late and spreading too fast. I'd gotten the call from David, from my stepfather, the man who'd raised me since I was ten, the man who'd given me everything and taken so much more in return—and I'd sat in this very apartment and cried for three hours straight.
I hadn't gone to the funeral.
Couldn'tgo to the funeral.
Couldn't risk being in the same room asthem. Couldn't risk their scents, their eyes, their hands, their voices whisperinglittle foxandRedandours, you're ours, you were always ours?—
"I'm sorry," I said carefully, shoving the memories down, locking them away where they couldn't hurt me. "I don't remember a Carol. Are you sure you have the right number?"
"Of course you don't remember me, sweetheart. You were so young when I moved away. Just a little thing, always trailing after those brothers of yours like a baby duck." A soft laugh. "But I've been thinking about you lately. About how alone you must be out there. Your mother talked about you all the time, you know, right up until the end. How proud she was of you. How much she worried."
Something cold slithered down my spine, settling into my gut like a stone. My mother had known. Had always known. Had helped me run, had given me money and suppressants and a bus ticket out of town, had looked at me with eyes full of grief and guilt and saidgo, baby, don't look back, don't ever come back.
Would she have talked about me to a stranger? Would she have broken my cover, risked my safety, for what—gossip? Reminiscing?
Trap, whispered the voice in my head. The one that had kept me alive this long.This is a trap.
