“Doesn’t surprise me.” Sweat had beaded on my upper lip, and I knew when the painkillers wore off, everything would hurt like a bitch. It was almost preferable to the darkness drowning me, to the noise in my head. The screaming, the taunts, the threats, that fucking word.Hysterectomy.
I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t feel my face. Darkness and blood rushed in my ears, blocking out all other noises. A hand approached, but I knocked it away with my wrist, snarling a noise I couldn’t hear.
Time passed. Seconds stretching, endless. No children, ever. Alone, forever. A constant, eternal stretch of time with the darkness in my head.
Something met my hand. Cold. Slick.
It startled me out of the darkness long enough to frown at the cool bottle of water Giant pressed into my hand.
“Drink,” he encouraged, his voice audible again.
I followed his instruction automatically, but the cold liquid tasted like relief, like air after suffocation.
My pride was too battered, my heart too ruined to say thank you, but I met his kind eyes and hoped he saw the words.
“Do you game, asshole?” Cobra asked, not quite neutral but almost… polite. For him, at least.
I nodded. Accepted the second bottle Giant passed to me, the cap unscrewed for me.
“Can you hold a controller with those hands?” Cobra considered my bandages and splints without judgement but critical, strict.
“Get fucked,” I snarled, and it was such a relief to hear my voice, to sound like myself instead of the broken, screaming, wild thing trapped inside me. I sounded angry, not broken. A little feral maybe, but that would work in my favour and keep people away.
It didn’t scare Cobra off, unfortunately. He tilted his shaved head, drawing my attention to the snake inked around his ear, so realistic it could bite me and I wouldn’t be surprised. “I’ll take that as a yes,” he said after a moment. “Come on. I’ll show you my set-up.”
He turned away, but stopped when a bark of laughter left me. “Why?” I asked, that laugh still there, maybe a little hysterical. “Why would I go anywhere with you? Why wouldyouoffer to help?”
He crossed his arms over his tight black vest and watched me long enough that I squirmed. “I’ve smelled that mix of blood, rage, and apathy before. The meds, the sickness. I know that smell, I know that dead look in your eye, and I don’tfucking like it.”
Giant’s words replayed in my head, enough for me to put together Cobra’s reason for helping me. He’d known someone as fucked up physically and mentally as me.
I doubted they survived.
“It’s a better idea than the gym,” Giant said softly, watching me. Always fucking watching me, like he was waiting for me to break down. “You can trust Cobra, he would never hurt anyone.”
I snorted.
“He’d never hurt a woman,” he corrected.
“Depends if she deserved it,” Cobra disagreed, leaning against the wall with his hands in his pockets.
“You’re not helping,” Giant grumbled.
I rolled my eyes, taking a step in a random direction. “Kill me if you want, I don’t give a shit. Anything’s better than this conversation.”
“Doesn’t smell like it’d take much from me to kill you,” Cobra remarked. “It’s not really worth the effort.”
I gave him a glare over my shoulder and kept hobbling on.
6
Cobra
She smelled like gunpowder and decay. Like the slow withering of life. Like Hanna in the days before she slipped away and I never heard her voice again.
“Not that seat, that’s mine,” I snapped when the beta, Lynn, aimed for my gaming chair. She painstakingly arranged her fingers until she could almost flip me off and lowered herself into my chair. I stared at her for a moment, wondering if I could shove her onto the floor without guilt biting at me.
I couldn’t.
