I planned to do the same thing tonight; why fix something if it wasn’t broken? It wasn’t healthy, sure, and it was probably rotting my liver, but it was the only way I was surviving. Gaming, booze, and those few rare moments where I felt something in technicolour instead of grey, endless grey. That was all I had.
I’d given up on taking the power back from my nightmares, had tried everything to crush them into smoke, to break them into easier digestible pieces. I forced out words that cut my throat on the way out. I even went to group fucking therapy because I was desperate.
I thought I’d known that feeling. Desperation. Thought I knew it inside out after months of this hollow, painful existence. I’d experienced every kind of desperation, could recognise it from a glimpse or flicker. My entire life now could fit within two emotions—numbness and desperation, so I knew it as well as I knew the vacant brown eyes that stared at me from the mirror. But I’d never felt it likethis.
This time, the desperation cut my skin like a razor blade and dug into the muscle beneath. It swam like acid through my veins until my heart faltered a beat.
“Tell me you’re lying,” I said to the muscular blonde woman who’d become my salvation. I was so shocked, so horrified, that I didn’t even snarl at her.
She shrugged, leaning against the bar in the common room. “Someone fucked up ordering, so we were already short, and then we had that party at the weekend.” The Knights had finallytracked down someone on their list, and liberated an omega the same night they uncovered leads on a whole network of traffickers. The celebrations ran through the whole night. “We should have had enough to get us to the end of this week,” she said apologetically.
Her name was something like Lauren, Laurel, Loreen, and she’d just ruined my life by telling me we were out of everything alcoholic. No wine, no spirits, not even a stray bottle of beer because those already went to Guardian, Prodigy, and Cobra where they sat across the room discussing something in low, serious tones.
“You must have something stashed away,” I argued with Laurie.
The look she gave me was sympathetic, soft enough to get my hackles up. “There’s nothing left, Lynn. But here.”
Me being an eternal optimist, I thought I’d sly me a secret bottle of potato vodka, but nope, it was a fucking business card. “What the hell is this?”
“I keep them on the bar for people I can see… struggling.”
“I amnotstruggling,” I snarled, reading the card and rolling my eyes. She thought I needed an AA meeting. Of course she did; she didn’t know my shit because I kept that close to my chest. I slid it back across the bar, keeping my voice polite because she was my booze supplier. “This was very kind of you, but I’m not an alcoholic. I just need it to knock me unconscious so I can sleep.”
“I wish I had something to give you,” Loretta (Loraine?) sighed, slipping the card back behind the bar for the next desperate person. “We're due a delivery on Friday.”
I laughed, like the world wasn’t falling apart around me. I had a routine that worked, and losing a part of it would be… bad. “Friday is three days away.”
“I know,” she said in the tone of an apology. “Have you tried joining one of Justice’s self defence classes? They might exhaust you enough that you pass out.”
Fuck, anything was worth a shot. “Thanks,” I said, and stalked away from the bar to track down Justice. Maybe punching someone would lift my mood as well as knocking me out. I might have just found a healthier coping mechanism.
11
Lynn
Iwas wide awake, and I wanted to scream. I needed someone to knock me out. A swift punch to the head should do it, or an alpha’s bark. But as much as I’d gotten to know the alphas of the MC, as much as I trusted them, I didn’t trust themthatmuch.
I exhaled a growling breath and turned over in bed for the sixth time, staring at the wall and the small, curtained window inset in it. This place had become home in the past few months. More than my shitty apartment, anyway. I didn’t miss it. I didn’t miss that old life, either. And until the Knights told me I’d overstayed my welcome, I was staying right here where the rent was free, I had access to food, and people around that I knew wouldn’t hurt me. It was more than I’d expected the night they took me from the farm. More than I’d expected before that, to be honest.
I sighed and rolled over again, facing the wall, staring at the polaroid ChaCha had tacked up of me, her, and the cute-faced new addition to my annoyances—or friends—Jessia.
An hour later, I gave up on sleep and pulled a hoodie over my pyjamas, shoved my feet in the annoyingly fluffy slippers Winner’s mate Mercedes insisted I take—they were black, and feltsogood, so I allowed it—and went in search of my most assholish friend.
“What thefuckdo you want?” he grumbled when I banged on his bedroom door, squinting into the dim hallway like I just woke him up.
“Of courseyou’dbe able to sleep,” I muttered, my mood turning even spikier. “I can’t fall asleep.”
Cobra groaned. “And you’re making that my problem, why…?”
I hesitated, but forced out the words. I’d spent weeks voicing the fucked up hell I was put through in that barn; this was nowhere near as triggering as that.
“You can bark,” I said, scowling into his bleary green eyes. “I’ve heard it.”
“No,” he argued immediately, trying to close the door on me.
I caught it before he could get it shut, and inserted myself between the door and the frame. He wouldn’t hurt me, no matter how badly he wanted rid of me; after months in his company, I knew his limits, his moral code, his weaknesses. He was a gentleman, loathed as he’d be to admit it, and I used it against him.
“I need you to knock me out,” I said, my voice low, throatier than intended. “One bark, that’s all I need.”
