“P-please!” I begged. “Please don’t let them!”
“Jez?” The deep voice was familiar, but it wasn’t until the lights flicked on and the scent of yeast and orange peel tickled my nose that some fractured part of my mind recognized Gage.
The confining hands melted away, the weight crushing my ribcage dissolving in the glare of the light fixture. I gasped in a wheezing breath.
I was on the floor, clawing at the floorboards with my ragged nails.
“Hey...” Gage said. “Hey, what is it? Are you okay?”
He knelt next me on the floor, one hand hovering over my shoulder like it didn’t know where to land. The scent of my mother’s kitchen during the holidays surrounded me like one of the blankets I’d refused to use, wrapping me in comfort and security among the whirling madness of the flashback.
With a desperate sob, I scrambled onto my knees and flung myself against Gage’s broad chest, burying my face against his shoulder and clutching handfuls of his shirt in a white-knuckled grip.
TWELVE
Gage
IT TOOK ME A SECONDto process the armful of sweet, coffee-scented omega trying to crawl onto my lap. Or maybe she was trying to burrow inside my ribcage, because she just kept wriggling closer and closer until there wasn’t a hairsbreadth of space between us.
If the screams echoing from the attic room hadn’t been a dead giveaway that something was wrong, the curdling sourness beneath Jez’s addictive perfume would have been. They’d been the screams of a terrified child, and god knew we’d all heard those way too often over the years, in our line of business.
But Jez wasn’t a child. Whatever nightmare had invaded her sleep, it had taken her back in time—and I could guess where. She’d practically tackled me in her haste for comfort, sending me backward onto my ass—my arms coming around her mostly in self-defense.
This whole clusterfuck was such a fucking mess. Knox needed to get better fast, so we could all figure out what the hell we were supposed to be feeling. Because right now, Heath saw her as the enemy—and not without reason. Meanwhile, Tony felt like he’d been betrayed from two directions, and I felt like fate was a vicious bitch who apparently had it in for us for some reason.
I could only imagine what Jez was feeling.
Her wracking sobs had transformed into a continuous, high-pitched keening sound, broken only by the occasional gasp that sounded like someone drowning in the ocean whenever she ran out of air. I rocked her a bit, hating the world that had brought her—and us—to this point.
If she hadn’t tried to kill Knox, you might never have met her, said a traitorous little whisper.You might have gone your whole life never knowing you had a scent match.
And I genuinely didn’t know if that would have been more or less tragic than the current situation. I mean, yeah... I’d always had a nagging sense of something being missing in my life, and I was pretty sure the others did, too. But maybe that was normal? Maybe everyone on the planet felt like that.
Did Jez feel like that? Or had that part of her been burned out of her soul when her dad sold her to a pack of monsters? Maybe she didn’t dream of finding her alphas, because she was too busy dreaming of whatever had sent her screaming into the darkness.
Hoarseness and lack of oxygen eventually muted her cries into pitiful whimpers that tore at my heart. How was I supposed to remember what she’d done to Knox when her face was pressed against the side of my neck, my skin growing slick with her tears and snot?
“Was it the storm?” I asked, following a hunch.
She went very still, her whimpers going silent. For a second, I was worried she would realize what she’d done and who she was trusting to hold her. But after an endless pause, she gave a small nod, not lifting her head.
“Okay,” I said, even though I knew her panic wasn’t because she was afraid of wind and thunder. She was afraid of something else that had happened at thesame timeas rain and thunder... and I could guess what it was.
“We’re going downstairs,” I decided. “It ain’t as loud down there.”
