If I had a therapist.
If therapists existed in Savage Knot for anything other than prescribing stronger suppressants.
I don’t know how long I sit there.
Minutes. Maybe more. The blood continues its slow pilgrimage from the wound in my side, and the cold continues its patient conquest of my extremities, and the pills begin their chemical negotiation with my nervous system. My breathing slows. My eyelids grow heavy. The pain recedes to a distant hum rather than an active scream, which is as close to comfort as I generally get.
Maybe this one will do it.
The thought surfaces without warning or permission—a quiet, clinical observation from a part of my brain that has been running this particular calculation with increasing regularity. Not suicidal, exactly. Nothing so dramatic or deliberate. More like… a passive curiosity. A detached assessment of probability.
Maybe this wound, this night, this slow bleed on this cold floor will be the one that finally tips the equation.
Maybe I won’t wake up.
That would be…
I don’t finish the thought.
Not because I’m afraid of the answer, but because something presses against my cheek and the shock of it snaps through the fog like a flare through smoke.
Cold.
Cold as fuck, actually, which is saying something given that I’m already half-frozen from the floor.
Fingers. Large, callused, pressing against the side of my face with an urgency that contradicts their temperature. They’re rough—not the manicured hands of Savage Knot’s elite Alphas, not the pampered digits that have never known manual labor or combat or the particular abrasion that comes from climbing surfaces not designed for human hands.
These are survivor’s hands.
I blink.
Once. Twice. The kitchen swims back into focus in slow, reluctant increments—edges first, then shapes, then colors that arrange themselves into the familiar geometry of my apartment. The blood on the floor. The cabinet above me. The overhead light that I don’t remember turning on, which means someone else turned it on, which means?—
Cursing.
Someone is cursing in a language I can’t immediately place. Not English. Not any of the Romance languages I picked up during my years of recovery. Something harsher, more guttural, with consonant clusters that crash into each other like waves against the cliff where I?—
Don’t.
The hands are shaking me now. Not violently—with controlled, purposeful force, the kind that sayswake up, you stubborn idiotwithout needing a common language to translate. My head rocks gently against the cabinet, and the motion sendsfresh sparks of pain through my ribs that actually help pull me further from the void.
Pain.
The most reliable alarm clock in existence.
I try to speak. What comes out is a slurred approximation of words—my tongue thick, my lips uncooperative, the consonants sliding into each other like drunken dancers on a tilted stage.
"M’fine…"
Convincing.
Really sold that one, Victoria.
Something sharp jabs into my neck.
The needle.
I should be used to it by now—the sudden puncture, the brief sting of metal piercing skin, the hiss of compressed liquid entering my bloodstream through a delivery system that was definitely not acquired through any official medical channel. But the cold of the solution as it disperses through my veins is always the part that makes me wince. Not the pain. The pain is nothing. It’s the sensation of something foreign and frigid spreading through the interior of my body, displacing the warm heaviness of blood loss with a chemical alertness that feels more like an invasion than a rescue.
