The sound of hands slamming onto a table is a specific kind of violence.
Not the violence of fists connecting with faces or bodies hitting pavement. The contained, redirected violence of a man who needs to destroy something and has chosen furniture over flesh. The impact reverberates through the apartment’s thin walls, through the plates still sitting on the table surface, through the floor beneath my bare feet where the vibration climbs my calves like an electric current.
Roman is standing.
Chair shoved back. Both palms flat against the table’s surface, fingers splayed, the veins in his forearms raised and rigid against the Norse runes like rivers breaking their banks. His shoulders are squared, his spine locked vertical, every line of his body conveying the specific, catastrophic tension of a man whose internal systems have crossed from operational into critical.
His jaw is clenched.
Not the competitive jaw clench I remember from the academy—the one that accompanied tied scores and mutual antagonism. This is structural. The muscles in his face engaged with a force that I can see from across the room, the tendons in his neck standing like cables, his ice-blue eyes burning with something so raw and so hot that it makes the frozen pine of his scent crack open, the smoked oud flooding the apartment with a territorial darkness I’ve never encountered from him.
“They fuckingrapedyou?”
The words hit the apartment like an explosion in an enclosed space.
No echo. No aftermath. Just the immediate, devastating silence that follows the detonation of a word I have never—not once, not in a decade of locked doors and cold showers and muffled screaming and morning briefings attended on bruised legs—applied to my own experience.
I blink.
The confusion on my face is genuine.
Not performed. Not the strategic bewilderment I deploy when I want to buy time or redirect a conversation. Real confusion, the kind that occurs when someone assigns a word to something you’ve been calling by a different name for so long that the correct label sounds foreign.
Raped.
That’s not?—
They were my pack.
They were my pack, and it was my heat, and heats are what packs are for. That’s the arrangement. That’s the structure. The Omega goes into heat and the pack assists and that’s the biological contract that everyone signs when they enter the dynamic.
It doesn’t matter that I didn’t want it.
It doesn’t matter that I ran.
It doesn’t matter that there was an alleyway and a wall I couldn’t climb and a voice that said “I wasn’t giving you an option to decide, Officer.”
Because that’s just how it works. That’s just?—
That’s just life.
Right?
“Well…” I start, and my voice has the careful, corrective tone of someone explaining a simple misunderstanding. “They’re…um. My pack. So I guess it’s not called…rape…per se.”
The word doesn’t taste right in my mouth.
Not because it’s the wrong word. Because it’s the right one, and my body knows it’s the right one—knows it in the way that a wound knows the name of the weapon that made it—and the act of saying it, even to dismiss it, even wrapped in qualifiers and deflections, activates something in my neurological architecture that I have spent years keeping dormant.
But I hold the line.
Because the alternative—the alternative where that word is accurate, where what happened in that alley and the alleys before it and the locked rooms and the mornings after constitutes the thing Roman just named?—
The alternative restructures everything.
The alternative means that my pack didn’t just betray me professionally. They violated me. Repeatedly. Systemically. With the institutional protection of a dynamic that societydesigned to give Alphas access to Omega bodies and called it partnership.
The alternative means that the nightmares aren’t overreactions. That the cold showers aren’t dramatic. That the screaming into towels at two a.m. isn’t a personal failure of emotional regulation but the entirely rational response of a body that was harmed and has been trying to tell me so for years while I translated its screaming into “that’s just life.”
