I close my eyes.
Sleep takes me fast, the way it does when you're desperate enough to stop fighting it.
I'm on my knees.
That's the first thing I know—the cold of the floor through the fabric, the specific ache of a hard surface against bone, my hands spread flat on the ground in front of me. My knuckles are marked. The skin across the backs of my hands carries the fresh sting of something thin and precise, and I don't look at them because looking would make it more real and I'm doing a very focused job of not making this more real.
The room smells like money. That's the only way to describe it—old money, the kind that has had decades to develop a scent, mahogany and leather and the particular crispness of a space that is maintained rather than simply cleaned. It's a smell I know from exactly twice in my life, from offices I entered as a supplicant rather than an equal, and it sits at the back of my throat now like something I can't swallow.
The man in the black suit stands over me.
He is not large—that's what I remember noticing the first time, how ordinary his physical dimensions are compared to the space he occupies. Average height, average build, the kind of man you'd look past in a room if he wasn't currently holding a ruler and deciding what to do with it. The suit is expensive. Everything about him is expensive in the way that has stopped needing to try.
"Where are they?"
"I don't know." My voice comes out smaller than I mean it to. I clear my throat. "I genuinely don't know where they are. They didn't tell me."
A sound that isn't quite a laugh. The floorboards are close to my face and I study the grain of them to avoid looking up, but then his hand is under my chin and the choice is removed—he tips my face toward his with two fingers, not rough, almost detached, the way you'd examine something that interested you without being certain it was worth the full investment of attention.
His eyes are pale. Sharp. And in them, before anything else, before the calculation or the deliberation or the professional patience of a man who is accustomed to waiting for what he's owed—pity.
Actual pity.
That's the worst part. Worse than the floor, worse than the ruler, worse than the knuckles.
"What a shame," he says, quietly. Almost to himself. "A pack with a pretty little Omega, and this is how they treat her." He studies my face for another moment, something shifting in his expression. "A scapegoat. That's all you are to them."
I swallow the thing in my throat that wants to be grief and isn't allowed to be, not here, not in front of him. I don't confirm it. I don't need to. He already knows it's true and so do I.
He releases my chin. Straightens. The ruler moves through his fingers in a slow rotation—not threatening, or not only threatening, more like a habit.
"I'm usually a gentleman," he says, conversationally, the tone of a man discussing something administrative. "But your men owe me a considerable sum, and someone—" the word lands with particular weight "—has to account for it. Don't take it personally."
He raises the ruler.
I flinch?—
Up.
I'm sitting upright in my own bed, both hands gripping the duvet, heart at a pace that belongs to someone being chased rather than someone who was horizontal four seconds ago. The ceiling is familiar. The heating makes its noise. Through the window the quality of light says morning has opinions about itself and I've been asleep for longer than I thought.
I look at the clock.
7:52.
I'm supposed to be at the café at eight.
"Oh, absolutely?—"
I'm out of bed before the sentence finishes. Bathroom. Face—cold water, both hands, the shock of it doing the job that sleep was supposed to do and didn't quite complete. Teeth. I do them while simultaneously locating my shoes with one foot, which is a skill I developed in my first year of bar work and have never lost.The face in the mirror is not the face of a woman who has had adequate rest. The face in the mirror is the face of a woman who has had two hours of sleep bookended by a collector's call and a dream that I am not unpacking right now because there is no time and also I simply refuse.
Don't.
It was a dream. A memory wearing dream-clothes. You've had it before and you'll have it again and it means nothing new.
His face when he said scapegoat?—
Leave it.
