I just sleep. Deep and dreamless and safe. With no alpha in my bed, no real nest. Just me.
Just Vee.
Chapter 9
Vee
I'm sitting on the bedroom floor when Arden knocks.
Not for any particular reason, the bed is right there. The chair is right there. But sometimes the floor is the right place to be when your brain won't stop running and you need something solid under you that isn't going anywhere.
"Come in," I say
He opens the door and takes me in without comment. Arden has a gift for seeing whatever's happening and letting it be what it is without immediately trying to fix it.
"How are you doing?" He crosses the room and sits on the edge of the bed. Casual. Like we're just two people talking.
"I'm okay." I think about it more honestly. "I'm processing."
"That's appropriate." He sets his bag down. "Anything specific or just the general weight of it?"
"Both." I pull my knees up. "Drake. Alex's flag. The fact that Jasper was in my house for months and I had no idea about him." I pause. "Take your pick."
Arden nods. No rush to fill the silence.
"Are you sleeping?" he asks.
"Mostly."
"Eating?"
"Finn won't let me not eat."
Warmth spreads over his face. "Good. That's what he's there for."
We talk for a while. He asks careful questions and I give careful answers and somewhere in the middle of it the careful falls away and I'm just talking. About the hollowness that comes and goes. About how I keep starting to feel okay and then remembering Drake in my kitchen or Eli in my nest and having to start over. Or how strange it is to be in a house full of people who want me here after so long in a house full of people who forgot I was there.
Arden listens. He doesn't try to resolve it. He just receives it, which is all I actually need.
After a while he reaches into his bag.
He pulls out a ziplock bag. Sealed. The kind with the double press closure, airtight.
Inside it is a shirt.
He holds it out to me.
I take it. Through the plastic the fabric looks soft. Well-worn. Large, even folded up.
"Fresh," he says. "I sealed it this morning."
I unzip the bag.
The scent hits me before I've fully opened it.
Burnt wood and ash. That deep layered strangeness I've been pressing my nose into for days. But stronger. So much stronger than the shirt I've been wearing, which has been slowly losing its potency no matter how carefully I've been handling it.
This is what it smells like at full strength.
