Now there are three more. Kev, Lex, Ezra. Three Alphas surrounding this body, tending it, waiting for it to come back.
It won’t. The body is too broken. So I stay in the dark where everything is distant.
Memories press at the edges. Shapes in the black that don’t get through the distance. The weight of a collar. The voice that barkedcrawl. Axel's smile. Wide and white and wrong.
Kylie's laugh when she told me I'd stand on that block with the others, naked and trembling, while Alphas bid on my compliance. The cell. The needles. Days of fire and forgetting, my body used against me, my mind wiped clean and rewritten with obedience.
The memories press, and I flinch deeper into the dark. Down here, they can't form completely. Down here, they're just pressure, not pictures. They want to surface, want to remind me of everything I survived, everything I lost, everyone I couldn't save. I won't let them.
Axel is dead. I know this. Someone told the body, and the body heard, and the information is in there somewhere. Axel and Kylie and Mick are dead. They can't hurt me anymore but thebody knows one thing and it has always known one thing:stay gone, stay gone, stay gone.
I don't remember how to come back. I don't want to remember.
And then… a scent cuts through the darkness. Gardenia. Clover. Sweetness with a deeply wounded edge.
The body turns toward her before I understand why. That specific lean toward something that doesn't hurt. Fear gone soft at the edges. Exhaustion in the bone. And underneath both, a note that matches the same bruising inside me. Fear gone stale from being held too long. Exhaustion buried deep in the bones. Pain that has dulled with time instead of healing. Familiar.
My attention snags.Omega.
Something in me stirs after months of silence. I know this scent. I know what it means. I’ve had it before. I don't want to surface. The dark is safe. The light is full of memories and Alphas and a body that betrayed me. I know how to sink. I'm good at gone, but the scent won't let me stay.
It hooks into something beneath the freeze, beneath the shutdown, beneath the place where I buried myself. It drags at me. Pulls at me. Reaches for me across the dark.Help me. See me. I'm alone too.
I start to rise.
Light. Too much. Too bright. Too real. My eyes are open and I don't remember opening them. Light blazes through windows, reflects off surfaces. I blink. My eyes water.
When did I come back?
I have weight again. Gravity. The body is suddenly, horribly real, heavy. I'm sitting. A chair. Soft. People surround me, shapes resolving slowly into figures, into faces, into the three Alphas who have been tending the shell. Kev. Lex. Ezra.
Their scents slam into me now, no longer distant clouds but a wall ofmate mate matethat my body screams for and mymind recoils from. Hands on me. The shoulder. The back. Touch that meant nothing a moment ago, and now it's everywhere, burning. They're surrounding me. All three of them. Worried eyes. Careful hands.
Alpha. Male. Danger.
Collar. Auction. Cell.
My breath comes too fast. They're too close. They're too kind. They're looking at me the way Thomas used to look at me, like I matter, like I'm real, and I can't survive that again. I can't let myself believe in their kindness only to watch it turn to cruelty or vanish into a grave.Please don't be kind to me. Please don't make me hope.
I’m shaking, tremors in my hands, my chest, my jaw. The freeze kept me from this, kept me wrapped in numbness, and now I'mhereand they'rehereand I can smell their concern, their desperate hope, their patience that has waited months for me to open my eyes.
She’s small. So small it doesn't seem possible. Dark curls tangled around a face too thin, too pale beneath its warmth. Violet eyes that are too large for her face, bruised underneath with exhaustion and something else, something I recognize from mirrors when I still looked at mirrors.Survivor.
She's in a wheelchair, gripping the armrests as though they help keep her upright. The gardenia and clover scent pours off her, and she's looking at me. Not through me. Not past me.At me.
The wall in my chest gives way. Cracks and shatters. My heart jolts, shocked back into motion. And for the first time in longer than I can remember, I refuse to go back to the dark.
Chapter Nine
Sera
One second Espie is sitting in the wheelchair and the next she's pushing herself upright, and staggers across the common area toward the male omega hunched over himself.
She can barely keep upright. She's skeletal under her clothes, all sharp collarbones and wrists thin enough to circle with twofingers. She's stronger than she was, but stronger than nothing is still barely anything at all.
The male omega with ash-blond hair, is just as emaciated as Espie. Just as broken. When we entered the room his eyes were unfocused, rocking gently in his chair while three Alphas surrounded him with grief carved into their faces.
But he's not unfocused now. He's looking at her like she's the only thing in the room that matters. He staggers to his feet and takes faltering steps toward her, the alphas surrounding him leaping to their feet.
