Page 13 of Slashed Bonds

Add it up, and it explains why I can’t score cock.

Especially not the pierced variety, apparently.

I brace both hands on the seat and try to get up, convinced I’m empty and done and ready to be a person.

The world tilts about nine degrees to the left.

Then I’m heaving again, and there’s nothing left to give, which hurts worse than when there is.

Cool. Great. Love this for me.

My knees give out. The tile comes up to meet my cheek, blessedly cold, and I lie there like roadkill with a skincare routine while heat flashes roll through me in waves. Sweat blooms along my spine. My hands go numb from the wrists down.

Black spots crowd in at the edges of my vision, so I stop fighting and concentrate on breathing for a hot minute.

In through the nose. Out through the mouth.

The same rhythm I used to take between whistles.

The irony of being broken.

This is the part nobody warns you about, and it’s the sad truth of being a rejected Omega. You hear the whispers growing up. The what-ifs. What if I disobey? What if I’m too much? What if they change their minds and send me back?

I always assumed those girls were being dramatic.

Then I found out that a severed bond doesn’t only take the Alphas. It takes the thermostat in your body, your sleep, your appetite, and the part of your brain that used to be able to hear a door close without checking who’s on the other side of it.

So I can see now why so many Omegas go quiet and pliant and agreeable. Why they smile and fold themselves smaller and never once ask what happens if.

Being a rejected baddie sucks balls.

Do not recommend.

Something warm and wet drags across my cheek.

I crack one eye open.

Knox stares back at me from four inches away, one eye icy blue, one eye brown with that ugly X cut through it, panting like this is the best morning either of us has ever had. Then he registers the state of me and the pant collapses into a whine.

Poor puppy wants to play while I’m dying on the floor.

“I’m alive,” I rasp. “Give me a minute.”

He whines again and shoves his enormous head under my hand, because that’s his solution to every problem, and against every law of medicine, it works. Eighty pounds of fur that was sold to me as a twenty-five-pound dog. Clean coat, cold air, cedar, oatmeal shampoo.

Home.

Not the house on Alder Row. That house is a foundation and a chimney and a lot in a subdivision where nobody will build.

Him. He’s the address.

This dog crawled out of the fire. He came out of it beaten and half-blind and left for dead in a ditch, and he still gets up every morning delighted about the concept of grass.

It’s giving motivation nation.

If Knox hadn’t survived, the last speck of kindness in me would have gone out with him. I’m sure of that in a way I don’t examine too closely, because examining it means admitting how thin the margin was.

I drift. Come back. Drift again.