Page 11 of Torment Me Knot
“You had a bad night. The fever spiked and you were in so much pain, you were crying out, and I...” She stops. A swallow,audible in the quiet. “I held you. To help you sleep. I told you I wouldn't touch you without asking and then I did it anyway and I'm sorry.”
She's standing by the window, as far from the bed as the room allows, hands open at her sides. Gray light seeps around the curtains behind her. The shadows under her eyes are deep enough to look like bruising.
“Can I sit down?” She tips her head toward the chair in the corner, her chair, the one she's been living in.
A nod. Small. The best I've got.
She drops into it like her bones have liquefied. She's been up all night holding me through a fever and the first thing I did when I woke up was panic and elbow her in the ribs and scream at her to get away, and she's sitting there looking at me like she's the one who did something wrong.
The room gets lighter, degree by degree. Through the glass, something I haven't heard in years, maybe longer.
Birds.
I stop breathing.
Birds, chirping outside the window, ordinary and indifferent, going about being birds the way they were going about being birds when Hugo was dragging me into the basement, when Wallace was writing his notes on a clipboard, when every window I looked at had bars or no glass or nothing at all. The birds kept chirping through everything.
I pull my knees to my chest.
“I'm sorry I scared you.” Quiet. From the chair. “I… I think I have something that will help.”
She leaves and comes back carrying something soft. Folded carefully in her arms. “I thought these might—”
Boots on concrete.
Hugo staring at the nest in the corner of my cell.
Nesting is presentation behavior, slut.
Ripped blanket.
Cold floor.
Dark room.
Hunger twisting through my stomach for days.
Animals don’t get fed.
The noise I make tears up through my chest. My sour smell detonates. I'm drowning in it, my own distress so thick I taste it, copper and acid and rot.
I'm rocking. Don't know when it started. My spine hits the headboard, back, forward, back, the rhythm mindless, the impact grounding in the only way my body knows how to ground itself right now. My arms lock around my knees tighter with every rock. My voice keeps going without me.
Bad omega. Dirty omega. Slut, slut, slut.
Hugo's hand is in my hair and I'm on my knees and the nest is in pieces around me, every scrap I'd stolen and hidden and arranged into the only safe thing I had, destroyed in thirty seconds while I sob and beg and promise anything, I'll be good, I swear I'll be good, please please, please—
Is that what you are? A bitch in heat?
“No nest.” The words come out in a voice I don't recognize. “No nest. No nest. No nest no nestnonestnonest—”
She drops the blankets, sinks to her knees beside the bed and makes herself smaller than she is, which for an Alpha is not a small thing to do.
“I'm so sorry.” Her voice cracks down the middle. “I didn't know. I should've asked first. I keep getting it wrong.” She stops herself. Breathes. “I’m not going to punish you. Just breathe. Can you do that for me? Just breathe.”
Her purr starts up again, ragged, like it costs her something to keep it going. My omega wants to go to her. Strains toward her even now, even while I'm still rocking, the pull in my chest urgent and mortifying, my biology casting its vote for the Alpha.
“Whatever happened to you—” She stops, biting off the rest of the sentence rather than pushing it through. “I won't bring the blankets again. If there's anything else, anything at all, you can tell me, or you can flinch and I'll back off, and I'll figure it out. Okay? I'll learn.” She picks up the blankets from the floor. “I'm going to put these outside. I’ll take them away.”
