Page 109 of Torment Me Knot
Our scents spike copper. Saliva floods my mouth. I swallow it back. The floor feels wrong under my feet, like the tiles have shifted a fraction.
“What’s wrong?” Kev wraps around both of us.
I open my mouth. Nothing comes out. I try again. Cold slides down my spine.
Wrong.
Chemical alpha scent floods the aisle, sharp and synthetic under the flowers and damp soil. My stomach turns before my brain catches up.
Espie presses hard against my side.
Then I see them.
“Wallace's alphas.” The word tears out of me. My gaze goes everywhere at once — the entrance, the aisle behind us, the couple browsing succulents, the woman with the stroller. Anyone. Any of them. My lungs lock up. Espie's gardenia curdles through the bond and I can't pull a breath in around it, can't think past the chemical stench, can't — “They're here.”
Ezra and Lex are already moving, scanning the aisles.
Espie's grip clamps hard on my arm. Her breathing has gone shallow. She points — a small, controlled gesture, like she's afraid to move too much — toward the succulent display near the entrance.
Two of them. Standing still among the browsers. Big, the kind of big that comes from the drug rather than the body underneath it. Wrong-shaped, somehow. Watching us with flat attention.
I know their faces. The auction floor. The holding room doorways. Males who enjoyed what they saw and did. They chose the drug, the bulk, the borrowed authority. The one by the succulents holds my gaze and the corner of his mouth lifts.
A sound comes out of me, small and ruined.
“We need to get them out.” Ezra's voice. “Right now.”
Kev is already moving, turning his body to put himself between Espie and I and any danger. Lex grips my bicep and it's the only reason my legs work at all. Ezra has Espie flush against his side, his arm fully around her, moving her.
The exit is thirty feet. I count the steps.
One. Two. Three. I stumble and Lex gets an arm around me and takes my weight and we keep moving. One foot and then the other. We hit the door and cold air hits my face, cutting through the chemical still sitting in my nose.
The alphas bundle us into the car. Espie curls into me in the back seat. Lex shoves in on my other side, Ezra on Espie's, and it's too many bodies for the space and I don't care. I need all of them exactly where they are. Kev hits the front seat and the tires skid as we pull out.
The numbers surface and my voice stops being mine. The car goes distant, the sounds of traffic underwater, Espie's face too bright and too flat at the same time like something seen through glass.
“Forty-seven.” My voice is far away. “Fifty-three.”
“Aubrey.” Espie cups my face. “No. Stay here. Stay with me.”
“Fifty-three. Omega male. Twenty-two. Damaged goods. Sold as-is. Five. Five. Five.”
“You're not there anymore.” Lex, close at my ear. “You are here. That's gone and it's never coming back.”
Espie wraps around me and she's shaking, her whole body shaking. I grip her wrists and find her pulse. The pack is here. All of them except one.
“Sera.”
“I know.” Espie presses her forehead to mine. “I want her too.”
Kev curses as we swerve around traffic. Ezra and Lex curl over us, bodies folded over ours.
“I should have stopped her.” Kev's voice has gone rough. He doesn't look at either of us. He keeps his eyes on the road like if he looks away from it something worse will happen. “She walked out and I just stood there.”
“You couldn't have stopped her,” Lex says. “She didn't want to be stopped.”
Outside, the city doesn't know. It just keeps going. The gravel crunches under the tires as we turn into the drive.How did we get here so fast?
