Page 28 of Torment Me Knot
I could take my car. Stay separate, keep my hands on the wheel of something that's mine. But if something happens on the drive, I won't be there.
“I'll ride with you. I’ll pick mine up late.”
“Knowing Blackwood, he’ll have it delivered,” Ezra says, sliding into the backseat behind the driver.
I climb in behind Lex. The door closes, solid and final, the lock catching. I'm inside their car, inside their scent.
Kev starts the car and pulls out of the parking garage. We rise up the ramp and the afternoon light comes in through the tinted glass. Nobody speaks.
My mates are curled into each other in the backseat, barely keeping their eyes open. They’re so exhausted. Espie is mine. She is also Aubrey’s and he is also mine. He's holding her as hisonly fixed point, and I know that feeling, I do, I've had it for six weeks, I just — I turn and look out the window instead.
Kev catches my eye in the rearview mirror. “Our house is twenty minutes away,” he says. “Maybe less, depending on traffic.”
I nod.
Lex turns slightly in his seat, glancing back at the omegas. His bergamot has gone grief-heavy, dark and bruised at the edges. “They're sleeping. That's good. Probably the first real sleep either of them has had in—” He stops. Swallows. “In a long time.”
“She hasn't slept more than two hours at a stretch since I pulled her out,” I say. “She suffers nightmares. Flashbacks. She screams in her sleep.”
“Aubrey doesn't scream.” Lex's voice is barely audible. “He just... stops. Goes still.”
The silence settles over me like weight.
“How long has he been like that?” I say.
Lex doesn't ask what I mean. “Since Kev pulled him out of that rescue mission.”
The one where Axel Turns was ended. And Leah and Aubrey’s nightmare both ended and began. I make a mental note to ask Leah to visit Espie again. Hoping that will help. At this stage, I’ll take anything.
Ezra indicates my cheek. “Espie caught you.”
I touch my cheekbone. Tender, probably bruising already. “She didn't mean to.”
Outside, people move through their lives untouched. A woman laughing into her phone on the corner. A kid on a scooter cutting through traffic while his father shouts after him. Normality everywhere I look. Like the world didn't just split open in a hospital corridor.
I don't know what I'm walking into. Don't know these alphas. Don't know if I can trust them not to shut me out once we're on their territory. Don't know anything except that my mates are in this car, and where they go, I go too.
Even if it means giving up the only life I've ever known.
Even if it means walking into a house full of male alphas with my pulse trying to climb out of my throat.
Chapter Twelve
Kev
The rearview mirror is a problem.
I adjusted it three blocks ago. Told myself I needed a better angle on the traffic behind us.
A lie so transparent even my hindbrain isn't buying it, and my hindbrain will believe almost anything if it gets me closer to my mates.
My mates. Plural. Two of them, curled together in my backseat like the rest of us don't exist.
Lex shifts beside me. His long fingers tap against his thigh in a rhythm that means he's thinking too hard. He's watching the mirror too. We all are, except Ezra, who's turned halfway around in the middle row to keep direct eyes on them. Sera sits rigid beside him, her basil-and-blood-orange scent spiked with something that reminds me of the moment before a witness breaks on the stand. Nobody speaks. The silence should be suffocating. It's not. It's worse: four alphas who all know the world just tilted sideways and will never be the same way again.
I keep my eyes on the road. Force them there. Every time my gaze drifts to the mirror something locks up in my chest, not pain, just pressure, the kind that says you're doing this wrong, and I unclench my hands from the wheel and remind myself I'm driving. I’m responsible for keeping everyone safe.
Aubrey clings to Espie. That sentence keeps rewriting itself in my head, rearranging the words like maybe a different order will make it make sense. Aubrey. Is. Touching. Her. His thumb traces slow circles on the inside of Espie's wrist, right over the pulse point. She's pressed into his side with her fingers threaded through his hair, her face tucked against his throat. Both sleeping now. But before that they whispered to each other. Fragments of sound, nothing intelligible, but I heard his voice. His actual voice, broken and rasping from months of silence, butthere. My eyes sting and I blink hard, keep my gaze on the road.
