Page 68 of Torment Me Knot
There are things I'm not saying. Things I will never say. That I begged. That I screamed myself voiceless and then mouthed the begging because my throat had nothing left.Please. Please. Anyone.That by the end I would have spread my legs for Wallace if he'd offered, just to make it stop. That the worst of it wasn't the pain. The worst of it was that somewhere around trial twenty-something I stopped being Espie.
“He called them trials.” The word comes out a whisper. “Numbered them. He kept files because this was research to him. He…documented everything. If you find… the files…maybe…”
I can't find any more words. Aubrey makes a sound against my shoulder. Something between a sob and a growl. He's shaking. He pulls me tight against him and I don't tell him to stop.
“I'm sorry.” His voice is in pieces. “Espie. I'm sorry. You should never have had to survive that. I'm sorry I wasn't there.”
Sera’s grip goes hard. “I'm going to find him, sweetheart. I am going to find every omega he experimented on. I’ll find him and I’m going to take him apart with my hands.”
Her breath shakes. “And not because you're my scent-match. Because what was done to you is an obscenity. Nobody should have survived what you survived. I have never wanted to destroy anyone the way I want to destroy the people who hurt you.”
She isn't promising me. She's telling herself, out loud, with the rest of us as witness.
“But not on your own, Sera. You have us now,” Kev says.
She turns to him. “Kev.”
“You don't go on your own again. Not after what we just heard,” Kev says.
Sera holds his eyes. Then she nods. Once.
Her face says agreement. The rest of her says something else. Whatever it is hasn't gone out behind her eyes but Aubrey pulls me in. His arms close around me and his cheek comes down on my hair. “Thank you, brave girl. Thank you for telling us.”
Brave girl.
I’m not brave.
I just survived, even when part of me wished I wouldn’t.
And now there’s nowhere left to hide what was done to me.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Lex
Iflip the egg once the white sets and the yolk starts to harden.
The chip in the spatula handle catches my thumb the way it always does. Ezra dropped the thing during the gas-leak panic in 2023 and we never replaced it.
Years later, we're still using a chipped spatula.
The bacon hisses in the second pan. Fat smell. Toast smell. The kettle ticks on the cooling element. My glasses fog from the steam and I push them up my nose with the back of my wrist. None of us slept.
Forty-three trials.
Stop.
“You get any sleep at all?”
Ezra. Behind me. Voice rough.
“Maybe an hour. I gave up around four and came down here. You?”
“Less than that, I think. Couldn't get my brain to stop.” He moves past me to the kettle, pours the cold pot down the sink, starts a fresh one. “How long has Kev been like that?”
Kev's at the table with both hands wrapped around a coffee cup, looking out at the patio to where our omegas cuddle under a blanket on the patio chair.
“Since I came down. He hasn't said a word and the coffee in his hands has gone cold twice.”
