Page 49 of Knot Your Pawn

This place is wrong.

Why should we keep a wrong place intact, just because it’s pretending to be our nest?

I drop the blanket from around my shoulders and kneel among what’s supposed to be our nest supplies.

“Vera?” Riley’s cautious question hangs in the air.

I grab around, through the flakes of stuffing and strips of fabric, until I find something. I don’t know what. I don’t know why I grab it, it felt like the right things to do, so I pull it out of the pile and start ripping it up.

It’s a blanket we had in our original nest. It’s fluffy, pale blue, nothing special or unusual.

Seeing it makes my chest hurt.

This should bring me joy, this should make me feel safe.

But it doesn’t.

Right now, it doesn’t.

It makes me feel like this is all a big lie.

It’s all one big lie.

All of it.

This isn’t home.

This isn’t my nest.

It’s all wrong.

“Vera!” Riley is closer now, touching my shoulders, trying to grab my arms, as I’m still ripping the blanket into smaller and smaller pieces.

I let out a growl, louder, harsher than before, which makes her back off.

“Bathroom.” I hear behind me, I think from Caleb, but I’m too focused on ripping the final piece of the blanket apart to pay too much attention.

Once the blanket is sufficiently shredded, I reach down again, pulling up another blanket. It’s got sweet flowers on it and is made of super soft cotton.

I liked it so much when I saw it online, but now it just reminds me that nothing here is right.

That this whole place is wrong.

The first tear into the fabric gives a satisfying sound, easing some of my tension, but none of the feeling of wrong, so I keep going.

Someone sits down at my side and I almost growl, until I notice it’s Luca and he’s holding out a large piece of blue and green crinkly paper. “This might be more satisfying.”

I stare at it, then at the mix of pillow filling and shredded blanket on my lap, before staring at the paper again. I reach out, touching the rough texture of the paper and immediately withdraw, shaking my head.

Then I reach through the pile on my lap and feel for the next thing, the next thing that is supposed to make me happy but won’t.

When I find it and pull it up, it’s one of the blankets that we made ourselves, from some super fluffy fabric we found in the fabric store. It has glow-in-the-dark moons and stars woven into it.

I stare at it, angry.

It’s another piece of what’s supposed to be our nest but doesn’t feel like it.

Another piece that makes it feel like I’m in some weird alternative reality, one where everything looks right but is wrong.