Page 12 of Torment Me Knot
She pulls the door shut behind her. I fell apart over blankets. That's what I am now — something that screams at folded fabric and can't stop rocking. I put my hands in my hair and pull until the sting is louder than the rest of it.
My whining starts the second she's gone, my omega reaching for the Alpha who left even though I made her go. I wrap my arms around my knees and dig my nails into my forearms. The sting helps. Gives me something immediate to focus on that isn't the whining, isn't the smell, isn't the pull in my chest that keeps sayinggo after her, go after her.
She comes back in, crosses to the bedside table and sets down a glass of water. “In case you're thirsty,” she says.
Then she goes back to the chair.
There's a bruise forming on her forearm from when I woke swinging, and she hasn't mentioned it.
Why isn't she pushing?
Because I’m her scent-match. Her Alpha decided I belong to her, biology dragging her toward me the same way my omega keeps straining toward her. Instinct. Not choice. But she dropped the blankets. She stopped every time I flinched.
That's… not instinct.
Instinct doesn't wait outside the door and come back with water.
“I don't know your name, sweetheart,” she says quietly. “You never told me.”
She doesn’t push when I stay silent. Doesn’t fill the space or rush to soften it. She just waits, calm and steady, like there’sno wrong answer and no punishment coming if I give her one. Somehow, that’s what lets the word loosen in my throat.
“Esperance.”
My name scrapes out of me, barely recognizable as language. My voice is ruined from disuse and screaming and the tube they put down my throat at Wallace's facility when I stopped being able to swallow on my own.
“Espie,” I add. Esperance is what my parents called me and it feels like handing over something I can't get back.
She says it quietly, from across the room, like she's testing the shape of it. The tension around her mouth eases, her gaze turning intent.
“That's French.” Her voice drops. “It means hope.”
Hope.
I press my forehead to my knees and close my eyes. Outside, the birds sing like nothing cruel has ever existed.
Hope.
What a fucking joke.
Chapter Six
Espie
Thirteen. Fourteen. Fifteen.
She's twisting the silver ring on her right hand again. I count the rotations. The fever has burned everything useful out of my skull and left me with this: her hands, the ring, the light catching the silver face of it as it turns.
Sixteen.
Her eyebrow scar pulls when she frowns. She stretches, arms overhead, shirt riding up, and I look away but not fast enough and then I can't unknow that sliver of skin. I notice everything. Even delirious, my brain keeps collecting details about her like evidence against me.
The fever drags me down again and pressure builds behind my eyes until I think they'll bleed. The sweat is cold this time, clammy where the sheets are already soaked through and twisted around my legs.
Sera’s scent goes bitter as she frowns at me. She never says how bad I look. The basil is how I know. I know what each note means before she opens her mouth, and that's worse than ignorance. Now I'm fluent in something I have no business learning.
I'm shaking so hard my teeth rattle, every bone aching. Her leg starts to bounce and then she starts to speak. “I have two dogs. Biscuit and Gravy. They're absolute disasters.”
I clench my arms around myself to stop reaching for her. The nausea tastes chemical and corrosive, like I swallowed battery acid and it’s still eating through me.
