Page 3 of Torment Me Knot
By the time I merge into traffic, my hands are shaking so hard I can barely grip the wheel.
The omega,my mate, hasn't stirred. Her scent fills the car. Gardenia and clover and underneath, the sour trace of old fear. She's alive. She's breathing. I got her out, and it's not enough. It will never be enough. Somewhere in the last hour, my entire life rearranged itself around this omega. She’s a stranger. It doesn’t matter. She’s mine and that’s everything. I don't know what Wallace did to her. I don't know how to fix it. I don't know anything except that I'd burn down the world before I let anyone hurt her again.
She needs the best help and that’s the Omega Healing Center. Canton City. Silverpine General would report her intake within the hour. Too many people there still answered to the old system. Canton City has medical staff who understand trauma. Facilities built for healing. If anyone can help her, what Adrian Blackwood and his pack have built can. I fasten my grip on the wheel and drive toward the only thing that makes sense. Toward safety. Toward help. Toward whatever the hell comes next.
Chapter Two
Espie
The lack of freezing cold drags me up from the dark. I've woken on that gurney so many times I know its shape in my bones, the way the metal steals heat from my spine, the bite of restraints against my wrists.
My fingers curl into soft fabric. Where I am is soft. Warm. I… don’t have words. I force my eyes open before I'm ready to face reality. Not knowing is always worse.
Light pours through gauze curtains that shift in a breeze I can actually smell, nothing like the recycled chemical air I've been breathing. Beyond the curtains, beyond a real glass window with no bars and no reinforced wire threaded through the panes, I see trees with leaves catching the light and blue sky going yellow at the edges, which means either dawn or dusk.
I haven’t seen the sky for so long.
I stare until my eyes burn, until the colors swim and blur, until I'm not sure if what I'm seeing is real or just another hallucination conjured up by my chemically-rewired brain.
My father used to say that the toughest plants were the ones that looked fragile.Mint, he'd whisper in that greenhouse where we built forts behind shelves of tomatoes,looks like nothing. Delicate little leaves. But you try uprooting it, Espie-girl. You try killing it. It comes back meaner every time.
I made peace with never seeing trees again. That's what you do when you're strapped to a table counting ceiling tiles while a man in surgical gloves explains how he’s going to carve you up. You make peace with the small death of hope. You let go of windows and trees and sky and all the soft beautiful things that used to matter, and you shrink yourself down to the space between heartbeats, the space where nothing can touch you. Cinderblock walls. Fluorescent flicker. Wallace's measured voice describing my screaming asnotable vocalization response.
Or I'm still wrong. Still dreaming. Still hooked up to one of Wallace's machines, hallucinating freedom while he takes notes on my brain activity and adjusts the dosage to see what happens next. That would be more like him. Give me hope, then rip it away. He always said my readings weremost interestingwhen I had something left to lose.
It feels like I’m alive and lucid. Every joint burns like acid in the sockets. Tremors roll through my muscles in waves I can't control, can't suppress, can't hide. That scares me almost as much as the softness does. I’ve worked hard to control every visible reaction, every flinch, every tell that might give him ammunition. Yet, the bed under me is soft and the breeze can’t be faked.
There are no IV lines snaking from my arms into bags of chemicals. No electrodes stuck to my temples with that cold gel Wallace loves so much. He says my readings arealways so interestingwhen my fear response kicks in.
This has to be a game.
There's always a catch, a trap disguised as kindness. I learned that at Haven before I ever met Wallace, learned it in the cold room where they left me for days when I didn't kneel fast enough. Evelyn Mercer with her clipboard, explaining exactly how much pain an omega body could endure.You'd be surprised, she told me once, while I knelt on rice until my kneecaps screamed.The body wants to live. It will forgive almost anything if you give it long enough.
There’s a woman in the chair. An alpha. My whole body locks into stillness.
She's watching my every move with intelligent, amber eyes. A scar cuts through her right eyebrow, old enough to be smooth. Broad shoulders. The kind of build that says she knows how to fight. She sits in that chair like she's been there a while. Waiting. Watching.
Her scent hits me. Crushed basil. Blood orange. Sun-warmed cedar.
My body recognizes her before my mind catches up.
No, no, no.
A gasp tears out of me. My pulse pounds in my throat, in my wrists, lower, where I'm suddenly hot and aching andhungryin a way that makes me want to scream. Every instinct tells me to bare my throat, to crawl toward that scent, to press my face against the source of it and breathe until I can't remember my own name or my own pain or anything except the warmth of her.
Mate. Safe. Home. Submit.
My omega surges toward the words.
Shut up.
Shut up.
I know what this is. Wallace spent months trying to synthesize exactly this response, trying to crack the code of scent-matching so he could manufacture it, sell it, use it to control omegas who would otherwise fight back.
He succeeded. He designed a synthetic alpha to make me stop running, stop fighting, stop being anything except the compliant little omega he always wanted.
This is a trap. She's probably a beta pumped full of synthetic hormones, and your body is too stupid and too desperate to know the difference.
