Page 13 of Torment Me Knot
“Biscuit eats everything. Shoes, books, one time my entire tax return. I came home to find her surrounded by shredded paper, looking completely unrepentant, and I couldn't even be mad. She was so proud of herself.” Sera exhales through her nose, one short breath that doesn't quite make it to a laugh. “Gravy thinks she's a lapdog but she weighs forty pounds. She tries to climb into my lap every time I sit down, and she knocks over everything on the coffee table in the process. Coffee cups. Books. One time an entire plant, dirt everywhere, and she just looked at me like I was the unreasonable one for putting a plant where she wanted to sit.”
I don't want her voice to help, but it does.
“Levi is probably losing his mind running the department without me. I haven't called him since I brought you here. I know he'll yell at me, and honestly he's right to yell at me. I shouldn't have gone in alone.”
Biscuit and Gravy. Her ruined couch. A department running without her, Levi losing his mind. A whole life happening somewhere else, unpaused, waiting — and she left it to be in this room.
“I don’t like coffee but I drink it anyway. Everyone else drinks it and it felt weird to be the only one at meetings with tea. My mother calls too much. She's already asking about you.” She pauses. “I told her it was too soon. She didn't listen. She never listens. Been telling me what to do since before I could walk, and the fact that I'm head of an entire department doesn't seem to have made any impression on her at all. She’s happy for us.”
The quiet that follows is a different kind. Longer. Weighted. Her scent goes very still, the basil dropping out entirely, just cedar holding.
“Female alphas don't get packs. I made peace with it, but mom held out hope for me.”
Her voice breaks onheld out hope for me.
I press my forehead harder into my forearm. The low burn behind my sternum isn't sympathy. It isn’t. My body is broken and feverish and it's lying to me.
“I got the dogs because I needed something that needed me.” Her voice has dropped to something stripped. “Pathetic, right? Head of Omega Affairs, can't even admit she's lonely.”
She takes a breath.
“Then I walked into that facility and there you were. And everything I thought I knew about my life just... stopped. Like the whole world went silent for a second, and when it started again, nothing looked the same.”
My whine slips free. It goes on and on and on, and her arms tighten around me — (when did she move, when did she cross the room) — her face pressing into my hair, her breathing slow against my neck, and I stop shaking quite so hard.
The fever swallows me whole.
I wake in sheets soaked through with sweat, her hand tilting water into my mouth, the light crawling across the ceiling and marking whole hours I can’t remember living through. Her voice threads through those missing hours, quiet and unhurried, filling the silence with soft meaningless things.
She tells me about her childhood. Her first week at the Academy when she was certain she'd made a catastrophic mistake. A neighbor’s tabby cat that used to sleep on her windowsill and hiss if anyone tried to pet it. My walls are sawdust by then and it gets in anyway, settling low in my gut where I can't dig it back out.
One morning I open my eyes and the ceiling stays still.
I wait for it to tilt. It doesn't.
I flex my fingers and they obey. I push myself upright and the room holds its shape around me.
The chemicals are finally burning out. Or enough of them are.
My body quiets. That's when I realize what the fever was doing for me. It was loud enough to drown everything else out.
Now the silence comes rushing back in and what fills it isn't peace. It's Hardwick's voice. Wallace's hands. The cold of the table and the sharp snap of latex gloves. Every memory too weak to break through the fever-noise suddenly has room to breathe. There's nothing left to drown them out now. Just me and the quiet and everything I've spent years trying not to remember.
Recovery turns out to be its own kind of horror.
Sera’s in the chair beside the hospital bed when I manage oatmeal without dropping the spoon. The room is quiet exceptfor the soft hum of the monitors and birds chirping outside the window.
She watches me carefully over the rim of her coffee cup. Exhausted. Guarded. Like she’s trying to decide whether to say something. She sets down her cup and straightens her shoulders.
“The doctors have been asking me about some additional tests,” she says.
The bowl clinks when I set my spoon down.
“Just blood panels and scans,” she adds quickly. “Nothing invasive. They’re trying to identify what was in those compounds so they can make sure it’s fully out of your system.”
Fear locks around my ribs anyway.
“They found notes at the facility. Records of the procedures. They think it might help them understand what Wall—”
