Page 117 of My Unhinged Alphas
“It means nobody died there,” he says.
“There’s a difference.”
His jaw shifts once, like he knows that and doesn’t have anything better to give me.
I take a step toward the little table by the bed where my bag should be, where my phone should be, where something normal should be waiting for me. “I’m calling them anyway.”
“You probably shouldn’t use your phone,” Knox says.
I stop and look at him. “Excuse me?”
“In case somebody’s tracking you.”
For a second, I honestly don’t know what to do with that sentence.
I let out a laugh, but it comes out wrong. “This is insane,” I say, pointing at myself. “I’m a nobody.” The words come fast now, hot and desperate and disbelieving. “I make coffee. I split bills. I forget laundry in the washer. Nobody is tracking me.”
“No,” Vale says. His voice is quiet, but it cuts through everything.
I turn to him.
His eyes are already on me. “You’re not a nobody,” he says. “Whether you want it or not.”
Fuck.
The word doesn’t leave my mouth, but it tears through my head hard enough to make me feel it in my chest.
I rake a hand through my hair and pace two steps before the motel room walls stop me. The room feels too small, too warm, too full of them. Too full of what they know and what I don’t. My scalp prickles under my own fingers.
I feel like I’m in a living nightmare. Not the loud kind. Not the kind where monsters leap out of shadows and you wake up gasping. This is worse. This is the slow kind. The kind where everything still looks mostly normal if you squint. A motel room.A bed. A lamp. Three men talking in calm voices about files and tracking and death counts like any of this belongs in my life.
I turn back to them. Havoc is watching me with that unreadable almost-smile of his, like he can see every fraying thread and is curious which one will snap first. Knox looks grim and steady and infuriatingly certain. Vale just looks at me like he wishes I’d stop proving him right.
“I had a job yesterday,” I say, and my voice shakes no matter how hard I try to hold it still. “I had coworkers and customers and the worst date in human history, and now you’re telling me I can’t even call my friends because somebody might be tracking me?” I laugh again, quieter this time, and drag my hand down over my face. “This can’t be real.”
But it is.
I know it is because my body knows it. Because I’m still sore, still tired, still carrying too much adrenaline under my skin. Because every time I look at the door, I half expect somebody to come through it with a gun. Because part of me already believes them, and that part is the one that really scares me.
I lower my hand and look at Knox. “If I don’t call, they’re going to think I’m dead.”
“We can find another way,” he says.
“Like what?”
He doesn’t answer right away, which tells me he doesn’t have one yet.
Of course he doesn’t.
I look at Vale again. I don’t mean to. My eyes just go there, like some part of me is still trying to make sense of him. He’s the one who speaks truths like they hurt him too. The one who makes everything sound inevitable.
“I don’t want this,” I say, pacing the length from the window to the bed, which isn’t much. But I feel like I’m going crazy.
Vale’s expression doesn’t change, but something in his face closes a little anyway. “I know,” he says.
That does something terrible to me. Makes this feel more real instead of less. Makes me want to scream or cry or throw something, but all I do is stand there breathing too hard in a cheap motel room, feeling the edges of my life peel back one by one.
I fold my arms around myself because I don’t know what else to do with them.
