Page 122 of My Unhinged Alphas
Not even now. Not when a lie would make this easier.
I push myself up to sit properly, one hand braced on the edge of the tub. My legs still feel weak, but I’m not on the floor anymore, and that counts as something.
“I hate that you’re the one in here,” I admit.
He takes that too. “Yeah,” he says. “You probably should.”
I look at him then, really look, and wish he’d stop making it so hard to hate him this way.
Outside the bathroom, I hear a floorboard creak. One of the others shifting. Waiting.
Vale glances toward the door, then back at me. “I can keep them out for a minute,” he says.
I swallow. And for one awful, human second, with the taste of acid still in my throat and my whole life splitting open around me, I’m grateful.
That feels like its own kind of sickness.
He sees something of that on my face, I think, because his expression softens by the smallest fraction. “You don’t owe us anything right now,” he says.
I laugh, tired and bitter and near tears in a way I refuse to examine. “That’s funny.”
“I mean it.”
I believe he does. I just don’t know what that’s worth.
He starts to rise then, slow and careful, giving me room before he even fully stands.
At the door, he pauses. “If you want,” he says without looking back, “I’ll tell them you remembered nothing.”
I stare at his back. At the man with the scarred face and the killer’s hands and the gentlest voice in the motel room.
And because this night hasn’t broken me in enough strange ways already, I hear myself say, “Do that.”
He nods once.
The door clicks shut behind Vale, and the bathroom goes quiet again.
Not truly quiet. The motel light still buzzes overhead. Pipes groan somewhere in the wall. Voices move faintly in the next room, too low to make out. But it’s quiet enough that I can hear my own breathing, and that turns out to be the problem.
Because the second he’s gone, she’s back.
The blonde woman.
Not clearly. Not all at once. Just in flashes that make my chest tighten until it hurts.
Blonde hair. A face too close to mine. Eyes wide with terror. Hands on my shoulders hard enough to hold, not hurt. That voice, shaking and urgent and so sure of one thing.
Hide, hide yourself, Lenny. Don’t let them find you.
I close my eyes and lean my head back against the wall.
Who was she?
The question moves through me slowly, like something sharp dragged under the skin.
My mother?
The word feels strange in my head. Heavy. Almost embarrassing. I’ve never really had one, not in the way other people mean it. Not a real face I could picture. Not a voice. Not a memory. Just an absence I learned to live around.
