Page 126 of My Unhinged Alphas
I turn my head and look at him in the dark. “That’s very obviously a lie.”
That gets the faintest shift in his face.
“Probably,” he says.
There’s something about the two of us like this, talking in the dark in voices barely above a whisper, that feels strange and intimate in a way I don’t know what to do with. Not romantic. Not exactly. More like a confessional. Like he’s on one side of a screen and I’m on the other, and whatever he says next is going to sound like sin no matter what words he uses.
I lower my voice even more. “Was it about tonight?”
His silence answers first.
Then: “Not just tonight.”
I swallow.
He still isn’t looking at me.
“What, then?”
His jaw shifts. “Things.”
I stare at him. “Vale.”
He closes his eyes briefly. “You don’t let go, do you?”
“Not when people wake up looking like they got dragged out of hell.”
He goes very still. Then he says, “I’ve seen worse places.”
“Me too,” I say.
The motel room is dark except for a weak stripe of light leaking in around the curtains. It cuts across the bed and leaves the rest of us in shadow. He’s still on top of the covers, like he didn’t trust himself enough to lie down properly, and I’m half sitting up against the headboard with the blanket pulled to my chest.
For a few seconds, neither of us says anything.
Then he says, very quietly, “What were you dreaming about?”
I laugh once under my breath. “You first.”
“That’s not how confession works.”
“You’re the one who looks like a penitent.”
I can hear the faintest shift in his breathing, almost a laugh, but it fades fast.
Then he says, “I was back there.”
“Back where?”
He takes too long to answer for it to be anywhere good.
“Places I couldn’t fix,” he says. “People I couldn’t keep alive.”
I turn my head and look at him in the dark. “That’s not one place.”
“No.”
“So it’s all of them.”
