Page 45 of Knot Your Pucking Secret

Chapter Seventeen

Sasha

The sight of her has lived like a presence in my mind for weeks now. Fuck, months, if I’m being honest with myself, which has been something new my therapist has requested of me. Healing starts with honesty. Personally, I think healing starts with torture. Because honestly forces me to admit there hasn’t been a single fucking day that I haven’t thought about her. Not one.

She looked so fucking perfect beneath the moonlight. It spilled across her features, giving her an ethereal glow that had threatened to send me to my knees. The ache in my chest tightened until it became difficult to tell one thought from the next. I knew every inch of that woman once. I knew the cadence of her laughter. The warmth of her skin. The scent that had become synonymous with home before I’d burned that home to the ground with my own hands. I hadn’t intended on seeing her the other night.

Or at least I hadn’t intended for her to see me. Every home game since she returned as head coach, I have hidden myself away in the stands. All so I could watch her. Watch the way shecommands an entire locker room without ever raising her voice, but not being afraid to put a bunch of Alphas in their place if the moment calls for it. Watch the respect every Alpha and Beta willingly gives her. Watch Holden and Dominic settle naturally at her sides as though they’d finally remembered what a real leader looks like. Watch the pack I’d spent months tearing apart learning how to survive without me.

That realization hurt more than anything I’d ever experienced. More than anything I’d been forced to confront these past few months. The world hadn’t stopped turning after I broke it. It had simply learned to keep spinning without me.

She fucking destroys me. Completes me. Changes me in ways she’s unaware of, because I can’t bring myself to surface from the shadows that hold me hostage.

I am a masochist. That is the one thing I know for certain.

Sitting in the stands week after week is terrible for my health. Denying myself of the one person I am desperate for is a kind of self-control that I didn’t think I could possibly possess.

It takes everything I am to sit in the stands and not march down to the box and beg for her forgiveness. To show her that the man I was before is gone.

I know I’ve still got a long way to go when it comes to my recovery, but I am making moves that even my therapist is encouraged by. After months of struggling, I was finally able to tell the therapist every single ugly detail of my childhood. I left everything on the table. I had skirted around my truth for far too long, but I’d laid myself bare. The only way I could ever start to move past it was to strip myself down to my bones. Bleed myself dry and start again. Rebuilt the man that was made, and transform into whatever, whoever the fuck I am now.

Nightmares reared their ugly heads, making sleep terrifying for weeks until I learned to let them go. To turn them into something I could control, rather than let them control me likethey had done for most of my life. I’m damaged. That’s the truth. But I realize now that the only way forward is to take one step at a time. To do the work. To accept change and embrace each day that comes my way. Each day is a day closer to feeling happiness. At least, that’s what I keep telling myself. It took me a long time to wrap my head around what my therapist tried to get me to see. That the best kind of revenge against the man that hurt me is to rise above the pain. To find happiness for myself.

Just like Holden and Dominic had tried to tell me.

God, I wish I had listened to them when they tried to stop me from self destruction.

But, I hadn’t been willing to listen to them. Apparently, that is all a part of the complex mental health issues that I had been diagnosed with.

CPTSD, anxiety, and depression.

The thing that has consumed me for years finally has a name.

The medication has helped though. Helped to clear my brain from the thoughts that had plagued me for so long. I am not better by any means. But I am getting there. I am a lot further along than I thought I could ever be. My next step in healing might be the one I have been most terrified for. I have put it off for weeks now. But I knew the longer I put it off, the worse it would feel. I just had to rip the bandaid off.

Which is why I am here. At Lennon’s front door.

I could throw up.

I might throw up.

I could so easily turn tail and run well the fuck away. But I don’t. I need to face her and apologize. I have to. Not just for me. But because I owe her something. Something more than the fucking nothing I’ve given her since she’d returned to Vadena.

I don’t expect anything in return. I don’t deserve it. I don’t think I ever will, no matter what Holden and Dominic have tried to reassure me. I couldn’t help the jealousy that had crushed mychest at seeing the two of them with our Omega. Watching them stand where I should have been was its own kind of punishment. They hadn’t pushed me out. I’d walked away all on my own. Dominic and I are alright. But Holden...

For a while there, I’d thought I’d lost him. I had never felt more alone than I did at that moment.

The first thing I had to do was apologize to my packmates. I hurt them too. I forced their hand even when they tried to fight against me. They had forgiven me. I had cried into Dom’s shoulder for hours until sleep had stolen me. Neither of them asked me to explain. They’d simply let me fall apart. Things still aren’t perfect. I think it's because we now know that we are missing a piece. One that will complete us. Or maybe that’s just the lie I keep telling myself because the alternative is accepting that I destroyed something that can never be put back together.

So I am here in some futile attempt at an apology.

Taking a deep breath, I knock on her door three times.

“Coming!” her muffled voice calls. The single word punches every ounce of air from my lungs, and before I get the chance to turn around and leave, the door is opening.

I hadn’t known what to expect before I came here, but it certainly isn’t what greets me.

Lennon's face is flushed, the edges of her hair drenched in sweat. Her scent hits me like a freight train.Fuck.She is close to her heat. It wraps around me before I can stop it, settling deep in my body until every instinct I have screams to close the distance between us. To touch. To soothe. To belong.