Page 12 of Slashed Bonds

I hate⁠—

Then there’s nothing underneath me.

The air comes up cold, clean, and smelling of ammonia from the plant and diesel from the lot. For a fraction of a second I’m weightless, and the sky is a flat winter white, and the world goes completely silent.

So I make myself a promise in the only voice I have left.

If I live through this…in any shape, with any body, with however much of me they leave behind.

No one is ever permitted to destroy me again.

Because how can you destroy something that’s already dead?

Today is the day Morrigan Crowe…Mori of Hellsing Ross Pack…died.

ACT ONE:

CHAPTER 1

Rejection Comes With Side Effects

~MORRIGAN~

Withdrawal can kick my tatted ass.

I’ve been folded over this toilet bowl for an hour, and my abs are getting a better workout than most people manage in a gym.

Fun times.

You’d assume a night of chaos and fuckery caused this. Cheap vodka. Bad decisions. A man whose name I never bothered to learn.

Nope.

One of the many side effects I deal with weekly. Daily, on a bad run. All because I fucked around and found out as a naive Omega who thought her childhood Alpha sweethearts were her destined mates.

Boy, was she proven wrong the hard way.

They say rejection is bittersweet.

I beg to differ when you’re on four variations of medication because your pack bond didn’t break so much as get ripped out by the root, and the site scarred over so thoroughly that it can’t be written on again.

Not that anyone’s lining up to try.

There are reasons for that beyond the obvious.

The clinic likes to list them, gently, as though I’m being graded.

Reason one, apparently, is the ink. My arms are covered. So is my throat. Every time I book another session, my file gains a note about how the presentation makes it tricky for me to give off the good Omega vibe I used to have without effort.

Wonder what tipped them off?

Reason two is my scent.

The leftovers of a slashed bond do something to a designation panel that makes clinicians frown at their screens and then frown at me, as though I did it on purpose. On paper I read as an Omega. In a room I read as an Omega who has been left out in the snow.

Reason three is everything else.

Black clothes. Depressive ballads that hollow me out at two in the morning. My ongoing devotion to one particular pop album about a breakup, which I play like scripture and would defend in court.