Page 31 of Slashed Bonds

The second was that somebody had left her to do this alone.

I asked if she wanted an attendant.

She said don’t.

So I sat on the floor of a corridor with a blindfold on for eleven minutes, holding water she wasn’t drinking, listening to a stranger fight her own body back into its lane.

When she got her voice back, I asked if she wanted me to leave.

She said no.

I pushed the blindfold up. She had her mask on. I got exactly one look at a pair of dark eyes with the entire night sky’s worth of damage in them, and that was that.

It’s giving love story for the romantically deprived.

I don’t know what happened to her.

I have theories. I’ve had two years to build them and every one of them makes me want to burn something down.

Here’s the one I keep coming back to.

She was a butterfly once.

Something bright and ridiculous and unbothered, moving through the world with the confidence of a creature that has never been shown a net. Monarch wings. That specific loud orange nobody wears unless they’ve never been taught to be afraid of being seen.

Then somebody caught her.

Not to kill her. That’s the part that turns my stomach. They caught her because she was beautiful and they wanted her still, and they pinned her down and admired her under glass.

And then they clipped her wings so she couldn’t leave.

I bite down on my bottom lip hard enough to hurt and stub the cigarette out in the tray.

Because here’s my situation, and I’ve been avoiding writing it down where I can see it.

This has become an obsession.

She was supposed to be a fix. A biological problem with a biological solution. My body gets loud, the doctors get twitchy, somebody in a lab coat starts using phrases like feral onset imminent as though I’m a weather event, and I handle it the way I handle everything.

I’d take death over that diagnosis, incidentally. I’m already living in the outer neighborhoods of insane. No need to send a specialist.

That’s all this was.

And somewhere in the last two years she got strings into me.

That’s the closest I can get. Invisible strings, laid over my ribs, wound around every joint, spun so slowly and so patiently that I didn’t notice the web taking shape until I was standing in the middle of it.

And realized I don’t want out.

No other Omega has managed that. Not one.

I’m the immune one. Ask anybody on the roster. Ask the girls who spent a season trying to make a project out of me. Niko doesn’t commit, Niko doesn’t stay, Niko forgets your name before the ice resurfacer finishes its second lap.

And yet I have been faithfully addicted to one masked woman for two years, and I bought her a room, and I don’t know her name.

I love it.

I hate it.