Epilogue One
KNOX
Two Weeks Later …
“This is getting out of hand.”
I dropped the stack of letters onto the bed beside Rogue. He paused his handheld and peered down at them.
“Oh. She’s still doing that?”
“She hasn’t stopped.”
She’d been sitting on my lap as I worked at my desk one day, sketching away, when her scent had gone sour with panic. I’d looked down to see her staring at a piece of mail I hadn’t opened.
It took me a moment to understand.
It was the first time she’d seen my name written out.
And the first time she’d realised the letter she’d carved onto my neck was the wrong one. Not that I cared, her claim was all that mattered, but it had sent her into a spiral.
Since then, it had been unending. As if in compulsion, she’d snuck into my office at night, digging through my drawers to find every possible document with my name on it.
They all now looked the same as the letters I’d dropped on Rogue’s bed.
Every ‘K’ had been scribbled out with black pen, the marks getting more distressed as the number of documents piled up. She’d scribbled a hole right through my birth certificate.
“Have you brought it up with her?” Rogue asked.
“I don’t know how.” It wasn’t even that I didn’t want to, but every time she spotted the mark on my neck, she balled up with anxiety.
“Have you considered changing your name?” Rogue suggested with a snort.
I groaned, laying back on the bed. “That would take months . Security told me she got up early yesterday to stalk the postman.”
Rogue chuckled, but cut off at the look on my face.
“Show me,” Rogue said. “See if we can change it.”
I sighed, straightening and tugging my collar down. I’d tried already, but there weren’t many ways to turn an ‘N’ into a ‘K’. I’d looked at it a million times. The ‘N+T’—I loved it. It was perfect . I didn’t give a shit how she spelled my name. But her distress was turning it sour.
Rogue stared at it for a long time.
“You know, I think I can fix it.”
“I want mine to be bigger than Rogue’s.” I dropped onto her bed in the nest beside where she was sketching a little while later.
“Your… what?”
“My mark,” I said, patting my neck. Like always, at the mention of my mark, she tensed, a flood of distress coming down the bond.
“Bigger?” she asked. “Like you want me to do… more?”
“Is that allowed?”
She frowned. “Because you don’t like it?”
“I love it.”
“Oh.” She sounded fragile. “Good.”
“Can I show you?” I asked. “I drew out what I want.”
She nodded.
I undid my collar to show her the sharpie marks Rogue had made across my neck. We thought we’d managed to make it work out just right.
The original scar was an ‘N+T’ in a haphazard scrawl. Rogue had managed to fit an ‘O’ between the ‘N’ and the ‘+’ that made it look like the fully written word ‘Nox’. Then he’d finished off her full name after the T.
With the marker, it read: ‘Nox and Thistle’.
She peered at it. “Oh, you want me to write it all out?”
“I don’t want anyone confused about who I belong to.”
“Shit.” She frowned. “Didn’t even think about that.” She was already rummaging around in Bunny’s stuffing. “It’ll go a bit around the back, though,” she said, finding her knife and pulling it out.
“Fine by me.”
She gave me a smile, flipping the blade, then paused, eyes tracing over the new additions. I could see the cogs turning in her mind, a sharp spike of relief slowly saturating her scent. “Actually. If we’re going to change it… I noticed that uh… some people seem to think it’s spelled… wrong?”
“Oh. The K?” I asked, as if it was possible I hadn’t noticed every document in my life turning up with black scribbles upon it. “Yeh. Had that issue my whole life.”
She chewed on her lip. “The bank misspelled it—and then I even saw one from the government ?”
“Oh, yeah, I know why,” I said, waving a hand. “My parents got it wrong when I was born. Everyone copied them after that.”
“Damn.” She tapped the flat of the knife on her palm. “Well, we should probably add it, then? Just in case the bank needs to like… know?”
I let out an internal sigh of relief. “I never thought about that. Not a bad idea.”
“Okay, great. I mean it’s stupid. But I think it’ll make everything easier…”
I laid down on the bed as she got to carving, smiling at the hum in her chest as she worked, every ounce of anxiety she’d had fading away as she fixed it.