Chapter 6 Nyx
NYX
Iwas braiding Tatum’s hair.
We were sitting on the edge of a narrow foster-care bed, our knees knocking together every time she shifted.
The mattress dipped under our weight, springs complaining, and the room smelled like cocoa butter and laundry detergent that never quite worked.
Her curls were damp from the sink, lighter where the water caught them, slipping through my fingers.
“Not too tight,” she said, already smiling. She tilted her head anyway, giving me better access, the way she always did when she wanted to feel taken care of without asking for it.
“I know,” I said. “You say that every time.”
“That’s because you be forgetting,” she shot back, laughing when I flicked her ear.
She talked while I worked, filling the space with nonsense about school, about a girl she didn’t like, about how this placement wasn’t that bad if you ignored the rules about snacks and bedtime.
Her voice stayed light on purpose. Mine did too.
I parted her hair slow and careful, fingers steady from practice. I had learned early that if I did this right, if I made her feel put together and seen, the rest of the world mattered a little less. She leaned back against me when I finished the first braid, warm and solid.
“You gonna keep doing my hair when I’m grown?” she asked, half joking, half serious.
“Somebody gotta make sure you don’t walk around looking crazy,” I said, and she laughed, loud and unafraid.
The sound stuck in my chest, sharp and sweet, and then it slipped away.
I came back to myself the way I always did when things went wrong, quiet on the outside, loud on the inside. Panic never helped me, and I hated that I couldn’t control it.
Breath came first, and it came wrong. It was shallow and measured, and the air scraped my throat, stripped of warmth, scrubbed until I shut down.
Weight followed. Pressure pinned me flat, my spine pressed hard, my shoulders aching, and my wrists complained before my eyes even opened.
Memory crawled in last, stubborn and incomplete. Concrete at my back, cold enough to bleed through fabric and into bone, and then the echo of a forearm locked under my jaw.
It hadn’t been rage. It hadn’t been chaos. It had been control, air thinning by degrees and not by accident, not enough to kill, enough to teach.
My stomach rolled at the aftertaste. I swallowed on reflex and tasted chemical bitterness clinging to the back of my throat, sharp and medicinal.
Suppressants, and something that made my limbs heavy. The realization didn’t land because they hadn’t guessed at what I was. They’d planned for it.
Scent hit before reason. Not mine, not fully, not with the inhibitor still riding my blood, but instinct didn’t need permission to read a room.
Smoked cedar and black pepper came first, edged with charred clove underneath. It pushed through whatever chemical filter they’d flooded the air with, the way danger still leaks through even when you try to bleach it out.
My throat remembered that forearm before my mind could place it, and my body betrayed me anyway with a flicker of awareness that warmed my skin even as nausea tightened my gut.
My omega recognized the alpha who’d handled me like a warning label, calm and precise and close enough to leave heat behind.
Then the timeline slid again. Not memories. Not a sequence. Just impressions slipping past, my weight shifting, being lifted or lowered, hands adjusting me without asking.
A door. A corridor. The bright bite of antiseptic. My body heavy and uncooperative.
A forearm under my jaw again, pressure calibrated, my vision narrowing at the edges while a voice somewhere said my name. I tasted metal and medicine and humiliation all at once, and then a sting, sharp at the side of my neck, followed by warmth spreading through my veins.
One thing stayed solid and clicked into place with ugly clarity. I wasn’t where I’d been before.
When awareness steadied, the force was gone. No arm at my throat, but the room still held me, and that mattered.
Observation prickled at my scalp, as if the space itself watched. My eyes opened into flat light.
Voices drifted around me in fragments. Low. Male. Controlled.
“She ran when she found it.”
“Sedation was necessary.”
“Omega response escalated.”
I caught tone before order. Irritation held tight, restraint layered over instinct, men arguing quietly the way people do when they think volume is the same thing as losing control.
Sound faded, but scent didn’t. Smoked cedar and black pepper lingered closest, charred clove riding the back of my throat even through suppression, and it made my omega twitch between fear and reflex.
Under that heat came something cool and precise, cold linen with bergamot and the faint bite of ink. Clean to the point of sterile. Controlled to the point of unnerving. It didn’t pull at my omega at all, and the absence felt intentional.
Another presence hovered near, brighter and restless, mint leaf and lime zest cutting through the filtered air with a sweet sugarcane finish. Too alive for a room designed to flatten time, and my pulse answered it with a fast, stupid beat.
The last scent didn’t rush in. Aged leather and oak, dark amber warmed by something almost indulgent, black tea steeped too long until it turned bitter.
It filled the space without effort, steady enough that my omega didn’t flare. It went quiet instead.
The room came into focus in pieces. No windows. No shadows. No edges that invited escape. Light poured down from somewhere overhead, constant and flat, erasing the idea of night and morning.
The air tasted expensive and sterile. The quiet pressed against my ears until I could hear my pulse thick in my throat.
This place wasn’t built for pain, at least not the obvious kind. It was built for waiting, for letting fear ferment until it turned into compliance.
My wrists were cuffed. Metal kissed bone every time I flexed, and thin red lines burned. My ankles were restrained too, not tight enough to cut circulation, tight enough to remind me what my body belonged to right now.
I didn’t fight the restraints, even though my body tried to reach for panic. That urge had burned out somewhere deep in my chest, because panic wasted energy and whoever designed this room understood that.
So I tested instead, because panic was expensive, and curiosity was cheaper than dying.
I started with my wrists, rotating carefully until the cuffs kissed bone, then easing back, mapping the exact point the metal gave and the exact point it refused. I learned the angle that would bruise and the angle that would only warn, and I filed it away.
They weren’t loose, but they weren’t cruel. That meant the goal wasn’t injury. It meant they wanted me functional.
Ankles next. Smaller range, but not none. Whoever did this wanted me restrained, not broken.
Then I tested the bed. I shifted my weight in a slow drag across the mattress seam, listening for the smallest change in sound, the kind that would tell me what was bolted down and what was monitored.
The bed didn’t creak. It didn’t answer at all, and that told me everything.
A camera in the corner, small enough to pretend it wasn’t there, angled slightly too low to be for security alone. A vent above the light panel, the grate too clean. A thin seam in the wall that could’ve been a door, or a panel.
No call button. No handle. They didn’t want me to ask for anything.
I dragged my cuffed hands along the mattress edge, searching for a stitch, a lip, a hidden clasp. Nothing. Seamless.
So I made my data. I jerked my wrists once, hard. Metal snapped against the frame with a sharp crack that didn’t sound accidental.
Then I went still again and counted in my head, slow and steady.
One. Two. Three. Four.
At five, the camera pivoted with a soft mechanical whir, just enough to remind me it had been watching the whole time. At seven, a speaker hidden somewhere in the wall clicked on, the sound faint and controlled.
“Do that again, and we sedate you properly.”
I didn’t answer. Silence had weight here, and I was learning how to carry it without letting it crush me.
The seam opened, and the room’s pressure shifted with it. No announcement and no rush, just a change in air that made my skin tighten.
Aged leather and black tea reached me first, calm and unhurried, and my body recognized it before my mind could place it. Not new. Not unfamiliar. Something I had already survived once.
The room seemed to make space for it on instinct, like it understood what had just walked in before anyone else did.
He stepped inside. No guards. No visible weapons. He didn’t need them.
He was tall, dark-skinned, broad through the shoulders in a way that came from certainty rather than constant violence. Age sat on him comfortably. Mid forties, maybe older if you measured by the weight in his eyes instead of the lines on his face.
His suit was black and tailored perfectly. Everything about him said control, the kind that did not require volume.
He stopped just inside and assessed the space the way I had, only faster. Then he looked at me, and I felt it like a hand closing around my throat.
Not at the restraints. Not at my body. My face.
That was when I knew I mattered, not as a person, but as a variable.
“Nyx Brooks.”
I stayed silent, because silence was the only thing in this room that belonged to me.
His gaze dipped, not to my chest or my legs, but to my wrists where the cuffs had left thin red lines. The look wasn’t sympathy. It was an assessment.
“You’re calculating.” His mouth curved, not quite a smile. “Good. Most people spend their first minutes begging for their lives.”
He moved closer, deliberate and unhurried, each step chosen. Distance existed here only because he allowed it, and my body knew that before my mind did.