Seven
SEVEN
Mia
WHEN I WOKE UP, FOR a moment I had no idea where I was or what time it was. My neck and back ached terribly, I couldn’t feel my ass cheeks, and there was a cat on my lap. I was leaned up against bare skin that radiated heat like a furnace, and the sour scent of stale sweat laced with bergamot and cinnamon filled my nose.
“Whuh—?” I mumbled, my tongue thick and cottony inside my dry mouth.
The more familiar smells of mown grass and honeysuckle wafted to me. “We’re in the basement with Emiel,” Luca said. The words were barely more than a whisper. “He’s been out like a light the whole time, but his breathing is okay and he’s had a couple of normal REM cycles.”
“Is it morning?” I asked hoarsely, still feeling like my brain was wrapped in felted wool.
“Probably. One of us should go up and let Zalen know what’s happening.” Luca paused. “In general, I mean. Not specifics, obviously.”
The heart-wrenching conversation from the previous night dropped into my memory like a boulder dropping on a mountain highway. I gasped in a choking breath. My heart started to race, thumping against my ribcage.
Emiel stirred against me, an unhappy rumble rising from his barrel chest. Luca scooted a few feet away from him—out of arm’s reach.
“Um, Mia? I think he’s waking up. Maybe you should give him some space.” There was a definite note of alarm in Luca’s voice.
“No!” I said, appalled. My arm around Emiel tightened instinctively. Princess let out an irritable squeak at the jostling, but she, too stayed exactly where she was—half on my lap and half on Emiel’s.
“It’s just that he might come out swinging—” If anything, Luca’s alarm had deepened further.
“He’s not some dangerous wild animal!” I whisper-shouted. Princess made another little grumbly noise, and I regained enough rationality to realize that me being upset was also making Emiel upset. I consciously relaxed my muscles and modulated my voice to a more normal speaking tone. “Sorry, Emiel. Everything’s okay. Princess is here; I think she’s worried about you. Honestly, we all are.”
Emiel flinched hard, every muscle in his body jerking at once as he came fully awake. His breath caught, and he went utterly still. He might as well have been a stone statue.
Princess still didn’t move, so I didn’t either. “Is this okay?” I asked tentatively, knowing that I would have to move away from him if he told me to. Which sucked, because I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to let him out of my arms again.
For a painfully long beat, there was absolutely no response. Then, breath shuddered into his lungs. “N-no. Maybe.” He sounded utterly lost. “Why—”
It was incredibly hard to drag myself away from his side. I felt like I was leaving patches of skin behind, bits of me peeling off to stick to him as I separated my body from his. Princess hissed softly and scrambled fully into his lap as I removed half of her perch.
I used the ambiguity of his answer as an excuse to keep one hand resting on an unbruised bit of his shoulder—a single point of connection.
“Because I’m really, really sad right now,” I managed in a quavering voice.
“Why?” he said again, the word barely a breath.
“She’s sad because she cares about you, and some asshole abused you when you were a tiny little kid,” Luca said. He was still sitting a short distance away, propped up against the unforgiving concrete wall with his arms crossed tightly in front of him.
Some of the terrible swelling on Emiel’s face was already starting to subside—alpha healing kicking in while he slept. His left eye was still mostly swollen shut, but I could see awareness and memory filtering back in behind the right one. The teasing scent of bergamot and spice ratcheted up, his pheromone suppressors having given up the ghost completely at some point.
“I care about both of you,” I said. “I’m upset about what was done to both of you! I want to help, and I can’t help.”
Luca’s forest-green eyes met mine. “You do help, Mia,” he said quietly. “You’ve helped more than anything else.”
“It’s not enough, though,” I said, defeated. “I can’t even hold you, Emiel. It’s all I know how to do about this, and it just makes everything worse if I try.”
Emiel was still sitting completely unmoving, and I was worried that his freeze response was the only reason he hadn’t shrugged my hand off his shoulder.
“You should be disgusted.” It was barely audible.
“That’s bullshit!” I couldn’t control the tremor in my voice. Tears trickled down my cheeks; I was crying again. “Emiel, do you even understand how amazing you are ?”
“I’m broken,” Emiel grated, as though I hadn’t spoken. “He twisted something up inside me, and it never grew right afterward. All I’m good for is hurting people. Punching them. Kicking them.” His good eye flickered to me and immediately away, as though it pained him to look at me. “Raping them. Just like he raped me.”
“ You didn’t rape me !” My voice rose to a tremulous shout. “I assaulted you, and—”
“Oh, my god, would you both fucking stop .” Luca cut across my growing hysteria, cutting off the ugly flow of words. My jaw snapped shut.
Princess let out an emphatic meow that sounded suspiciously like agreement.
“Mia,” Luca continued. “This isn’t helping things right now. Emiel. I know it’s not intentional, but you’re essentially telling another sexual abuse survivor that I’m a broken, useless piece of shit to my face. So, maybe stop doing that?”
“S’different,” Emiel muttered, not meeting either of our gazes. Princess purred, butting his bruised chin with her forehead.
“Different,” Luca echoed flatly. “Because I’m an omega? Because I was older? Because they induced my heats first so I was begging for it?”
“Don’t say that!” Emiel curled forward, clenching his hands around his bare shins. His blunt fingernails dug in to the skin. One of them was torn to the quick.
I gave his shoulder a small shake. “Emiel... victims aren’t to blame for what their attackers do to them. Ever . You aren’t disgusting. I wanted you in my heat nest, long before I actually went into heat. You didn’t hurt me, and you certainly didn’t rape me. I’m so, so sorry that you ended up in that situation in the first place—but only because you didn’t want it. Not because I didn’t.”
The shoulder beneath my palm shook.
“Course I wanted it!” Emiel sounded like he was on the verge of joining me in tears. “How could I not want that? You. Luca. Both of you. You’re so perfect, and I’m so...”
“ Also perfect ,” I finished, cutting him off. “You’re the amazing alpha who saved Luca and me from his old gang, and who works at a terrific non-profit helping kids, and who donates obscene amounts of money to animal rescues. You saved Princess!”
“You did that,” he said, and he was definitely crying now.
“Call it a team effort,” I told him magnanimously.
“Right,” Luca said. “Ditto to all the stuff that she just said. But you’re also crying in a cold basement, covered in bruises after spending four days low-key trying to commit suicide via illegal cage fight. Dude, you need to talk to someone about this. Professionally, I mean.”
“S’not that cold down here,” Emiel mumbled. “And you got no room to talk.”
I looked over at Luca, my eyes burning from too many tears. “Luca, have you ever seen someone?”
I was hoping he’d say yes... that I could turn to Emiel and tell him, look, if Luca can do it, why can’t you ? But Luca was uncomfortably quiet for a long moment.
“I mean... yeah, sure. Zalen made me go to counseling after I got away from the gang,” he said eventually.
“An’ did it help?” Emiel pressed.
Luca sighed. “Not a single goddamned bit. And you know why?”
I tried to picture a teenage Luca, fresh off his unhappy childhood and four years of intense trauma. “Because you were locked up tighter than Fort Knox, and you didn’t give the counselor a single, solitary thing to work with?” I suggested.
His eyes slid down and to the side. “Might’ve been something like that, yeah.”
My heart ached for them both, so badly I feared it might shatter into razor-edged pieces.
“You know,” I said, “it doesn’t have to be like this. Not forever. Nothing can erase what was done to you both. But it doesn’t have to stay this huge shadow over your life. And, I don’t know... maybe it has to get worse for a bit before it gets better. But you’re two of the bravest people I know. I don’t want to lose either of you to your pasts, and sometimes I’m afraid I will .”
Heavy silence fell over us.
Princess was the one to break it, making a cute little meep noise and bopping Emiel lightly on the face with a front paw.
Luca’s complexion looked pasty in the harsh, overhead lights. “I’ll consider it if he will,” he said stiffly.
More silence, broken by another plaintive meow.
“Dunno,” Emiel rasped. “Maybe.”
I squeezed his shoulder convulsively. “I’ll take it for now. Does that mean we can get out of this basement, please? For one thing, the litterboxes down here really need to be cleaned. And for another—don’t take this the wrong way, Emiel, but you desperately need a shower.”
Luca pushed himself to his feet. “Seconded, on both counts. But... you know, if you wanted to leave off with the pheromone suppressors for a bit, Emiel—I wouldn’t be unhappy about it.”
I turned a pleading gaze on the alpha. “Oh, would you? I love your scent. You don’t have to hide it.”
Emiel peeked up at us with his good right eye. “You do?”
I nodded enthusiastically. “It’s amazing. I want to make a dessert in its honor. You can help me test recipes!”
Emiel looked completely derailed for a moment.
“Guess it wouldn’t hurt to let it go for a few more days,” he said cautiously. “The suppressors... they just... help me not think about everything so much.”
“So, how’s that been working out for you?” Luca asked.
Emiel hesitated. “Not so great, I guess.”
“Try it long enough for me to get the dessert right,” I suggested. “If you hate it, you can always start taking them again.”
“’Kay,” he said. “S’pose I can do that.”
I’d rolled onto my knees on the hard floor when I’d separated from him earlier, and my kneecaps were killing me. Getting up was an agony of stiff joints, punctuated by pins and needles.
“Wow,” I said, holding a hand down to him. “Could we maybe do this in a nest next time? Or at least a proper bedroom.”
“That would seem to be preferable, yes,” Luca agreed. He reached a hand down as well.
Emiel looked between us, hesitating before reaching up and taking our hands with his battered ones. Even with two of us, it was a bit of a procedure getting him on his feet. Princess jumped down from his lap with an irritated huff, but once he was upright, she immediately started weaving around his legs.
“Stairs. Shower. Sleep,” I said firmly. “On a soft surface, with blankets and pillows.”
“Yes, fucking please,” said Luca, who’d presumably been awake keeping an eye on things while Emiel and I had been out cold.
We helped Emiel hobble toward the stairwell, and I silently promised myself one more day of rest before I pulled up my big girl panties and went to deal with the restaurant... and Nat.