24. Wraith
Wraith
My eyes snap open in the dark.
Something's wrong.
The nest is warm. Ivy's tucked against my chest, her breathing slow and even, her fingers curled loosely against the scars below my collarbone.
Whiskey's sprawled on her other side, one arm flung over his face, snoring softly.
Plague has his back to all of us, but he's close enough that his shoulder blades brush the blanket near Ivy's hip.
Thane hasn't moved from his spot against the wall, chin tucked to his chest, arms crossed even in sleep.
All accounted for.
Except one.
The spot where Valek was sitting is empty.
My body screams when I start to move. Every muscle, every joint, every inch of scarred skin feels like it's been run through a meat grinder and reassembled by someone who didn't read the instructions.
The stitches Plague put in pull tight across my face.
My ribs ache and my jaw throbs with a deep, nauseating pulse that radiates up through my skull.
But Valek is somewhere in this house.
And Ivy is here.
And those two facts existing simultaneously makes my hindbrain light up like a fucking alarm system.
I carefully extract myself from Ivy. Inch by inch. Sliding my arm from beneath her head, replacing the warmth of my body with a pillow, easing my weight off the mattress so slowly that my exhausted arms shake from the effort.
She murmurs something. Shifts. Her hand reaches for the space where I was and finds the pillow instead.
I freeze.
She settles.
I let out a soft breath.
I watch her for a moment before moving to the hall. It's dark. No light anywhere except what bleeds in through the windows. The orange haze of streetlamps, the pale wash of the moon behind gathering storm clouds.
Enough to see by.
Enough to see too much by.
My hand drifts to my face.
The bandages are there. Gauze and medical tape, wrapped carefully by Plague, covering the stitched-up split in my scar tissue and everything beneath.
Secure. Intact.
But my hand checks again three steps later.
And again at the kitchen doorway.
And again when I reach for the faucet.
Because twenty thousand people saw what's under here. And every single one of them has a phone. And by now, in the middle of a night that feels like it will never end, I'm everywhere.
On screens.
In feeds.
In group chats and comment sections and the nightmares of any kid who made the mistake of watching a hockey game tonight.
My fingers find the bandage again.
Still there.
Doesn't matter.
They already saw.
The faucet runs cold. I grab a towel, soak it, and press it against my throat.
The dried blood has stiffened the skin there, crusted into the edges of the gauze, flaking in some places and cemented in others.
I scrub at it with the rough side of the towel.
Too hard. The friction burns against scar tissue that's already raw.
I scrub harder.
Some of it's mine. Split scar tissue, the hit from Wade's stick, the places where he clawed at me when I tore into his neck.
And some of it's Wade's.
I can still taste it.
Iron and salt and the frantic hammer of his carotid against my tongue surge up in my memory without warning and my stomach lurches. I brace both hands on the counter, head dropping, breathing through the wave of nausea.
You mauled someone.
On live television.
Like a fucking animal.
The towel is pink now.
I keep scrubbing.
The blood won't come off.
The blood will never come off.
It's soaked into the gauze, into the scar tissue, into whatever's left of the person I was before I proved the entire fucking world right.
Except Ivy.
And Thane, I think.
My hand flies to my face again.
Checking.
The bandage is still there—
"You have checked six times since coming in here. The bandages are fine."
I go still, glancing back over my shoulder.
Valek sits at the table with a glass of water he hasn't touched.
He doesn't look up. His silver eyes are fixed on some point in the middle distance, his posture deceptively relaxed with one arm draped across the back of the chair, legs stretched out, ankle crossed over ankle.
"Seven," he corrects quietly when my hand twitches toward my face again.
I force it back down to the counter.
A snarl builds in my throat. Not because he's wrong. Because he's right, and he's watching, and I didn't even realize he was there, which means I'm more fucked up than I thought.
The towel is in my hands again before I even realize I'm still scrubbing at blood I've already scrubbed at. My knuckles ache. The scar tissue on my fingers catches on the rough fabric. Fucking hate the feeling of microfiber whispering roughly against my scars like billions of tiny sharp hairs.
Valek watches me destroy my own skin without comment.
Anyone else would try to stop me.
He just watches.
The absence of a reaction in his empty eyes is so foreign that it actually makes me pause. My hands slow on the towel. The frantic scrubbing eases into something less punishing.
I don't know what to do with someone who looks at me and feels nothing.
Everyone feels something. Terror, mostly. Revulsion. Morbid fascination. The pitying horror of the well-meaning and the gleeful cruelty of the rest.
I'm a feral alpha. A visibly feral alpha. My face is a Rorschach test, and every single person who's ever seen it has shown some kind of reaction.
Even Ivy was shocked.
I slip the bandages down to clean the blood beneath them, my eyes locked on Valek the entire time.
His are flat and calm and empty.
I don't know what to do with that.
I don't like it.
"Sit," Valek says, nodding to the other chair.
I don't sit. I stand at the counter with the bloody towel in my hands and my jaw throbbing and my mind replaying the same footage on an endless loop.
My hand reaches for my face again.
I catch myself at the last second and slam my hand down on the counter instead. The impact rattles the dish rack.
"Eight," Valek says.
Another snarl.
The towel is shredded in my hands now. I've been twisting it without realizing, wringing it so hard that pink water drips onto the counter and my knuckles have gone white.
I force my fingers open and let the ruined towel drop.
My hands are shaking. I press them flat against the counter to make them stop.
"Wraith," Valek says in that detached tone.
I raise my hands to sign something. I don't even know what. My fingers form shapes and abandon them. Start again. Stop.
There's nothing to say.
There's nothing that will make this smaller.
I cross my arms over my chest and grip my own shoulders, a self-contained hold that probably looks fucking pathetic, a seven-foot-three alpha hugging himself in a dark kitchen because the world saw his face and he can't fucking cope with it.
Valek is still watching. Hs eyes are still flat and bored, but his jaw is tight. He's uncomfortable. Somehow, not with my face.
I think it's my distress.
My eyes flick to his forearms again. In the glow from the microwave clock, the scars are shadowed and more visible than before. His sleeves cover most of them, but a few of the round ones—cigarette burns—are visible.
A history written in skin.
Another language I'm fluent in.
I take a deep breath and fix my bandages before facing him fully, raising my hands to ask him the question that's been burning in my chest.
W-H-Y… D-I-D… S-H-E… C-L-A-I-M… Y-O-U?
Valek's silver eyes finally lift to mine fully.
"I don't know," he admits, shrugging one shoulder.
"I expected to play out my contract and move on.
That's what I do. I arrive somewhere, I perform, I leave before anyone gets close enough to notice I'm empty inside.
The Carters…" He stops. His jaw works. "My family gave me everything.
Patience. Love. A name. And I still can't… "
He doesn't finish that.
"Then Ivy happened," he finishes.
He says her name like she's a natural disaster.
Why is he telling me this?
My first instinct is to bristle. Ivy isn't a disruption. Ivy is the best fucking thing that has ever happened to me and if he can't see that…
But then I remember.
A dark corridor. My fist connecting with concrete hard enough to crack both. Blood on my knuckles.
The universe had given a monster a scent match, and I wanted to destroy something because of it. Punish the world for the cruelty of dangling something beautiful in front of something ruined.
My hand twitches toward my face again.
I catch it halfway and redirect to the counter, pressing my palm flat against the surface so hard my entire arm shakes.
"Nine," Valek says mildly.
I snarl at him. Stop counting.
"Then stop checking," he replies, and he signs along with his words this time. It's a different dialect, but close enough I can read his hands.
My brain, already overloaded and half-feral, stutters.
Valek signs.
Not fluently, and not in my cobbled-together version of ASL that's half-improvised and half-feral shorthand, but he signs.
I stare at him.
You've been watching, I sign, the movements rough and accusatory.
"I've been learning," he corrects, his lip curling slightly around the words. "I am adept at picking up languages. Always have been." He taps the scar on his head from Ivy's fire extinguisher. "Plague isn't the only one in this house with a brain."
I don't even have the energy to be surprised.
All I can do is growl at him.
Valek doesn't seem to care about that, either.
Instead, he tilts his head slightly, continuing to study me with those flat silver eyes, and for a moment there's a flicker of something else behind them.
Not warmth, though.
I raise my hands to sign again. You should have let me kill him. At least then Ivy would be safe. And the monster everyone already sees—
I gesture at my own bandaged face.
—would have FINALLY done something useful.
"Alphas are monsters," Valek agrees, watching me. "But you…" He hesitates, his eyes flicking away. They go distant, and even flatter, somehow. "You are good, Wraith. Not a monster. And you stopped. Nothing stops a monster."
His hand slides to his arm, his thumb pressing into the round cigarette burn on his opposite wrist, hard enough to blanch the scar white.
Then he comes back.
And the look on his face tells me everything the words didn't.
I'm an expert in communication without words.
I've spent my entire life reading what people don't say because they refuse to hear what I can't.
And whatever Valek just visited in the silence of his own skull left marks on him. The kind of marks that never fully scar over because the wound keeps getting reopened.
"She loves you," Valek says quietly, meeting my eyes again. "Ivy loves you. Does anything else matter?"
I feel my jaw working behind the bandages. The exposed muscle twitching. The sharpened teeth pressing against gauze.
If I could speak, I wouldn't know what to say.
But the needle moves a fraction from threat toward unknown where Valek is concerned.
The conversation ends without either of us formally ending it. Valek drains his water in one long swallow. I leave the torn towel on the counter.
And I return to the nest.
Fitting myself around Ivy takes effort. I'm stiff and aching everywhere. My body doesn't want to bend. My ribs don't want to compress. Every position sends fresh pain radiating through muscles that have been pushed past their limit.
I bury my face in her hair and breathe in her honeyed scent until the spiraling stops. Until it's just her scent and her warmth and the slow, steady rhythm of her breathing.
"Wraith?" she whispers sleepily, rolling toward me, burrowing closer. Her fingers curl against the scarred skin of my chest and she holds onto me, nuzzling into my throat.
I don't check my bandages again.