Chapter Five
Espie
Sweat soaks through my clothes and cools against my skin, hot and freezing at the same time. My joints grind like something's chewing through them, muscles locking and releasing. Wallace's cocktails are leaving my system, and my body punishes me for surviving them.
I curl into myself and fall back on the breathing technique that got me through everything else.
Shallow. Quiet. Small. An omega whine escapes me.
High and thin. The kind that means retribution.
I lock my jaw shut, but the sound keeps rising in my throat, my instincts betraying me.
Underneath it I smell myself. Sour and sharp, omega distress bleeding into the air with every exhale.
She's there instantly. “Hey.” The word cuts through the haze. “Sweetheart, can you hear me?”
My teeth chatter too hard to answer.
She moves closer, her scent flooding the space, cedar going sharp and edged. “I need to hold you. Keep you warm.” A pause, like she's swallowing something down. “Can I do that?”
She's asking. Even now, even watching me fall apart by degrees, she's asking.
“I know you don't want me near you.” The words come out stripped back, rough at the edges, and I smell the war in her. “You're shaking so hard you're going to hurt yourself. You’ll feel better if I hold you. Please. Let me help you.”
She's still purring. The sound is worn thin from hours of it, raspy at the edges, but she hasn't stopped.
The vibration of it lodges below my sternum, loosening something I'm fighting hard to keep clenched.
I should tell her to stop. I should hate the way it gets inside me.
I don't tell her to stop. Neither yes nor no comes out of me, and she takes the silence as permission. Or maybe she runs out of road.
She climbs onto the bed and wraps around me, chest to back, her arm across my stomach, her face buried in my hair, and her warmth hits all at once.
The weight of her arm. The heat through our clothes.
Her breathing, slow against the back of my head, like she’s counting each exhale to keep herself steady.
“I’ve got you.” Low against my ear. Certain. “Breathe. Ride it out. I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.”
She’s still asking to touch me instead of taking. Not expecting I’ll be grateful for it.
Her body settling against mine registers all the way down my spine. The anxiety slowly bleeds out of me. Her cedar warms as her purr vibrates through me, holding me together while soothing something restless inside her at the same time.
The shaking turns too violent to fight. I feel like I’m splintering apart, and there’s nothing in this room except her holding me together, so my body decides for me. It softens. Goes still.
My omega understands her already.
The rest of me is still terrified.
Need an Alpha. Can't survive without one. You're nothing on your own.
The anger. The fear. The absolute certainty that warmth is a prelude to something worse. My body won't hear any of it. My omega won't hear any of it. She presses deeper into the cedar and the warmth and purrs like she's been given something she was starving for.
The sour note in my own scent thins enough that cedar comes through, filling my lungs instead of competing with the sharp reek of my own fear.
She holds me through it. Time stops making sense, measured now in fever spikes and breaks, in the quality of light shifting behind the curtains, in how many times a cool cloth presses to my forehead and disappears.
My muscles cramp and release in waves. My skin goes from burning to ice and back.
My throat hurts from sounds I don't remember making.
Through all of it her purr never stops, her arm never leaves.
I surface, fighting my way back from oblivion: her voice somewhere to my left, low and worried, talking to someone I can't place; the chemical sting of something injected into my arm; the sour smell of myself saturating sheets, air, skin; cedar underneath it all, constant, like something that lives here now.
Underneath the cedar, underneath everything, her purr still going.
Mine mine mine, some animal part of me keeps insisting, without my permission, without my wanting it, my omega straining toward the alpha.
One second I'm under and the next I'm thrashing, violent, uncoordinated, my elbow connecting hard with something solid, my legs kicking against sheets that wrap like restraints. My voice tears out of my throat before I know it's happening.
“Get off get off get off—”
The room has no shape. No way to measure where I am in the dark. My chest pounds so hard my vision strobes with it, white-out pulses in the corners. The sheets. The smell. Someone's arms in the dark.
She releases me. The warmth goes. Cold air rushes into every place where her body was and the wail that tears out of me isn't the soft whining from before. It's rawer, scraped up from somewhere deeper, high and keening and not under my control. The sour reek of my distress floods the room.
I scramble backward until my spine hits the headboard.
Breath comes in short pulls that don't reach my lungs, the room tilting, shadows bleeding into each other at the edges.
The whining won't stop. It takes too long to understand it's coming from me, my omega howling for the Alpha who let go, come back come back why did you leave, while I press myself into the headboard hard enough to feel it in my teeth.
Shut up shut up shut up!
Her voice comes from somewhere to my left, rough with sleeplessness. “I don’t know what you need. I’m not touching you now. I’m not anywhere close.”
The room is still swimming. I stare at where I think she is.
“You had a bad night. The fever spiked and you were in so much pain, you were crying out, and I...” She stops. A swallow, audible in the quiet. “I held you. To help you sleep. I told you I wouldn't touch you without asking and then I did it anyway and I'm sorry.”
She's standing by the window, as far from the bed as the room allows, hands open at her sides. Gray light seeps around the curtains behind her. The shadows under her eyes are deep enough to look like bruising.
“Can I sit down?” She tips her head toward the chair in the corner, her chair, the one she's been living in.
A nod. Small. The best I've got.
She drops into it like her bones have liquefied. She's been up all night holding me through a fever and the first thing I did when I woke up was panic and elbow her in the ribs and scream at her to get away, and she's sitting there looking at me like she's the one who did something wrong.
The room gets lighter, degree by degree. Through the glass, something I haven't heard in years, maybe longer.
Birds.
I stop breathing.
Birds, chirping outside the window, ordinary and indifferent, going about being birds the way they were going about being birds when Hugo was dragging me into the basement, when Wallace was writing his notes on a clipboard, when every window I looked at had bars or no glass or nothing at all.
The birds kept chirping through everything.
I pull my knees to my chest.
“I'm sorry I scared you.” Quiet. From the chair. “I… I think I have something that will help.”
She leaves and comes back carrying something soft. Folded carefully in her arms. “I thought these might—”
Boots on concrete.
Hugo staring at the nest in the corner of my cell.
Nesting is presentation behavior, slut.
Ripped blanket.
Cold floor.
Dark room.
Hunger twisting through my stomach for days.
Animals don’t get fed.
The noise I make tears up through my chest. My sour smell detonates. I'm drowning in it, my own distress so thick I taste it, copper and acid and rot.
I'm rocking. Don't know when it started. My spine hits the headboard, back, forward, back, the rhythm mindless, the impact grounding in the only way my body knows how to ground itself right now. My arms lock around my knees tighter with every rock. My voice keeps going without me.
Bad omega. Dirty omega. Slut, slut, slut.
Hugo's hand is in my hair and I'm on my knees and the nest is in pieces around me, every scrap I'd stolen and hidden and arranged into the only safe thing I had, destroyed in thirty seconds while I sob and beg and promise anything, I'll be good, I swear I'll be good, please please, please—
Is that what you are? A bitch in heat?
“No nest.” The words come out in a voice I don't recognize. “No nest. No nest. No nest no nest nonestnonest—”
She drops the blankets, sinks to her knees beside the bed and makes herself smaller than she is, which for an Alpha is not a small thing to do.
“I'm so sorry.” Her voice cracks down the middle. “I didn't know. I should've asked first. I keep getting it wrong.” She stops herself. Breathes. “I’m not going to punish you. Just breathe. Can you do that for me? Just breathe.”
Her purr starts up again, ragged, like it costs her something to keep it going. My omega wants to go to her. Strains toward her even now, even while I'm still rocking, the pull in my chest urgent and mortifying, my biology casting its vote for the Alpha.
“Whatever happened to you—” She stops, biting off the rest of the sentence rather than pushing it through.
“I won't bring the blankets again. If there's anything else, anything at all, you can tell me, or you can flinch and I'll back off, and I'll figure it out.
Okay? I'll learn.” She picks up the blankets from the floor.
“I'm going to put these outside. I’ll take them away.”
She pulls the door shut behind her. I fell apart over blankets. That's what I am now — something that screams at folded fabric and can't stop rocking. I put my hands in my hair and pull until the sting is louder than the rest of it.
My whining starts the second she's gone, my omega reaching for the Alpha who left even though I made her go.
I wrap my arms around my knees and dig my nails into my forearms. The sting helps.
Gives me something immediate to focus on that isn't the whining, isn't the smell, isn't the pull in my chest that keeps saying go after her, go after her.
She comes back in, crosses to the bedside table and sets down a glass of water. “In case you're thirsty,” she says.
Then she goes back to the chair.
There's a bruise forming on her forearm from when I woke swinging, and she hasn't mentioned it.
Why isn't she pushing?
Because I’m her scent-match. Her Alpha decided I belong to her, biology dragging her toward me the same way my omega keeps straining toward her. Instinct. Not choice. But she dropped the blankets. She stopped every time I flinched.
That's… not instinct.
Instinct doesn't wait outside the door and come back with water.
“I don't know your name, sweetheart,” she says quietly. “You never told me.”
She doesn’t push when I stay silent. Doesn’t fill the space or rush to soften it. She just waits, calm and steady, like there’s no wrong answer and no punishment coming if I give her one. Somehow, that’s what lets the word loosen in my throat.
“Esperance.”
My name scrapes out of me, barely recognizable as language. My voice is ruined from disuse and screaming and the tube they put down my throat at Wallace's facility when I stopped being able to swallow on my own.
“Espie,” I add. Esperance is what my parents called me and it feels like handing over something I can't get back.
She says it quietly, from across the room, like she's testing the shape of it. The tension around her mouth eases, her gaze turning intent.
“That's French.” Her voice drops. “It means hope.”
Hope.
I press my forehead to my knees and close my eyes. Outside, the birds sing like nothing cruel has ever existed.
Hope.
What a fucking joke.