Chapter Six
Espie
Thirteen. Fourteen. Fifteen.
She's twisting the silver ring on her right hand again. I count the rotations. The fever has burned everything useful out of my skull and left me with this: her hands, the ring, the light catching the silver face of it as it turns.
Sixteen.
Her eyebrow scar pulls when she frowns. She stretches, arms overhead, shirt riding up, and I look away but not fast enough and then I can't unknow that sliver of skin. I notice everything. Even delirious, my brain keeps collecting details about her like evidence against me.
The fever drags me down again and pressure builds behind my eyes until I think they'll bleed. The sweat is cold this time, clammy where the sheets are already soaked through and twisted around my legs.
Sera’s scent goes bitter as she frowns at me. She never says how bad I look. The basil is how I know. I know what each note means before she opens her mouth, and that's worse than ignorance. Now I'm fluent in something I have no business learning.
I'm shaking so hard my teeth rattle, every bone aching. Her leg starts to bounce and then she starts to speak. “I have two dogs. Biscuit and Gravy. They're absolute disasters.”
I clench my arms around myself to stop reaching for her. The nausea tastes chemical and corrosive, like I swallowed battery acid and it’s still eating through me.
“Biscuit eats everything. Shoes, books, one time my entire tax return.
I came home to find her surrounded by shredded paper, looking completely unrepentant, and I couldn't even be mad. She was so proud of herself.” Sera exhales through her nose, one short breath that doesn't quite make it to a laugh.
“Gravy thinks she's a lapdog but she weighs forty pounds. She tries to climb into my lap every time I sit down, and she knocks over everything on the coffee table in the process. Coffee cups. Books. One time an entire plant, dirt everywhere, and she just looked at me like I was the unreasonable one for putting a plant where she wanted to sit.”
I don't want her voice to help, but it does.
“Levi is probably losing his mind running the department without me. I haven't called him since I brought you here. I know he'll yell at me, and honestly he's right to yell at me. I shouldn't have gone in alone.”
Biscuit and Gravy. Her ruined couch. A department running without her, Levi losing his mind. A whole life happening somewhere else, unpaused, waiting — and she left it to be in this room.
“I don’t like coffee but I drink it anyway.
Everyone else drinks it and it felt weird to be the only one at meetings with tea.
My mother calls too much. She's already asking about you.” She pauses.
“I told her it was too soon. She didn't listen.
She never listens. Been telling me what to do since before I could walk, and the fact that I'm head of an entire department doesn't seem to have made any impression on her at all. She’s happy for us.”
The quiet that follows is a different kind. Longer. Weighted. Her scent goes very still, the basil dropping out entirely, just cedar holding.
“Female alphas don't get packs. I made peace with it, but mom held out hope for me.”
Her voice breaks on held out hope for me.
I press my forehead harder into my forearm. The low burn behind my sternum isn't sympathy. It isn’t. My body is broken and feverish and it's lying to me.
“I got the dogs because I needed something that needed me.” Her voice has dropped to something stripped. “Pathetic, right? Head of Omega Affairs, can't even admit she's lonely.”
She takes a breath.
“Then I walked into that facility and there you were. And everything I thought I knew about my life just... stopped. Like the whole world went silent for a second, and when it started again, nothing looked the same.”
My whine slips free. It goes on and on and on, and her arms tighten around me — (when did she move, when did she cross the room) — her face pressing into my hair, her breathing slow against my neck, and I stop shaking quite so hard.
The fever swallows me whole.
I wake in sheets soaked through with sweat, her hand tilting water into my mouth, the light crawling across the ceiling and marking whole hours I can’t remember living through. Her voice threads through those missing hours, quiet and unhurried, filling the silence with soft meaningless things.
She tells me about her childhood. Her first week at the Academy when she was certain she'd made a catastrophic mistake. A neighbor’s tabby cat that used to sleep on her windowsill and hiss if anyone tried to pet it.
My walls are sawdust by then and it gets in anyway, settling low in my gut where I can't dig it back out.
One morning I open my eyes and the ceiling stays still.
I wait for it to tilt. It doesn't.
I flex my fingers and they obey. I push myself upright and the room holds its shape around me.
The chemicals are finally burning out. Or enough of them are.
My body quiets. That's when I realize what the fever was doing for me. It was loud enough to drown everything else out.
Now the silence comes rushing back in and what fills it isn't peace.
It's Hardwick's voice. Wallace's hands. The cold of the table and the sharp snap of latex gloves.
Every memory too weak to break through the fever-noise suddenly has room to breathe.
There's nothing left to drown them out now.
Just me and the quiet and everything I've spent years trying not to remember.
Recovery turns out to be its own kind of horror.
Sera’s in the chair beside the hospital bed when I manage oatmeal without dropping the spoon. The room is quiet except for the soft hum of the monitors and birds chirping outside the window.
She watches me carefully over the rim of her coffee cup. Exhausted. Guarded. Like she’s trying to decide whether to say something. She sets down her cup and straightens her shoulders.
“The doctors have been asking me about some additional tests,” she says.
The bowl clinks when I set my spoon down.
“Just blood panels and scans,” she adds quickly. “Nothing invasive. They’re trying to identify what was in those compounds so they can make sure it’s fully out of your system.”
Fear locks around my ribs anyway.
“They found notes at the facility. Records of the procedures. They think it might help them understand what Wall—”
“Don’t.”
She stills, her scent spiking.
“Sorry.” She swallows. “I didn't mean to—”
“D... don't s... say his name.”
She nods slowly. “Okay. I won't. I'm sorry.”
My heartbeat trips, stutters, goes too fast and then drops, and I press my teeth together and breathe through it. It's fine. I just don't want to hear his name. That is a reasonable thing. That is not a crisis. That is—
“The doctor overseeing your care is Dr. Maverick.” She watches my face carefully as she speaks. “He may need to examine some of the injuries.”
My wrists throb instantly.
I fix my eyes on the wall.
“You don't have to agree to anything,” she says quietly. “But it would help if they understood what was in those compounds. What it did to your body. So we can make sure anything residual stops hurting you.”
Her scent shifts as she speaks. Cedar steady beneath a flicker of sharp basil.
“We found notes at the…” She clears her throat. “They mention an experimental compound that may have affected your scent receptors, and they think that could explain some of the lingering symptoms, but they won't know until they—”
Serum.
Let's try a higher concentration this time, Omega 7.
The hospital room drops away.
Cold table beneath my spine. Latex snapping sharp in the air. Antiseptic and that sweet chemical smell underneath it, the one that always meant he’d made something new.
Hold still.
My left arm already turned upward before he asks. Vein marked in black ink. Prepared.
You have fascinating biology.
The needle slides in.
Cold floods my vein instantly. Ice under the skin. Crawling toward my chest. It burns when it reaches the heart. My body arches anyway.
Somewhere far away, a machine starts beeping.
“Espie.”
Her voice. I know it but I can't reach it.
“Espie. Come back. You're safe. You're with me.”
Sera’s panic reaches me first. Basil and scorched cedar slam into my senses, fear splitting her scent wide open until it burns through the antiseptic residue poisoning my head. It’s real. She’s real. I drag myself toward her.
“Feel my heartbeat?”
There's a rhythm against my spine. Slow. Warm. She's behind me, arms around me, and I'm on the bed. The sheets are cotton. The light through the window is gold, going amber, afternoon bleeding toward evening, not fluorescent, not his.
“Sweetheart, come back to me. Whatever you're seeing isn't happening now. It's over. You're here with me.”
She's purring. The vibration moves through her sternum and into my back, and my bones go loose without my permission, the locked muscles unknotting one by one. Cedar and basil fill every breath. Just her. Just now.
I'm shaking. Tears have dried on my face and I didn't know I was crying.
My fingers are twisted in her shirt. Knotted there. Knuckles white, fabric pulled taut, and I don't remember doing it. When did I grab her? When did I...
Her arms loosen, careful not to trap. “I said the wrong thing. I should have thought about what words—” She stops. Swallows. “I'm so sorry, Espie. I should have been more careful.”
Weak. Pathetic. My body found her when my mind was gone, and now she knows.
It almost comes out. I know you didn't mean to. I swallow the words before they can escape. I press my lips together and the words burn all the way down. She doesn't get to know I was listening that closely. She doesn't get to know it got in.
I loosen my grip slowly. One finger at a time, I peel myself off her shirt.
Sera shifts back immediately, giving me space the second I pull away. No hesitation. No resentment. Just careful attention, like she’s trying to learn the shape of my fear without stepping on it.
“I’m sorry,” she says again quietly.
I shake my head before I can stop myself.
Not your fault.
The words never make it out.
Her scent stays close anyway. Cedar and basil threaded warmth through the antiseptic hospital air until my body starts leaning toward it without permission.
I curl my fingers hard into the blanket to stop myself from reaching back.
My omega aches after her.
That’s the worst part.
Not the fear.
Not the memories.
The wanting.