Chapter Seven
Espie
The fever is gone. The aches have faded to whispers. I can sit up without the room spinning.
Progress.
The kind measured in whether my legs will hold me if I need to run. They won't. Not yet. But yesterday I couldn't stand at all, so better.
There’s a knock at the door.
Not Sera.
I know her knock by now: light, tentative, like she's asking permission from the wood itself. This one is firmer, and underneath the sound, a scent drifts through the gap beneath the door.
Chamomile. Honey.
The breath leaves my body.
No.
That scent. I know it. I spent years trying to excise it from memory. Hoping I’d see my friend again hurt too much. So I stopped. But chamomile and honey press through the door, and either I've lost my mind at last or —
The door opens.
Leah.
Small. Thin. Filling out in ways that mean someone has been feeding her, but still thin. Brown hair to her shoulders. Her eyes have changed. Not hollowed-out anymore. Bright and alive.
My legs are already swinging over the side of the bed, feet hitting the floor. She's crossing toward me and I'm reaching for her even as my knees go soft and unreliable beneath me.
She catches me. We sink onto the bed together, a controlled collapse, and it doesn't matter that I can't stand. She's here. Alive and real. Shaking just as hard as I am as we clutch each other.
Her scent wraps around me, and underneath it are three currents I don't recognize. Warm. Male. Layered in the specific way of alphas who've been sleeping close to someone for months, pine and cedar and something darker, woven through Leah's scent.
Three bonding bites mark her throat, healed to silver. Three sets of teeth. Three claims. I stare at the way the light catches the scarring. The girl I was before Haven would have looked at those bites and thought chosen. Loved. Safe. She would have wanted them.
“Espie.” Her voice cracks on my name. She pulls back just enough to look at my face, and then her mouth twists and she drags me back in. “I thought you were dead. I thought —”
“I know.” The word scrapes out of me. “Me too.”
She makes a sound against my shoulder. Her fingers lace through mine, thumb moving back and forth across my knuckles.
“We looked for you. We did everything we could to find you but he’d… moved you and—”
I nod. It’s all I can do so I don’t cry. “I know you would have.” I’d caught a glimpse of her in the dark cinderblock corridors as Wallace moved me again. A glimpse of her was all I’d needed to be horrified and relieved at the same time.
“When you were brought here, the nurses wouldn't let me in. Said you were in withdrawal, said you needed rest, said —” She stops. Swallows. “I’m happy you’re better.”
My throat locks up. I squeeze her hand until her breath catches.
“My alphas found me,” she says, after a moment. Softer now. “Ronan, Gabriel and Jax.”
After a moment she looks down at our joined hands. “I couldn't be touched for weeks after. Flinched at footsteps, at the sound of a door.” She pauses. Comes back to herself. “They never pushed for anything. Just — waited. They're still waiting, for things I'm nowhere near ready for.”
Sera waits. The thought arrives uninvited. That same particular patience. The kind that makes me want to know what it's waiting for. I shut that down.
“Gabriel cooks,” Leah continues. Her voice goes warm.
“Jax reads to me. Terrible stories. They’re absolutely dreadful.
He does the voices and everything. I laugh even when I don't want to, which I think is the point.” The smile softens.
“And Ronan just sits. Sometimes all night. The pain never goes away, but they make it better.”
“Are you happy?” I ask.
She smiles, and it's real, it reaches her eyes. “Absolutely happy.”
Leah got lucky and I’m glad.
The door opens quietly behind her. Cedar and blood orange drift into the room before Sera does.
She pauses just inside the doorway like she’s checking whether she’s interrupting something important, and Leah eases away from me enough to look over her shoulder.
Something passes between them. Recognition. Understanding.
Sera doesn’t come closer. She just leans against the wall near the door, giving us space even while her attention stays fixed on me, that same careful watchfulness she always carries now.
Leah squeezes my hand. “It can be good. I know you don't believe that. I know everything they put us through was designed to make sure we never believed it. I'm not saying trust any of them. Just… don't close yourself off before you know who your alpha really is. That's all I'm asking.”
She hugs me, telling me she’ll come back soon, and to call her if I need a friend to talk to.
“Leah is important to you,” Sera says.
“Yes.” Small word. All I have.
“I'm glad she found you,” Sera says. Her voice is quiet. Something careful in it. “I'm glad you have someone who understands.”
That's what she says. Not I wish it were me. Not let me be that for you. Just glad that I have it.
“Why?” The word comes out before I've decided to say it. “Why would it matter to you?”
“Because you smiled. When she said goodbye, you smiled.” A pause. “I… hadn't seen that before, and… your smile is nice.”
The words land strangely in my chest. Too soft. Too sincere.
Sera starts worrying at the silver ring on her right hand, twisting it once, twice. The furrow between her brows deepens again. Always worried. Sera clears her throat. “I actually came back in to ask if you wanted a shower.”
Shower.
I smell myself now she’s mentioned the word. Sweat dried into my skin. Fear soaked so deep into me it feels permanent. Leah hugged me while I smelled like this. Shame crawls hot under my skin.
Now that I’m thinking about it, I can’t stop thinking about it. Hot water. Clean skin. The need rises sharp and urgent enough that I almost sway toward it.
Sera’s mouth softens into a small smile, and something twists painfully low in my chest because I realize I like her smiles too.
“There’s a nurse waiting outside if you’d like one,” she says gently. “A beta.”
Relief hits so hard it almost hurts. Stupid, humiliating relief. I nod before I can overthink it.
Sera opens the door and asks the nurse to come in. She’s older, gray threaded through dark hair, her scent neutral and easy in a way that lets my shoulders unclench a fraction. Beta. Safe enough for my body not to panic.
The bathroom is small. A plastic chair waits in the shower stall. The nurse turns on the water, tests it with her wrist, adjusts.
“I'll be just outside the curtain while you wash,” the nurse says. “You don't have to say much. Just make a sound and I'm there.”
I ignore the residual bruising on my skin. The IV marks and scars around my wrists and steps under the water.
Heaven.
I drop onto the plastic chair under the spray. The heat moves into muscles I’m clenching. Not just days. Years. The tension doesn't release so much as briefly pause, shocked out by the water.
I scrub until the chemical smell is gone, then keep scrubbing. By the time the nurse helps me out, I'm hollow. Emptied. She unfolds a towel and the warmth of it hits me. Someone put this in a warmer. Someone thought it through and ended at warm towel. I'm not going to cry about a towel. I refuse.
The nurse helps me dress in soft trousers and a shirt that doesn't scratch at my skin. Her touch is quick and professional. She helps me from the bathroom and back to the bed, and I lie down gratefully. A simple shower has me panting like I’ve run a marathon.
The nurse pulls the blankets up as Sera watches every move. Sleep claims me instantly.
I surface to afternoon sun filtering through the curtain. Sera is on the chair by the window. A book is in her lap. She's not reading it. Her focus is aimed directly on me.
Sunlight strips across the floor and over the bed. I move my hand under it and for one second I'm eight years old in my mother's garden, grass itching against my arms, sun heavy on my closed eyelids.
“It’s a lovely afternoon and there's a garden on the roof. I could take you up. If you wanted some real air,” Sera says.
I blink at her, my attention swinging to the sunshine outside and then back to her. Did I hear her right?
“You don't have to,” she adds, and I hear something shift in her voice, not backtracking, more like she's trying to pull the offer back so it doesn't feel like pressure. “You've been in this room for days. You're stronger. But if this is where you want to stay —”
I haven't felt sun on my skin for so long. “Will there be other alphas there?”
“No one will touch you. I’ll make sure of that.”
I can’t help it. The thought of real sunshine on my skin is too much. I manage one jerky nod.
Her scent opens up, cedar deepening, blood orange blooming warm. She's pleased. Relieved. She walks from the room and returns with a wheelchair.
“I can walk,” I say.
We both know that's not true and she doesn't say so.
She waits. Let me fight my own battle with what I can and can't do. The truth is unglamorous: I can have my dignity or I can have the garden. Not both. Not today. I lower myself into the chair. The vinyl is cool through my trousers, and my hands lock around the armrests too tight.
Sera steps behind me. Her hands settle on the handles.
She pushes gently. We move through corridors.
Pale blue on the walls, warm cream. Someone made deliberate choices here.
Real plants in the window boxes, their leaves reaching toward the light.
No chemical undertone in the air, no suppressant residue, no fear ground into the walls by years of omegas trying to be small enough to survive.
I search for the exits anyway. Stairwells left and right, elevator ahead, too slow, too obvious, skip it. Windows that tilt open but not enough. I count staff as we pass, note who looks up and who doesn't, file which corridors branch where.