Chapter Eight
Aubrey
The dark keeps me soft and warm. Nothing hurts me here. Nothing reaches. Nothing asks. Somewhere beyond the dark, a body exists. It breathes. It blinks. Hands move it sometimes. Feed it. Bathe it. The body allows this.
I'm not inside the body.
I'm here.
The body is there.
Somewhere else.
I like the nothing. I chose the nothing.
The body rocks. I don't tell it to. It just does. Back and forth. Back and forth. The motion helps, somehow. Keeps the screaming quiet.
Scents drift past. Oakwood. Whiskey. It reaches me through gauze, present but not landing.
Kev. He's careful, this alpha. He asks permission the body stopped requiring long ago and waits for answers the body can't give. He purrs all of the time. The body registers it through the sternum. I don't let it mean anything. I sink deeper.
Another scent. Earl Grey. Sandalwood. Sharp and steady.
Lex. The quiet one. He reads. The body hears his voice.
He doesn't pause for responses. He doesn't leave gaps. He just continues, page after page, as if the words themselves are company enough. “I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees,” and then the next line, immediately, no beat, no waiting, his voice still level, never changing. Alpha. Mate. My body doesn’t respond.
A third. Fresh linen. Ezra. He's the one who touches the body the most. Soft hands. Slow movements. His fingers shake sometimes when he tends the body. He's afraid of causing damage. He hasn't understood yet that the damage is the whole of me. Damaged beyond hope of repair.
A hand touches my shoulder. Warm. Pressure. Light. The body doesn't flinch anymore. The body learned not to flinch.
Another hand. My back this time. Slow circles.
Someone is always touching me, these days.
They hover. They wait. They won't give up on the body even though I already have.
Their grief drifts past me sometimes, far off, muffled.
They want me to come back. I hear it in the soft words, smell it threaded through their scents.
I loved a pack once. Thomas, Liam, Matteo.
Thomas taught me to drive, his whole face crinkling when I ground the gears, the laugh coming easily, and he said I love you like it was the most obvious thing in the world.
Liam pressed a bag of paints into my hands outside a shop window, just saw me looking and bought them, and I stood on the pavement holding them and didn't know what to do with being known like that. Matteo sang off-key while he cooked, terrible and completely unashamed, and I used to sit at the kitchen table just to hear it. All three of them, gone in one day. The kind of gone that didn’t let the body mourn.
Then there were… the others. The body didn’t like those. That was when the body learned the dark protected. That it could sink on itself and the pain would be distant.
Now there are three more. Kev, Lex, Ezra. Three Alphas surrounding this body, tending it, waiting for it to come back.
It won’t. The body is too broken. So I stay in the dark where everything is distant.
Memories press at the edges. Shapes in the black that don’t get through the distance. The weight of a collar. The voice that barked crawl. Axel's smile. Wide and white and wrong.
Kylie's laugh when she told me I'd stand on that block with the others, naked and trembling, while Alphas bid on my compliance. The cell. The needles. Days of fire and forgetting, my body used against me, my mind wiped clean and rewritten with obedience.
The memories press, and I flinch deeper into the dark. Down here, they can't form completely. Down here, they're just pressure, not pictures. They want to surface, want to remind me of everything I survived, everything I lost, everyone I couldn't save. I won't let them.
Axel is dead. I know this. Someone told the body, and the body heard, and the information is in there somewhere. Axel and Kylie and Mick are dead. They can't hurt me anymore but the body knows one thing and it has always known one thing: stay gone, stay gone, stay gone.
I don't remember how to come back. I don't want to remember.
And then… a scent cuts through the darkness. Gardenia. Clover. Sweetness with a deeply wounded edge.
The body turns toward her before I understand why.
That specific lean toward something that doesn't hurt.
Fear gone soft at the edges. Exhaustion in the bone.
And underneath both, a note that matches the same bruising inside me.
Fear gone stale from being held too long.
Exhaustion buried deep in the bones. Pain that has dulled with time instead of healing. Familiar.
My attention snags. Omega.
Something in me stirs after months of silence. I know this scent. I know what it means. I’ve had it before. I don't want to surface. The dark is safe. The light is full of memories and Alphas and a body that betrayed me. I know how to sink. I'm good at gone, but the scent won't let me stay.
It hooks into something beneath the freeze, beneath the shutdown, beneath the place where I buried myself. It drags at me. Pulls at me. Reaches for me across the dark. Help me. See me. I'm alone too.
I start to rise.
Light. Too much. Too bright. Too real. My eyes are open and I don't remember opening them. Light blazes through windows, reflects off surfaces. I blink. My eyes water.
When did I come back?
I have weight again. Gravity. The body is suddenly, horribly real, heavy. I'm sitting. A chair. Soft. People surround me, shapes resolving slowly into figures, into faces, into the three Alphas who have been tending the shell. Kev. Lex. Ezra.
Their scents slam into me now, no longer distant clouds but a wall of mate mate mate that my body screams for and my mind recoils from.
Hands on me. The shoulder. The back. Touch that meant nothing a moment ago, and now it's everywhere, burning.
They're surrounding me. All three of them. Worried eyes. Careful hands.
Alpha. Male. Danger.
Collar. Auction. Cell.
My breath comes too fast. They're too close.
They're too kind. They're looking at me the way Thomas used to look at me, like I matter, like I'm real, and I can't survive that again.
I can't let myself believe in their kindness only to watch it turn to cruelty or vanish into a grave.
Please don't be kind to me. Please don't make me hope.
I’m shaking, tremors in my hands, my chest, my jaw. The freeze kept me from this, kept me wrapped in numbness, and now I'm here and they're here and I can smell their concern, their desperate hope, their patience that has waited months for me to open my eyes.
She’s small. So small it doesn't seem possible. Dark curls tangled around a face too thin, too pale beneath its warmth. Violet eyes that are too large for her face, bruised underneath with exhaustion and something else, something I recognize from mirrors when I still looked at mirrors. Survivor.
She's in a wheelchair, gripping the armrests as though they help keep her upright. The gardenia and clover scent pours off her, and she's looking at me. Not through me. Not past me. At me.
The wall in my chest gives way. Cracks and shatters. My heart jolts, shocked back into motion. And for the first time in longer than I can remember, I refuse to go back to the dark.