Chapter Twenty-Two
Espie
The living room carries the same worn-in warmth as the kitchen. A leather couch soft from years of bodies dropping into it. Photos crowd the mantel above the fireplace, the alphas younger there, smiling and careless and painfully happy.
One of the photos shows Ezra holding a cat.
Small. Striped. He is crouched between Kev and Lex in a garden, and he is the one looking at the cat instead of the camera, and the cat is looking at him.
Kev had black hair then, and now there are streaks of silver at the temples.
He’s older than me by more than a decade.
Maybe close to forty, but that doesn’t matter. I feel older than him on the inside.
The room is warm. Two pools of soft yellow light spill from table lamps. The layered alpha-scent of three males has settled into the walls and the carpet and the fabric of the couch.
Aubrey pulls me down beside him in the middle of the couch. The alphas spread out through the room, close enough to be present, far enough not to crowd. Kev sets a bowl of popcorn on the coffee table in front of us.
“There’s more in the kitchen if you want it,” he says.
Lex crosses to us, and holds the blanket out to us, thick and pale and soft, leaving the space between us for us to close, or not.
“In case you get cold,” he says.
Aubrey reaches and his fingers close around the edge of the blanket and his whole face changes.
The little inhale. The way his pupils expand.
I know that look. I'm already doing it. The fabric is plush, deep-pile, the kind of soft I haven't touched since I was a child, the kind that used to live across the back of my parents' couch.
“Oh,” Aubrey breathes. Almost soundless. The smallest oh of an omega caught off guard by something kind.
A noise comes out of my throat too before I can stop it, low, pleased, fingers buried in the pile. We are both gone in the space of a breath, the texture lighting up something instinctive.
Lex's gaze warms. Sandalwood deepens in the space between us, threaded with something pleased. He likes that we took the blanket. The corner of his mouth lifts, and there's a glint in his eye that says he knows exactly what he just did and he's quietly, thoroughly pleased with himself.
“Thank you,” Aubrey says. “It's... thank you.”
His chamomile sweetens. Honey threading through the edges.
“Any time,” Lex says. “Espie. Aubrey. You ask if we miss something. We will. We're alphas. We get thick-headed. You tell us, and we fix it.”
Aubrey unfolds the blanket across both our laps, then frowns at it like it is not quite right.
He tugs at one corner. Tucks an edge under my hip.
Lifts another section and shakes it out, fluffing the pile, arranging it.
Pulls it up higher, draws one side around my shoulder, brings the other across his own back so we are tucked into the same fabric, sealed in.
I sink against him and curl into him as he arranges the blanket around us.
When he’s finally satisfied, we are wrapped together in our own little cave of soft.
“You two warm enough in there?” Ezra asks.
They’re watching us. Ezra’s hand rests motionless on his knee. Kev swallows hard enough that I see his throat move. Lex doesn’t blink. Across from us, Sera sits with one knee bent, perfectly still.
I see the longing in their gazes. They want to be closer to us, but they’re holding themselves back. One of you could come over. I almost ask.
“No, we're okay,” I say.
Kev points the remote and starts the movie. Cars explode. Someone makes a quip about stolen diamonds.
Sera is curled in an armchair across the room. She’s beautiful. Long legs tucked under her, the flickering light catching the sharp line of her jaw, the fullness of her mouth, the scar that cuts through her eyebrow.
The scar is a neat line. I want to know how she got it. If she has more. Where they are. How many. Whether she has ever shown them to anyone before. Whether she would show them to me.
She’s been hurt too. Not the same way as us but hurt all the same, yet she’s been so careful around us. She found me in the facility and saved me. And ever since, she has taken nothing I couldn’t give.
I want to know her. Not just the want low in my belly. The other want. Whether she sleeps on her side or her back. What she was like as a girl. Her family. Her job. Her joys. What is her favorite food and what season she likes the best.
She’s always giving and she doesn’t seem to know she’s doing it.
She catches my gaze across the flickering light. The tips of my ears go hot. Heat slides down my neck after, into my chest, where the echo of Aubrey hums and I can’t look away. I’m drawn to her.
A gunshot cracks from the television and I jolt. Her lips soften at the corners of her mouth. Aubrey shifts beside me.
He nudges his nose against my temple. A soft press. Asking.
“Espie?” he breathes. So quiet. Just for me. “Do you... do you want them?”
He already knows. He just wants me to say it so I know too.
“I think... I think I might.”
His breath stutters against my hair. “Yeah. I do too.”
He kisses my temple and pulls me tight against him. We perfume together, the scent thickening between us, drifting out across the room.
Kev glances over. He breathes us in once, deliberate, and looks back at the screen. He grips his own thighs to do it. Lex shifts in his chair, his sandalwood warming, no effort to hide it. Ezra exhales on a slow count and sinks deeper into his seat.
“Easy, you three,” Sera says.
Lex clears his throat and Kev relaxes into his chair.
“I’m always easy,” Ezra wiggles his brows. His eyes sparkle as Lex rolls his eyes and mutters something like ‘why us’.
Their lame jokes make me relax. I drop. My shoulders, my spine, my jaw. The whole of me gives up the fight. My eyes grow heavy, and sleep takes me between one breath and the next.
Wallace's voice slithers around me. The voice he uses when he's about to do something terrible, the one that sounds like he's reading from a grocery list instead of documenting torture.
Omega 7, heat response trial forty-three.
I'm on the table. The metal bites cold against my spine through the paper gown.
Leather restraints buckled too tight. He likes the marks.
He documents the bruising patterns. Subject shows characteristic resistance despite awareness of futility.
My ankles strapped, spread apart, cold air against my inner thighs where the gown's ridden up so they can access my slick.
The overhead light positioned so I can't look anywhere except into its center.
The needle slides in. Synthetic heat compounds enter my bloodstream and burn. Liquid fire races through my veins. My belly cramps before the needle's even out, muscles clenching around nothing, and slick floods out of me in a rush I can't control.
Let's see how your body responds this time. I've adjusted the compound ratio. The onset should be faster.
It's always faster than I'm ready for. The heat slams into me.
Every nerve firing at once, screaming for touch, for something to ease the desperate hollow ache.
I'm empty. I'm so empty it feels like dying.
I know what I need and it's not here. It's never here. The knowing is its own kind of torture.
The room shifts. I'm in a vehicle now. Floor vibrating. Engine through my bones. Blindfold tied tight. Hands zip-tied behind my back, shoulders screaming from the angle. The gag tastes of bile and copper.
Someone’s sobbing next to me. Another omega I’ll never meet. Wallace keeps us separate.
I want to reach for her but I can’t with my bound hands and the heat is still burning through me and the emptiness is a clawing demand that drowns out everything else.
Another shift. Another table. Newer restraints. Same cold metal. Same surgical lights burning into my retinas. Same antiseptic smell over something organic underneath, the smell of fear and suffering that no amount of cleaning can fully erase.
The voice is different here. Or maybe the same voice. Maybe all the voices have blurred together over the years into one endless drone of clinical observation.
Fascinating. Most subjects show complete psychological breakdown by trial thirty. You just keep going. The resilience is remarkable.
He sounds impressed. Like he's paying me a compliment.
Like I should be grateful for my own stubborn refusal to shatter the way he expects.
I want to scream at him that it isn't resilience.
It isn't strength. It's that dying takes longer than he expected.
I've been breaking for years. Slowly. Piece by piece.
Trial by trial. One day there won't be anything left of me except the thing they made.
The compounds burn through me again. Another injection.
Another trial. I seize with need, cramping around emptiness, desperate for relief that won't come.
I arch off the table as far as the restraints allow, every muscle pulled taut, and the sound that comes out of my throat isn't human anymore. The camera’s red light blinks in the corner, recording everything.
“Espie. Espie!” Something taps my cheek, too insistent to ignore.
The room comes back in pieces. Couch under me. Blanket. Aubrey's chest under my cheek. The lamp Sera turned low. The house. The house. I'm in the house.
Ezra's on his knees in front of me. I don't know when he moved. He's just there, on the rug close enough to touch.
Sera's on her feet by her chair. Hands fisted at her sides, eyes flared. Kev and Lex are leaned forward in their chairs, hands on their knees, jaws set. Every one of them is watching me.
The air smells wrong. Burnt sugar laced with copper. Sharp enough to scrape raw on the inhale.
That's me.
I'm broadcasting distress so loud the alphas are flinching from it. I haven't scented this version of myself for a while. Some part of me had hoped never to smell it again.