Chapter 5
I wake up warm.
It takes me a while to understand that. My body's loose and heavy and slept-out in a way it hasn't been since before the hospital, and for a while I just float in it—no cold coming up through the floor, no ache, warm all the way through.
It's the warmth that finally drags me up, because it doesn't belong here.
The cellar isn’t warm.
There's a second blanket over me. A heavy one, pulled up to my chin, that wasn't here when I fell asleep. I fell asleep in Killian’s lap—I remember that much—and at some point he must have let me alone to grab the second blanket.
He covered me. Moved me off him, put his own blanket over me, and I slept through all of it.
My hands fan out but I don’t feel him. Then the fear creeps back in.
He's awake. Sitting against the wall a few feet off, not looking at me—looking at my bag, open in his hands.
I sit up too fast. The cellar swings, gray crowds the edges, and I lock it down and get my back to the wall and my eyes on the bag, because everything that matters in the world is in that bag.
"Morning, sunshine." He still doesn't look at me.
His voice is different than last night—flatter, colder, none of the lazy heat left in it.
Like the man who put his hand on my ribs and told me to sleep and the man holding my bag are two different people, and this one's furious at the other.
"Sleep good? You did. You drooled on me. "
"Please give me my bag."
"'Please give me my bag,'" he echoes, high and thin, mocking.
Then he tips it, and my things spill across the stone—the folded shirt, the socks, the two amber bottles, and the little foil strip, rattling out into the light.
He sets the empty bag aside and picks up the first bottle, reads the label like it's boring, and looks at me for the first time.
"Kept saying you needed your bag. Real polite about it, too.
Made me curious what a guy like you can't leave home without. "
"They're just—it's nothing. It's mine." My voice comes out even. But my heart's already going, already too fast, because I can see where this is going and there's not one thing I can do to stop it. "Please. I need those."
"Yeah?" He turns the bottle in his fingers. "How bad?"
My control slips. Just for a second—my hand comes up, reaching, before I can stop it.
He sees. Of course he sees. Something ugly and pleased lights his face, and my stomach drops, because now he knows it matters. There's no taking that back.
"Kill—" I start.
He pops the cap off with his thumb, slow, watching my face the whole time. Then he holds the bottle out over the drain in the middle of the floor and turns it over.
My heart pills pour out in a rattling stream, bouncing off the old iron grate, most of them going straight through the dime-sized holes into the dark and the water somewhere below. Gone in a couple of seconds.
I'm off the cot before I know I've moved.
"No—no—" I hit the floor on my knees over the grate, clawing at it, jamming my fingers through the little holes after pills I can already see are gone, down in the black where I can't reach, and it doesn't matter that it's useless, my hands won't stop. "Please, please don't, please—"
"There we go." He picks up the second bottle, gives it a rattle, delighted with himself.
For one gut-dropping second I think he's going to read the label—actually wonder what a guy needs this badly.
But he doesn't. He's not looking at the bottle at all.
He's looking at me on my knees clawing at a drain, and to him that's the whole prize.
Not medicine. Just proof he finally got to me.
"Those are—please, I'll do anything, those are important, please—" I've got my fingers wedged in the grate up to the knuckle, scraping, and my chest is a fist now, my pulse slamming and skipping, the gray sliding in fast from every side because I'm panicking and moving and my heart can't take either.
I can't breathe right. I don't care. I claw at the iron.
He dumps the second bottle out over my hands. Pills bounce off my knuckles and vanish into the dark.
And then—the worst one—the little foil strip. He holds it up where I can see it. "This too?"
My stomach drops.
"That one… doesn't matter," I say, too fast, and it's the biggest lie I've ever told, and I watch him not believe it for a second—but he's already bored of my talking, already tipping the strip and thumbing the tablets out through the grate one by one, plink, plink, plink, fourteen days of the only wall between me and the thing I can't ever let them see, dropping into the dark.
I stop clawing.
I make myself stop, kneeling there over the grate with my fingers scraped raw and my heart trying to climb out of my throat, because the gray's gone thick and close and if I don't stop moving I'm going down.
I press my forehead to the cold iron and I breathe, four in, six out, and I let the pills be gone.
Just clothes, I told him. Nothing. Mine.
What a lie.
"Huh." Killian watches me put myself back together with something like disappointment, like the show ended too soon. He tosses the empty strip onto the stone by my hand. "All that," he says, shaking his head, "over a couple of pill bottles. Christ, the drama."
He stands, stretches, all that size unfolding easy, and nudges the empty bag toward me with his boot.
"Dad wants to figure out what to do with you today. I'm gonna go see. Sit tight." At the stairs he pauses, and for just a second something flickers over his face when he looks at me down on the floor—there and gone, too fast to name. Then it's gone, and the grin's back. "Don't go anywhere."
The bolt slides home behind him.
I stay on the floor a long time, over the grate, staring down into the dark where everything I need to survive is lying in an inch of black water, out of reach forever.
Fourteen days, I had. Now I have none.
The clock didn't just start. It's already up.
∞∞∞
Calder comes for me a couple of hours later.
I'm still by the grate when he does—sitting cross-legged on the cold stone next to it, head in my hands, the empty bottles and the foil strip scattered where Killian left them.
He stops a few steps in and takes it in—me on the floor, my scraped fingers, the bottles—and something crosses his face. He doesn't ask. "Up. You're not staying down here."
I don't understand, and I'm too wrung out to pretend I do. "Where—"
"Come on."
He walks me up out of the cellar, and somewhere in the hall one hand settles at the small of my back to steer me—and the second it lands, something jumps between us. A jolt, sharp and warm, straight up my spine. He feels it too; I know because his hand comes off me like the touch burned him.
We go up through the cold pale house, and then there's a second staircase, and halfway up it my body slows. My heart's been climbing all day with nothing to hold it down, and the stairs finish the job—the steps swim, my chest pulls tight, and I have to stop, one hand flat on the wall, and breathe.
I wait for him to snap at me to move.
He doesn't. He just stops a step below and waits—quiet, not touching me, not rushing me—until I can go again.
He doesn't ask what's wrong. I don't tell him.
At the top he takes me into a bedroom. A real one. Bed, windows, a door to a bathroom, morning light. After the cellar it's so much that I stop in the doorway, sure it's a trick, sure that the second I step in someone's going to explain the catch.
"It's yours for now." Calder says it flat. "There's a bathroom through there. Clean up. I left clothes on the bed." He nods at a folded stack—soft grey things, too big for me. When I don't move he adds, quieter, "They're mine. Everything of yours is—" a small pause, "—downstairs. These'll do."
His. I don't have the energy to focus on the strange flutter in my tummy.
"Why," I manage. "Why am I—what's happening?"
"Vincent'll talk to you later. Get cleaned up first." He's already stepping back toward the door. But he stops with his hand on the frame, and he looks at me a beat too long. "You should eat something."
His eyes go over me one more time—too thin, too pale, swaying a little where I stand—and I watch him land on the easy answer: half-starved, run-down, nothing a decent meal won't fix.
"I'll have something sent up.”
He doesn't know the half of it. But it's better that he thinks I'm just hungry, so I let him, and I don't say a word to change his mind.
He leaves, and the door shuts behind him—no lock, no bolt. Is that how confident they are that I can’t escape? Just a closed door?
I mean, they aren’t wrong, but it’s still kind of a hit to my self-esteem.
I shower. The water runs hot the second I turn it, and I dial it back to warm without thinking—the old habit, even now. It feels good to get clean and I focus on that rather than what else this fucked up family has in store for me next.
Once out of the shower, I dry off and run my fingers through my chaotic blond curls. They never sit right but I try my best. When I’m satisfied, I turn and eye the pile waiting for me on the bed.
Calder's clothes swallow me. The shirt slips off one shoulder; I have to fist the waistband of the sweats to keep them up.
And they smell like him—cut grass, clean, cool.
I mean to get dressed fast and get clear of the scent, but I catch myself standing there with the collar half-lifted to my face, breathing it in, my shoulders down from around my ears for the first time all day.
It takes me a second to make myself quit.
Then I sit on the edge of the too-big bed and I do the math I've been putting off since the grate.
No suppressants. Not for two weeks—for good.
I know what happens now. I've spent my whole life on those pills specifically so it wouldn't. The scent comes first, Starla always said, low and disgusted, the one time she explained why I could never, ever skip.
Then worse. Then the thing that gets an unclaimed omega taken, or hurt, or worse than hurt.
In a house of three alphas.