Chapter 7
I've been digging at my hand for ten minutes, and it just keeps bleeding.
The glass is deep—a sliver of it buried in the meat of my palm—and I can't get it out.
I've tried my fingernails, my teeth, the corner of a towel.
All I've managed is to make it bleed worse and work the thing in deeper.
It doesn't help that my hands won't stop shaking.
I've got the cut one under the tap, watching the water run pink down the drain, pressing at the torn edges with my thumb, trying to squeeze the glass up and out the way you'd squeeze a splinter.
It won't come.
"Come on," I whisper at it, pulling my hand back to get a closer look. "Come on."
Blood wells up dark and runs down my wrist and drips off my elbow into the basin.
“Fuck,” I hiss. My eyes are stinging now, and I'm not going to cry over a piece of glass. I've had worse and not made a sound. But I'm so tired, and everything hurts, and I just want it out—
The bathroom door opens behind me.
I don't hear it so much as feel him: cold wood and ice, filling the little bathroom. I go still, my back to Vincent, my throbbing hand under the water.
"I'm fine," I say. Fast. To the drain.
"It doesn’t look like it." Level, unhurried, and closer than I'd like. The deep hum of his voice sends a chill down my spine. "And you've been at it a while, for someone who's fine."
"It's just a cut. I've got it."
"You've got it." I hear him set something on the counter—the small hard snap of a case. "You've got blood on my floor, my sink, and most of your arm. Turn around."
I don't. I keep my eyes on the pink water, because if I turn around he'll see my face and how mortified I am.
"Sonny." Quieter. "Turn around."
I turn around—not because he ordered me to, but for the way he says my name. Low. Almost gentle. Nothing I've braced for. It throws me so badly that I've turned before I decide to.
He's still in the bloody shirt—my blood, gone rust-brown across the white—with a small first aid kit open on the counter beside him. His eyes go to my hand, then my face, that sorting look, taking a reading off both.
"It's fine," I try again. "There's just—there's glass in it. I can get it, I only need a—"
"Up." He nods at the counter. "Sit."
I get up on the counter like he says and realize my legs were going a bit shaky. Vincent steps in—right between my knees, no hesitation, like the space is already his—and takes my wrist in one hand and turns my palm up to the light.
And I forget about the glass entirely, because he's so close. Closer than the office. Closer than the kitchen. Close enough that his scent is the whole room, and my stupid body reads alpha, near and goes warm and loose and wants to sway into all that cold clean weight and be still against it.
I lock my spine. I stare hard at the wall over his shoulder. It doesn't help—I can feel the heat of him down the insides of my legs where he stands, and my heart's already going wild.
"Hold still." He has the tweezers out. He braces my hand flat in his, big and warm and sure, and his thumb settles into the center of my wrist, over the pulse, where he can't not feel it hammering. "This is going to hurt."
"It's okay." Rougher than I mean it. "I'm used to it."
His eyes flick up to mine. Just for a second. Something moves behind them—there and gone—and then he looks back down and goes to work.
He's good at it. His hands are unhurried and exact. He works the sliver out slow and clean, and it hurts—enough that my hand jerks in his.
He holds it fast. Won't let me pull back, his grip closing warm around my fingers. "Easy," he says, low. "Almost. There." Even and quiet, like he's gentling something half-wild.
Nobody talks to me like that. Nobody. My throat pulls tight and I blink hard at the ceiling and blame the pain.
"There." He lifts the sliver free—a wet red splinter of glass—and drops it in the sink.
Then his attention is back on my hand and he just—looks at it.
His thumb moves over the cut, over the old thin scars near my wrist that I've never let anyone see, and it stops there, on one of them, a beat too long. A question he doesn't ask.
When he lifts his eyes to mine they've gone darker, and for a second neither of us moves, and the air between us goes tight as a held breath.
Then he clears his throat, quiet, and reaches for the antiseptic, and the moment folds itself away—but his hand stays wrapped around mine longer than the job needs, and I don't pull back.
Neither of us do.
He cleans the cut. That part's worse than the glass, the sting of it flooding up my arm, and I'm gripping the edge of the counter with my good hand and breathing wrong and telling myself I'm fine, I'm fine, it's just a cut, when it happens.
The room slides sideways.
All at once—the light going thin and grey at the edges, the sound of him pulling gauze turning far away and underwater, my heart slamming up into my throat and then stumbling, skip and catch, skip and catch, and the counter tipping gently sideways under me.
My mouth's gone dry. My hands are cold. Oh, no. Not this–
"—hey." Vincent's voice cuts back in, sharp now, close. A hand on my jaw, tipping my face up. "Hey. Look at me. Stay with me, kid."
I try. His face swims. "'m fine," I slur.
"You're pale as a sheet." His thumb's at my pulse now, at my throat, and I feel him feel it—the mess my heart's making—and something in him goes very still and very alert. "Christ. Okay. I've got you."
And then the counter's gone and the floor's gone and I'm off my feet.
One of his strong arms is behind my back and one under my knees.
He lifts me like I weigh nothing at all, like the whole day weighs nothing, and the last clear thing I feel is my cheek finding the warm cotton of his shoulder and my body just—giving up. Sinking into him.
Every alarm I've got drowned under one dumb animal fact: alpha, safe, held.
He lays me down on the bed. I feel it under me, cool and soft, and I feel him take my hand back up and keep working, wrapping it now, steady, and I float somewhere just under the surface, in and out, catching pieces.
"...didn't mean it," I hear myself say. My mouth's not mine. The words spill out on their own, thick and slurred, from wherever I keep them. "The p–picture. Tell him—tell Killian I didn't—I was only dusting, I didn't know it was—"
"Easy."
"—didn't mean to break her. Tell him. He was so—" My throat closes. "I'm sorry. I say sorry and it never—it never counts, but I'm—"
"Easy..." His hand settles on my chest, flat, warm, heavy, right over the heart that won't behave. "Nobody's asking you for anything. Breathe."
I inhale deep under his hand, and the awful skipping slows by degrees.
The grey pulls back, and I'm so tired, I'm so tired of all of it, and the last thing I know is the weight of his palm on my chest and the cold clean scent of him and a voice somewhere above me saying, low, almost to himself, what are you?
Then I'm gone.
∞∞∞
I wake up warm.
I'm learning to hate that, how my body keeps waking up warm in this house and taking a second to remember it shouldn't be.
I'm under the blankets, tucked in, my head on a real pillow.
My hand's wrapped clean and neat, gauze and tape, professional.
The light through the window's gone the deep blue of just-past-sunset.
I sit up too fast and the room swims a warning at me.
"Easy. You went down hard." Vincent's across the room, in the chair by the window, one ankle crossed over his knee, watching me. He's changed his shirt, but it looks like he’s been in here since.
Waiting for me to wake up.
"What happened?" I ask.
"You passed out. In the bathroom, halfway through my patching your hand." He says it plainly. "Your heart was doing something I didn't like. I finished the hand, put you to bed, and I stayed to make sure you didn't do it again." A pause. "You've been out a couple of hours."
A couple of hours. Him, sitting in the dark, watching me breathe. My face goes hot and I look at the blanket. Then I remember what led to all this commotion.
"Killian," I say, and then don't know how to finish it. Is he—will he—
"You won't see Killian for a couple of days."
I look up. "Why?"
Vincent just shakes his head, once, and doesn't explain, and there's something final and cold in it that tells me not to ask again. Whatever's happening with Killian is happening somewhere I don't get to see, and I file that away with everything else about this family I don't understand.
"The doctor comes in the morning," he goes on. "Early. He'll look at the hand, look at the heart, sort out what you actually need instead of us guessing."
The doctor. My stomach drops through the mattress, but I keep my face still, keep it grateful, and Vincent watches me do it.
He continues. "You did a full day and then some. You'll rest until he comes. No work."
"I can work." It's out before I think—reflex. I’m here for a purpose and I don’t want to find out what happens when I can’t even do that right. "My hand's fine, I can—"
He holds up one hand, and I stop. Just like that.
"You'll rest," he says. "That's not a kindness. You're no use to me dead, and you spent today doing a fair impression of getting there." He uncrosses his leg and stands, and my whole body tightens, tracking him, as he crosses the room—slow, unhurried.
He sits down on the edge of the bed. Close. Right up next to my hip, close enough that his scent rolls over me again, and my traitor body leans a half-degree toward it before I catch it.
He notices. I swear he notices everything.
For a moment he just looks at me, and it's not the cold sorting look now. It's quieter. His eyes move over my face, down to my mouth, back up, and something in the room changes temperature. I feel it low in my stomach, that pull, that want I don't have a name for and can't afford.
His hand comes up and he tucks a piece of hair off my forehead, and his fingers linger at my temple.
I don't breathe.
"Let me ask you something," he says. Low. Almost gentle. I swallow hard. "Is there anything you want to tell me?"
Everything in me goes cold.
"Anything you're hiding," he says, and his thumb strokes once, slow, along my cheekbone. "Because I've got a feeling there's more to you than a bad heart. I can't put my finger on it yet." His eyes hold mine. "But I will."
He knows. The thought comes in a white flash of panic. The scent, he's smelling it, he knows—
No. No, he can't. If he'd worked it out he wouldn't be asking, he'd just say it.
He knows something's off—he can feel the shape of the secret without seeing what it is—and he's holding the door open to see if I walk through it.
That's all. The suppressants are almost gone but not completely out of my system yet.
There's still time, there has to still be time—
But the door's right there, open, and the worst part—the part that actually scares me—is how badly I want to walk through it.
Sitting here with his thumb on my face and his scent in my lungs and the memory of being carried like I mattered, some starving idiot part of me wants to tell him everything.
Hand him the whole terrible truth and let him decide what to do with me.
Because he kept me alive today, and it would be so easy to believe that means I'm safe.
It doesn't mean I'm safe. It means the opposite. An unclaimed omega in this house is worth more broken open than kept whole, and the kindness is exactly how they'd get me there.
I shake my head. "No," I say. "There's nothing."
It's the biggest lie I've ever told.
I swear he sees right through it.
But he doesn't push. He just nods, slow, like he expected exactly that, like he's got all the time in the world and I'm the one running out of it. His hand drops from my face. He stands.
"There's food," he says, nodding at the nightstand, and there's a tray there I didn't see, a covered plate and a glass of water. "Eat. All of it. Doctor’ll be here early."
And then he's at the door, one hand on the frame, and something makes me open my mouth before he can go.
"Did Killian tell you?" It comes out before I can stop it. "What I did."
He goes still. Doesn't turn around all the way—just his head, enough to catch me in the corner of his eye. "No."
The relief and the dread hit at the same time. He doesn't know. He also doesn't know, which means he's going to find out some other way, and I don't know which is worse.
"It was an accident," I say, low. "Whatever he—it was an accident, I swear, I didn't—"
"I know it was." Even. Certain, in a way I don't understand and can't question. He looks at me a moment longer, in the blue dark. "Don't worry about it. Whatever it was, I'll take care of it."
I'll take care of it. I don't know if that means the thing I broke or the son who broke me back. Something in his voice makes me think he means both, and that scares me more than an answer would have.
“Rest, Sonny.”
And then he's gone, the door clicking shut behind him.
I eat, because he told me to.
And some small ruined part of me turns I'll take care of it over and over in the dark.
I want to believe it.
I want to feel it.
I want to be…
Taken care of.