Chapter 9 Elijah #2
Jabari crossed the distance in two strides, and his fist slammed into my chest. The hit drove me backward into the wall hard enough to knock the air from my lungs, and pain detonated through my ribs as my head cracked against the panel.
Vision flashed white, and I tasted blood where my teeth cut my lip. He was on me before I could recover.
Jabari grabbed the front of my shirt and wrenched me forward, slamming me back again. The containment wall shuddered under the impact, and alarms shrilled as the system struggled to compensate.
His knee drove into my thigh, brutal and precise, and my leg buckled. I went down.
The floor was cold against my cheek, and my lungs burned as my breath tore in a shallow, useless pull. Every beta instinct I had screamed submission, screamed to make it stop, but containment had stripped away the mechanisms that usually kept men from becoming monsters.
Jabari loomed over me, feral dominance pouring off him in suffocating waves. His scent was rage and heat and unchecked alpha violence, and it made me feel reduced to something breakable.
“You do not get to touch her,” he snarled.
His foot planted against my shoulder, pinning me in place as his alpha surged for the kill instinct, the one that ended threats permanently. The room bowed under the pressure, lights flickering.
“Jabari.”
Malachi’s voice cut through the violence.
It was not loud, and it did not need to be. The alpha bark hit the room with physical force, dominance slamming down hard and final.
Jabari froze mid-motion, body locking as Malachi’s authority crushed his alpha into stillness. A low, involuntary sound tore from Jabari’s chest as he fought the command and lost.
Jabari staggered back a step, then another, breathing hard, fists still clenched, eyes burning with fury and frustration. Malachi lowered his hand slowly, and the command remained.
Jabari’s muscles still shook, jaw clenched so tight I could hear his teeth grind. His alpha strained visibly against the restraint, fury barely contained beneath Malachi’s authority.
I could not speak, and I did not try. The room was too small, Jabari was too close, and my beta had nowhere to diffuse the pressure, nowhere to mediate or redirect it.
Every instinct screamed to yield, to de-escalate, to survive. None of those options existed.
Others filtered in behind him, the weight of Pack Meridian filling the doorway without crossing the threshold. No one spoke and no one looked away.
Malachi did not turn toward them. “Look at him,” he said instead, voice calm and lethal. “This is the cost of the rut. This happens when instinct outranks law.”
Jabari took another half-step forward before catching himself, breath heaving, eyes never leaving me. For a moment, I thought he might ignore Malachi’s command.
Then he turned away with a violent jerk, fists still clenched. The motion was not control so much as it was obedience forced into shape.
“You will remain in containment,” Malachi said, finally meeting my eyes again. “You will have no contact with the omega. You will not be consulted on decisions regarding her or the bond. You will observe. And you will remember.”
I nodded once, and the movement cost me everything. My ribs protested, and the bond flared.
Malachi turned and left, and Jabari lingered a fraction longer. His feral gaze burned into me before he followed the others out.
When the door sealed behind them, the containment room closed in all at once. The bond screamed.
Not metaphorically and not faintly. It tore through me with the force of separation, a brutal, dragging ache that started in my chest and spread outward until my limbs shook with it.
Being cut off from her was not relief. It was punishment, and my beta could not metabolize it.
Every breath felt wrong, incomplete, as if my ribs were a cage built for something that was not there. The absence was debilitating, a constant, grinding pull that promised no end.
She deserved space and safety, and my body still reached for the omega I had violated. Disgust followed instantly, hot, because the bond did not care about morality.
My thoughts splintered in a familiar pattern, and the counting came first. It was sharp and compulsive, a hand closing around my throat from the inside.
If I did not count, I could not breathe. If I counted wrong, I had to start over, because wrong numbers meant wrong consequences and my brain insisted the universe would punish someone else for my failure.
Nyx, always Nyx. That was the cruelty of it.
I pressed my palms to my eyes until pressure turned the dark behind my lids into sparks. Then I counted prime numbers in a whisper I did not trust myself to raise.
Eleven. Thirteen. Seventeen. Nineteen.
The numbers did not soothe the pain, but they gave it edges I could grip. My body still reached for her through the bond.
I could not stop the connection, and the helplessness of that made me want to crawl out of my skin. I shoved off the bench too fast and stumbled, palms slapping the wall to steady myself.
The smooth panel gave me nothing to grip and nothing to punish myself against, and I hated it for being safer than I deserved. Safety built for men who could not be trusted with their own instincts, safety built for men.
I hit the wall anyway, hard enough to split skin across my knuckles and send a sting up my arm. Blood smeared against sterile white, and for one brief second the red was honest in a way I had not been.
It was not enough. Nothing would ever be enough.
The bond kept pulling, and my mind replayed the moment I decided hers did not matter. Disgust rolled through me so violently my vision blurred, and I could not make myself stay still.
I could not undo it, and I could not unmake myself. The thought arrived with the cold logic I used to solve problems that threatened the pack’s infrastructure.
Remove the compromised element. Protect the system.
So I tried.
Not for absolution and not for sympathy. For containment.
If I was gone, I could not hurt her again, and the idea clung to me. If I was gone, the bond would have to find another way to die.
My OCD latched onto the attempt, and it built rules before I could stop it. Prime numbers of affected, prime numbers between breaths, because my brain needed sequence the way a drowning man needed air.
If I made it to ninety-seven, my brain insisted I had earned the right to go again.
I drove myself into the wall, head and shoulder first, because I did not deserve gentleness and because the room offered no other tools. Light fractured behind my eyes, and I kept counting through the nausea so I would not stop.
Twenty-nine. Thirty-one. Thirty-seven.
The alarms shrieked, lights strobing as the system tried to correct for what I was doing to myself. Somewhere outside, footsteps hit the corridor, and the sound should have snapped me back into compliance.
It did not.
I went again, harder, and my skull rang as if the room had become a bell. The bond flared.
Forty-one. Forty-three. Forty-seven.
My stomach lurched, and I swallowed bile. I counted anyway, because if I did not finish the sequence my mind insisted I had failed at the only useful thing I could do.
Fifty-three. Fifty-nine. Sixty-one.
Hands caught me before I could drop again, and someone wrenched me backward hard enough that my spine jolted. A voice barked my name and I heard more footsteps in the corridor.
I fought them. Not to survive, but to finish.
I twisted, trying to find the wall again, trying to get my forehead back to the cold panel. My body shook with rage and shame and a compulsive certainty that I had to complete the count or Nyx would pay for my interruption.
A needle bite hit my arm, sharp and immediate. Heat flooded my veins, heavy and fast, dragging my limbs toward uselessness.
The world tilted, and the numbers scattered, slipping out of my grasp. I tried to catch them, anyway.
I tried to keep counting as my tongue thickened and my eyes refused to stay focused. Sixty-seven. Seventy-one. Seventy-three.
The last thing I felt before the sedative pulled me under was the bond, still there, still wrong, still insisting I remained tethered to the omega I had harmed. The last thing I heard was my whisper, hoarse and frantic, trying to make the sequence come out clean.
Seventy-nine. Eighty-three. Eighty-nine.
The numbers did not soothe the pain, but they kept it from swallowing me whole. Barely.