Not with teeth, not with a knot, but with care. I was washing away the shame. I was telling her body, even while she slept, that she was worthy of being handled with dignity.
When she was clean, I dried her with a fresh towel, patting the skin dry. I lifted her hips, God, she was so light, so fragile, and slid the leggings back up her legs, preserving her modesty.I pulled the shredded remains of her top down, covering her torso.
Then I wrapped her.
I took the heavy wool blankets Daniel had brought and cocooned her. I tucked the edges in tight, creating a barrier between her and the cold, between her and the world. I built a fortress out of wool and silence around her.
I sat back on my heels, exhausted, my expensive charcoal trousers soaked with water and grime, my shirt clinging to my back.
I checked my watch.
We had been in the house for forty-five minutes. It felt like a lifetime.
I looked at the bowl of water, now murky. I looked at the rag in my hand.
I felt a dark, possessive satisfaction settle in my chest, heavy and dangerous like a stone. Simon might have touched her pleasure. Daniel might have anchored her fear.
But I had taken care of her.
I stood up, my knees cracking, and picked up the bowl. I walked to the sink and poured it out, watching the water swirl down the drain.
"Medics first," I muttered to the empty kitchen, reciting the lie I needed to believe to keep my sanity. "Alphas second."
But as I looked at my reflection in the dark window, disheveled, wild-eyed, vibrating with repressed energy, I knew it was bullshit.
The Alpha was already there, pacing behind the bars of my ribs, waiting for her to wake up.
NINE
Tessa
The first thing I registered wasn't pain, or light, or sound. It was the smell.
It wasn't the clean, sterile scent of my air-filtered fortress, that nothing-smell of expensive purifiers and isolation. Nor was it the sharp, ozone tang of the storm that had been battering the coast hours ago. It was heavy. Dense. A cloying, biological fog that coated the back of my tongue like thick syrup, choking the air from the room.
It smelled like dark chocolate and burnt sugar, bitter and gritty, swirling with a dark, caffeine-rich intensity. It smelled like warm spiced chai and yeast, violently domestic and terrified, the scent of a bakery on fire, safe, yet suffocating. And cutting through it all, sharp as a razor blade against soft skin, was the authoritative, cooler scent of aged bourbon and teakwood, smelling of winter and control.
It was an invasion. My sanctuary had been breached.
Mixed into that complex, masculine cocktail was the unmistakable, humiliating stench of my own biology. blackberries and brine. It was fermented and sour, sharp withdistress, smelling like fruit left to rot in the scorching sun of a high summer.
It smelled like a pack den.
My eyelids felt like they had been glued shut with lead paste. I forced them open, fighting the sticky, dragging heaviness of a drug hangover that coated my brain in cotton. The light in the room was grey and diffused, filtering through the high windows. The storm had finally broken, leaving behind a bruised, silent morning that felt heavy with impending judgment.
I wasn't on the kitchen floor. I wasn't huddled on the cold tiles where the lightning had found me.
I was in my bed.
The high-thread-count sheets were tangled around my legs, damp with a cold sweat that made the cotton cling to my skin. My body felt completely wrecked. That was the only word for it.
My muscles ached with a deep, lactic burn, a hollow trembling in my limbs as if I had run a marathon while dragging a sledgehammer behind me. My skin felt raw, sensitized to the point where the mere brush of the duvet cover against my hip bone made me flinch.
But there was a deeper ache. A phantom fullness between my legs that throbbed with every beat of my heart. A ghost sensation of pressure, of friction, of fingers stretching me open past the point of comfort.
Simon.
The name floated up from the murky, turbulent depths of my fever dream like a corpse surfacing in a lake.
