Page 145 of Pucking Feral: Part Two

I stare at the screen, blinking. This is the same alpha who can't say the word feelings without grimacing. The same alpha who kissed me in his dark room and then staggered back like I'd shot him.

And he wrote my scent match and my mate in a formal statement to the league without blinking.

Plague reads it. His eyebrow lifts.

"That's… aggressive."

"It's accurate."

"It reads as combative. Soften it."

Valek's jaw works. The silence stretches long enough that I think he's going to refuse. Then he glances at me and I give him an encouraging nod and mouth "please."

He reaches over without moving the laptop and deletes the last eight words, then hits the period key once, hard, with a look that says he thinks he's doing everyone a massive and difficult favor.

"There," he says. "Softened."

Plague reads the revision and his mouth thins. "I suppose that's the best we'll get."

"You're welcome."

Then it's my turn.

The room shifts. Whiskey picks up his phone and starts scrolling through loud cat videos. Plague clicks around mindlessly on his laptop. Thane checks his messages.

Valek gets a worn paperback out of his bag. It's a vintage bodice ripper with a Cyrillic title, the kind with a dreamy hand-painted cover, but he isn't really reading it. He's watching Whiskey from across the table as if the entire point of this is to bait Whiskey into harassing him with questions about it.

Fucking with Whiskey seems to be a sport for Valek, and I'm not complaining. It is funny.

But Whiskey is too focused on the cat videos.

They're all pretending to be busy. All except for Wraith, who I think might actually be so exhausted, he's fallen asleep again. His face is nuzzled into my neck and his breathing is slow and steady and soft against my back, his scarred hands resting in my lap and arms loose around my body.

I stare at my phone screen. The cursor blinks in the empty notes app.

This is the part where I write about Wade.

Not the version I've been telling in fragments, either. I can't get away with a detail here, a confession there, like I parceled out to each alpha as I learned to trust them.

This is the official version. The one that goes on the record. The one that says my name is Ivy Byrne and my ex-fiancé forced a mating bond on me and I burned it off my own body to escape.

The one that torches whatever was left of my invisibility. Because I have to protect my pack the only way I can.

I start typing.

It comes in pieces. I write the end first, the part about the flat iron, the smell of my own skin burning because I'm definitely not going with the sanitized version of this that makes Wade seem redeemable, the bus ticket I bought with the last cash I had, and how I came to the Ghosts' arena with nothing and found a pack of alphas. Or rather, a pack of alphas found me, starting with Wraith. Starting with overcooked chicken soup when he doesn't even fucking eat chicken.

Then I go back to the beginning, when Wade was everything I thought I wanted. Then the middle, when wanting turned to trapping.

My hands shake on certain sentences.

I backspace. Retype. Backspace again. Sigh and think.

Nobody interrupts.

The room stays quiet except for the occasional rustle of Valek turning a page. At some point, a chair scrapes. I don't look up. Footsteps move to the kitchen. The coffee maker hisses and gurgles. Footsteps return.

A fresh mug of coffee appears at my elbow.