Page 52 of Knot Playing Fair 2

He hadn’t been as withdrawn as before these last few days, but I still caught him zoning out sometimes—a pale, drawn look on his face when he thought no one was looking. He arrived about fifteen minutes after I did and joined us in laying waste to four large pizzas... but I caught that same look on his face when he excused himself and headed upstairs to his nest.

Part of me wanted to push, to intrude on his space and demand he tell me if he was all right or not. Instead, I watched TV for a bit, browsed stupid cat pictures on my phone until I was tired, and went to bed...alone.

Sleep took longer than I would have liked, but I was firmly tethered in dreamland when something ripped me back to wakefulness hours later. My breath froze in my chest as a full-throated scream of fear and pain reached me through the ceiling of my bedroom. I scrambled into a sitting position, dizzy with interrupted sleep as it came again—the high-pitched cry of an omega in terrible distress.

TWENTY-TWO

Emiel

EVEN AFTER ALL THESEyears, a disturbance in the middle of the night was enough to wake me up instantly. Too many times, it meant that very bad things were coming my way. But this wasn’t the subtle sound of drunken footsteps in the hallway, or the clink of a bottle falling to the floor.

Somewhere below me in the house, Luca was screaming.

It wasn’t the first time I’d heard him scream. Both he and Mia had screamed in the heat nest—with pleasure, I hoped. But this? This was an altogether different kind of noise.

Princess mewed in distress, leaping down from the bed.

“It’s all right, girl,” I said automatically, though of course I had no way of knowing that. One thing Ididknow—if anyone had broken into the house, it would have woken me up long before the scream did. It probably would have woken Princess, too.

I was already on my feet, grabbing my phone off the charger in case someone needed to call nine-one-one. Hardly any light filtered through the attic bedroom’s dormer windows. It was the kind of late that was almost early, and based on the sounds of people stumbling around downstairs, everyone else in the house had been fast asleep, too.

The light in the second-floor hallway was on. Zalen and Byron had beaten me to Luca’s closed door. Princess, put off by too much crackling alpha energy in too small a space, scampered back to the stairway, probably hiding just out of sight.

Mia chose that moment to stagger up the stairs from the first floor, earning herself a startled feline hiss. She still looked half asleep, and her sweet scent was curdled with worry.

“What’s happening?” she rasped. “I heard—”

Another sharp cry cut her off. It subsided into a low moan; the kind a wounded animal might make.

“Nightmares, I think,” Zalen said grimly. “It’s been a long time since he’s had them like this. I don’t know what could have...” He trailed off, his eyes fixed on the closed door of Luca’s nest.

“He went to that counseling place today to sign up,” I said without thinking. “Well, yesterday now, I guess.”

Byron scowled at me. “It was just to fill out paperwork, wasn’t it? Why would that give him nightmares?”

Mia shoved between him and Zalen and knocked on the door. “Luca? Are you awake? We need to know if you’re all right!”

There was a long stretch of silence. I couldn’t even hear Luca breathing through the door.

Mia shot me a worried look. Then she grasped the doorknob and tried to turn it. It barely jiggled—locked from the inside.

At that, I heard a sharp intake of breath from the bedroom.

“G... go away!” The words were choked, probably by tears.

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