Page 12 of Ruin Me Knot
One sits on the edge of the bed on one side of me. He’s propped against the wall, legs out front, his body curved toward me as if he meant to shield me even while unconscious. He’s dark and broad across the shoulders. A barely discernible scar slashes his jaw with the kind of roughness that says he’s seen dark places.
Another sprawls on my other side in a similar posture, long limbs tangled, auburn hair sticking out in unruly tufts. Freckles paint his nose and cheeks. His mouth is parted, a burr of stubble shadowing his jaw, and even in sleep he looks half-amused, as if he’s waiting for a punchline.
The last, all muscle and patience, leans next to the closed door with his chin on his chest. Tattoos wind down both arms, dark against his mid-brown skin. Even knocked out, he looks ready to spring up, to put himself between me and anything that so much astwitches wrong.
I’m in a small room. There’s warmth here, blankets and pillows piled soft around me.
I’m not in my prison. There’s no bleach or steel restraints for one. There’s silence without screaming or crying from prison mates I’ve never seen.
I shouldn’t trust anything Hardwick told me about scent-matches, but nothing else explains the way the Omega in me arches toward them, longing and warning colliding in the center of my chest. But bigger questions crowd my head.
How the fuck did I get here?
And where the fuck is ‘here’?
An IV is taped to my arm, the line trailing to a nearly empty bag of saline hooked on the wall above me with a shiny metal retractable arm. Hardwick has taken so much blood from me in the past, I recognize the clear liquid. Bandages are wrapped neatly around the cannula in the back of my hand. My skin’s clean, and there’s no fresh bruising over my already mottled skin, which is unusual.
Someone dressed me in a t-shirt so large it slips off my shoulders, soft and warm, saturated with charred sugar. My eyes snap to the dark Alpha. He’s missing his shirt so there’s nothing to stop my gaze roving over acres of bare smooth skin. His chest and stomach are cut with thick, hard muscle, every line and curve on display.
My belly twists as an electric hunger blooms. That’s…different to the sick dread that normally wells when there’s an Alpha near me. The sight of him is obscene in its comfort, a promise of strength I don’t want to want. I fist the borrowed fabric I’m wearing, tempted and unnerved by how much I desire to touch him. I can’t let myself fall for anything an Alpha represents. Can’t forget that in the end they’re all alike. That I’m biologically programmed to do their bidding, to be their slave. But eventually all the care in the world will mean nothing because they will use that power against me.
I try to piece together how I ended up surrounded by these alphas. This isn’t my cell, with its sour mattress and piss bucket. I’m lying on the softest mattress, wrapped in blankets fluffier than anything I’ve known. Part of me wants to pressmy face into the fabric, to pull every inch of material tight around my body and burrow deep like my Omega craves, but fear keeps me stiff.
I remember Hardwick’s face and her manic eyes as she plunged a needle into my arm, sending me into the heat she promised would kill me. Aroused delirium had sliced through me straight away, burning out my veins as I writhed on the hated gurney, while Wallace stood dispassionately over me before everything turned to static.
Then sudden confusion in the back of a moving car. Big and careful hands trying to soothe me as faces swam in my vision. Voices spoke to me, gentle but fierce. I’d fought. Tried to claw my way out of the lucid nightmare, terror and heat snapping at my heels. The most beautiful sound resonated through me and then darkness swept me away again.
I don’t understand how I got from hell to this.
I don’t know how I can trust what’s real.
But I do not trust the sleeping Alphas surrounding me.
Every instinct screams I’m prey, caught in the middle of a predator den. I’m surrounded by muscle and heat and fire that isn’t just in my skin anymore. It’s crawling through my veins, thoughts turning sticky and confused.
They’ve made me anest.
But Haven’s lessons are drilled into my psyche.
Panic ratchets tight under my ribs and I shove my Omega back down into her darkness when she hisses her hunger.
Heat. Nest. Alphas. Claim.
Run. Fucking run!
My body jolts, sending a heavy, unsteady thud through the mattress connecting us. The Alphas jerk awake and three sets of eyes snap open. Their sharp and animal-bright focus instantly zeroes in on me.
My pulse spikes. Instinct screams through my bones.
Move.
I scramble onto my hands and knees, the blankets tangling around my legs. I aim for the door and the dubious safety beyond, but the massive, tanned Alphajerks to his knees. I fly backward and slam into the wall behind me instead. The sudden thump does nothing to slow the panic. I’m too exposed, hemmed in by their bodies, by the heat spiraling through my limbs and the hunger in the air that’s mine and not mine.
The flame-haired Alpha moves fast, coming at me on his hands and knees.
My palm flies up on pure instinct, a pathetic shield against two hundred pounds of dominance. Like that would ever stop him. "Stay away from me!"
He stops. Immediately. His light hazel eyes lock onto me. "I’m only trying to help. You’re going to rip the cannula out of your hand if you’re not careful."
