Page 126 of Pucking Feral: Part Two

Why is he telling me this?

My first instinct is to bristle. Ivy is the best fucking thing that has ever happened and if he can't see that…

But then I remember.

A dark corridor. My fist connecting with concrete hard enough to crack both. Blood on my knuckles.

The universe had given a monster a scent match, and I wanted to destroy something because of it. Punish the world for the cruelty of dangling something beautiful in front of something ruined.

My hand twitches toward my bandages again.

I catch it halfway and redirect to the counter, pressing my palm flat against the surface so hard my entire arm shakes.

"Five times now," Valek says mildly.

I snarl at him. S-T-O-P… C-O-U-N-T-I-N-G.

"Then stop checking," he replies, and he signs along with his words this time. It's a different dialect, but close enough I can read his hands.

My brain, already overloaded and half-feral, stutters.

Valek signs. Not fluently, but he signs.

Have you been watching me? I sign, accusatory.

"I've been learning," he corrects, his lip curling slightly around the words. "I am adept at picking up languages. Always have been." He taps the scar on his head from Ivy's fire extinguisher. "Plague isn't the only one in this house with a brain."

I don't even have the energy to be surprised.

All I can do is growl at him.

He doesn't seem to care about that, either.

You should have let me kill him. At least then Ivy would be safe. And the monster everyone already sees⁠—

I gesture at my own bandaged face.

—would have FINALLY done something useful.

"Alphas are monsters," Valek agrees, watching me. "But you…" He hesitates, his eyes flicking away. They go distant, and even flatter, somehow. "You are good, Wraith. Not a monster. And you stopped. Nothing stops a monster."

His hand slides to his arm, his thumb pressing into the round cigarette burn on his opposite wrist, hard enough to blanch the scar white.

"She loves you," Valek says, still staring off. "Ivy loves you. Does anything else matter?"

I feel my jaw working behind the bandages. The exposed muscle twitching. The sharpened teeth pressing against gauze.

If I could speak, I wouldn't know what to say.

But the needle moves a fraction from threat toward unknown where Valek is concerned.

The conversation ends without either of us formally ending it. Valek drains his water in one long swallow. I leave the torn towel on the counter.

And I return to the nest.

Fitting myself around Ivy takes effort. I'm stiff and aching everywhere. My body doesn't want to bend much. Every position sends fresh pain radiating through muscles that have been pushed past their limit.

I bury my face in her hair and breathe in her honeyed scent until the spiraling stops. Until it's just her scent and her warmth and the slow, steady rhythm of her breathing.