I fell.
Into her scent.
Into the memory of things that had once touched her skin.
I shaped myself around it, dragging my knees to my chest, trying to do what only Daphne’s body knew how to. Make the pain stop. Make me fucking work. Turn the monster off for one goddamn minute!
But it didn’t go away.
The smell of her lingered in the absence, and all of me chose to shatter instead.
“Fuck!”
My hands twisted into the fabric in a desperate moment, gripping until they smothered me completely. Shit. I crumpled, my stomach knotting as the hurt climbed into my chest, where everything beat on the edge of a blade.
This wasn’t working.
I wasn’t working.
Daphne, her name bleated in the dead light, spilling from my lips like clotted blood.
No, I mouthed, breathless and aching, clawing my fingers down the center of her bed when the scream in the back of my throat finally tore loose, shredding through me like the loaded gun pressing into my gut.
I wanted her.
I needed her.
I loved her.
And she fucking left me.
twenty-one
Wolfe: Moderate Sedation
“Get the doc!” I shouted, kicking through the door.
The house felt musty, clinging to the beads of sweat and silence that perfumed the room as we clambered down the entryway.
“Move,” Nathem ground out, snapping his eyes to me for instruction, but the smells and sounds peeling off the walls caught my attention. Fear smelled different on men than it did on women. Not stronger. Not better. Just… different. And tonight, it was all around me.
“Over there,” I instructed, pointing near the kitchen, noticing the splatter of gore swiped across the toe of my Converse.
Blood was everywhere, and I couldn’t stop myself from following it in a straight, merciless line to the moment Threx pressed a goddamn barrel against my chest while Blade bled to death behind him.
What the hell had happened?
I had seen him slumping, the edges of his eyes shaking with withdrawal, but something in that fucking house had demolished what little resolve he was keeping in his rear pocket.The question wasn’t whether he would fall. It was how far I would let him go before I dragged Daphne back into hell to fix her monster.
Not that I was any better, just more skilled at hiding it.
It was not until Daphne moved out for midwifery school that I truly understood what it meant to miss someone. The slow throb of a dull chasm building around the spaces that were once safe took me some time and a hell of a lot of whiskey to understand. Because before Daphne, absence was transactional.
Meaning, you carve people into parts.
How they touched you. How they smiled. The methodical way they lined the dishes in the cupboard by pattern rather than by size. You compartmentalize them into functional memories and emotional responses, so your logic doesn’t break, even when your heart does.
But this did not happen with Daphne. I did not miss her in parts. I missed her whole.