Finally Awake

Aurora’s POV

“Why is she not waking up?”

I heard an agitated voice woven into a distant wave in the loop of darkness that surrounded me. The sound was pleasant to me and made the wave calm down in a serene way. I wanted to move my body toward it but it wouldn’t budge.

“I’m sorry, Alpha, she has lost blood,” a female voice chirped softly, which contrasted with the earlier deep masculine voice. Her voice was also melodious.

“Then give her blood or anything!” the man barked out before releasing a rough huff. And I wanted to reach out toward the voice; he should calm down. I didn’t like the worry and pain hiding under the frustration in his voice. I didn’t understand why I didn’t like it but I just didn’t.

“Brother, calm down, you are scaring the healer.” A new, quiet voice cut in. Then shuffling sounds followed and my body yet again succumbed to another darkness.

“What did you do today?”

The voice came in and I looked around to see I was kneeling on the cold floor of the basement. How did I get here? My stomach lurched immediately because I had thought the bear had killed me. The confusion of being back here sent a sharp panic through me before I saw my reflection in the adjacent mirror and I understood; I wasn’t dead yet, I was just reliving one of the nightmares from when I was still new with Knox.

“I—I” My voice came out trembling as I fiddled with my fingers; I couldn’t look at him directly.

“Talk clearly!” Knox’s voice boomed and my heart nearly jumped out of my ribcage. I wanted to hide but there was nowhere to hide where Knox was. He would find me, and when he did, he would educate me.

My body shook with tears, my shoulders shook from fear, “I didn’t finish my food,” I responded in a small voice.

He smiled softly, his gaze softened, yet the gray orbs were vacant like they always were. The smile that had lured me to him that year. “Why was that, my lovely Bella?” he asked, and his voice had gone gentle the way it did sometimes, the way that used to confuse me into thinking I had imagined the other version of him.

“I—I couldn’t—”

A hot slap landed across my face before I could finish my sentence, nearly taking the air out of me as my vision went hazy from the pain. I blinked repeatedly, tears gathering on my face as I pressed my hands to my stinging cheek.

Knox bent down, yanked my hair tight, jerking my head back so that my face was angled up to his, “What do you mean you couldn’t?” he asked calmly, his eyes boring into my frantic ones, and I could feel his breath on me. “You don’t want to eat what I gave you?”

“No—” I started, and then he breathed in slowly through his nose and let me go with a push that sent me sideways, and he stood and began pacing the basement before going to the table where the whip was.

“I don’t want to always do this,” he said softly, almost to himself, picking up the whip with ease, “but you push me to it, my Bella.” And without warning the first hit landed on my skin and I screamed out. I knew my skin had torn from the impact as I felt blood trailing down as my body instinctively curled itself.

“Knox, please—”

***

“Why is her body shaking?” the angry voice I’d assigned to the man I’d named Alpha bellowed out.

And the female I’d come to know as Roland, who was also the healer, responded immediately, ”I’m trying, Alpha. I need you to let me—”

“Why is she still in pain? Is she—”

“Alpha.” Roland’s voice was firm with a stressed edge to it. “I need you to step back and let me work. Please.”

A low, guttural sound vibrated in my subconscious and I wanted to ask if there were animals around us and tell them it wasn’t safe, but what followed was a resigned sigh and a shuffling of feet.

“Fix it,” the alpha said in a low voice, yet my features softened because his voice always trickled into my ears. I loved it.

“I’m trying.” Roland responded and I felt a sharp sting in my arm. ”Maybe release a calming pheromone to ease her through it.”

Calming pheromone? I frowned at the choice of words before the scent of rain-drenched earth and warm sandalwood assaulted my nostrils and enveloped me whole like an endorphin, and immediately made my body lax. My chest stilled with calmness, no worry, no etched memory of the past, the basement, the whipping, or Knox.

"It has been a week, why is she not waking up?” the alpha’s soothing voice simmered in low tones. I always wanted to listen to it because his voice always pulled me to the surface in my subconscious.

My eyes fluttered open, blinking to take in my environment, and I saw a different ceiling. I jolted up from shock, my head whipped around until it stopped at the open door with a man standing in the doorway.

I raised my head to look — a tall, very tall man at the door, his shoulders almost covering the doorframe — and I gulped. I had never seen someone like this before, never seen someone so built; he was occupying the entire space.

Whatever he had been about to say stopped the moment he noticed my eyes were open, and he crossed the room to me immediately and crouched beside the bed and grabbed my hand in both of his. His hands were enormous and very warm. “You are awake, finally,” he mumbled like an answered prayer.

An electric spark shot through me from the point of contact and I exhaled a shaky breath and blinked from the shock of it, staring at our hands and then back up at his face, taking it in properly for the first time — the jaw and the dark eyes and the intensity in them that should have frightened me but didn’t.

“Are you okay?” he asked, and his voice came out hoarse, barely above a whisper, and it was a strange thing to hear from a man who looked like he could dismantle a building with his hands, but the worry sitting openly in his eyes softened everything about him in that moment.

And my brain, which had been slowly rebooting since the spark of contact, finally recognized the owner of the voice I had been hearing through the dark.

Alpha. I peeked at him again and quickly concluded the name fit him. Alpha — he looked like an alpha.

When I didn’t respond he turned his head toward the open door without releasing my hand, “Roland,” he called softly, “she’s awake.”

My brain was still running through the last things I remembered — the rain, the hill, the men, the bear, the gold eyes in the dark — and I looked at the man crouched beside my bed holding my hand, and in a way that made no logical sense given everything that had just happened, I felt nothing close to fear with him.