Cold Water

Trishelle's POV

The basement stayed cold year-round. Fourteen years sleeping on that shitty mattress, and Trishelle knew every crack in the concrete that leaked freezing air, every spot on the ceiling that dripped when it rained. She'd given up on the cold around the same time she'd stopped thinking anyone would fix the busted vent.

She wasn't really asleep. Three hours of half-rest, one ear always listening - that's all this house ever let her have.

The door at the top of the stairs banged open.

Boots. Two pairs, heavy on the wood. And underneath, the slosh of a full bucket.

Before she could sit up, the water slammed into her.

Not just cold - violent. It punched the air from her lungs and made everything go white. Trishelle jerked off the mattress, gasping. The blanket was soaked through. Her hair plastered dark and wet across her face.

Laughter echoed down the stairs. Easy, careless laughter from men who'd never been on the receiving end.

"Rise and shine, Trash."

She shoved her hair back with shaking hands and blinked water from her eyes. Jack stood at the bottom of the steps, empty bucket swinging from two fingers, grinning like he'd just won something. Mid-rank warrior, built like a brick wall, jaw like it'd been carved from stone. Not the worst of them. Not the best either. Just another asshole.

She lifted her wet shirt and sniffed. Clean-ish. Tap water, not the nasty mop bucket water. Small victory.

She said nothing. Silence was always safest. Any response - question, complaint, even a simple yes sir - opened a door, and doors in this house only led to worse shit.

"Breakfast's not gonna cook itself, Trash," Jack said, already turning away, already bored. He stopped on the second step. The smile he threw over his shoulder said he wasn't done yet. "Alpha wants French toast. Bacon, eggs, sausage, fresh-squeezed juice." He paused. "And coffee. Warriors'll be down soon. Don't drag ass, or I'll find a bigger bucket."

"Yes," she said, voice flat and steady. She'd practiced that tone for years. "It'll be ready."

He snorted and left, the door slamming above her. Trishelle sat alone in the dark, cold water dripping from her hair and pooling in the floor cracks.

She gave herself ten seconds.

Exactly ten. She'd learned that number the hard way around age twelve. Ten seconds was the limit. Any longer sitting in her own misery and the weight would crawl up her chest and lock there, and then she couldn't breathe, let alone cook.

She counted them like a bomb timer that never went off.

Then she got up.

The kitchen was different territory.

It took up the whole back half of the ground floor. Four industrial stoves, beat to hell from years of use. Pots hanging in rows from an iron rack. Refrigerators like steel vaults. Pale granite counters that showed every fingerprint if she didn't stay on top of them. This was the one place in the Bloodmoon pack house where her hands mattered, even if that only showed up as demands instead of thanks.

She could cook. Always could. Self-taught at first, watching through cracked doors, then sharpened the way a knife gets sharpened - over and over against something hard.

She checked the window on her way to the fridge. Still dark. That thick black that sits right before dawn. Not even four yet.

She twisted her wet hair into a bun, snapped the elastic from her wrist, and started pulling ingredients.

Bread first. Always. Alpha James wouldn't touch store-bought, never had. He wanted perfect texture and crust with just the right give. She'd learned that at fifteen the hard way, using bakery bread one morning when she'd miscalculated her time by twenty minutes. He'd picked up the toast, looked at it like roadkill, and set it down without a word. The silence had been worse than yelling.

She'd never miscalculated again.

While the dough came together under her hands, she ran the morning's list. Never just his plate. Twenty-three warriors trained before dawn and came to breakfast ready to eat everything in sight. Warrior Dae couldn't eat pork - she'd learned that the first month, paid for it in ways she didn't let herself remember. Three pregnant pack members needed menus that changed constantly. Old Councilman Brett's eggs had to be over-easy, never scrambled, never poached. He'd complained straight to the Alpha the one time she'd screwed up.

She kept it all in her head like a constantly updating map. One mistake and someone paid. Usually her.

The dough went to rest. She moved to sausages, then bacon, then the oranges she'd pulled out last night so they'd hit room temperature. Cold oranges gave half the juice - another lesson learned through bruises.

She was deep in the rhythm, knife moving on autopilot, when her body went cold.

Not Jack's footsteps. Not the omegas shuffling down from upstairs.

These were slow. Deliberate. Each step landing like it owned every room it entered.

She knew those footsteps. Had known them since she was small, when they'd meant pulled hair and shoved shoulders - the everyday cruelty of kids raised to think some people didn't matter. The years had stacked up and the cruelty had grown with them, sharper, colder, with more teeth.

Please, she thought - not quite a prayer, since she'd stopped sending those anywhere years ago. Just a signal shot into the dark. Just keep walking. Just this once.

The footsteps stopped.

"I thought I'd be smelling coffee by now."