Lahat ng Kabanata ng Marked by the Alpha: Kabanata 111 - Kabanata 120

RyanThe body took some getting used to not the shape of it... I'd studied the shape of it for longer than she could imagine, longer than this pathetic little unit of time she calls a marriage but the weight of it. The way blood insists on moving whether you tell it to or not. The way lungs keep dragging air in like it's owed something. I had forgotten, in the space between worlds, how loud a body is. How much it wants.I let it want for now.She's standing by the door, not moving, and I can feel the fear coming off her like heat off a road in summer. It's a good smell. I didn't expect that... that fear would have a texture, a taste almost, sitting at the back of this borrowed throat. I file it away with everything else I'm learning. The way her hair falls when she leans forward. The exact pitch her voice climbs to when she's trying not to cry. The ring on her finger, worn thin on the underside from eleven years of her thumb worrying at it.I know so much about her already. I have had

RyanThere's a version of me still in here, and no one can hear him scream. That's the first true thing I've understood since I came back... if "came back" is even the word for it, if there is a word for what this is. I'm awake behind my own eyes, and I can't move them. I can feel my hand close around Zara's wrist and I didn't tell it to close, and somewhere underneath the warmth of her skin against mine I am clawing at a door that isn't a door, screaming a name that isn't coming out as sound.Zara. Zara, it isn't me. Don't listen to it, don't stay, get out of this room.None of it reaches her. My mouth moves and something else's words come out of it, smooth and old and amused, and I am a passenger strapped into the back of my own skull, watching my hand hurt the woman I married.I didn't used to believe in anything I couldn't put my hands on. Structural loads, torque specs, the particular honesty of numbers. Now I understand there are rooms inside a person nobody built for, and somet

RyanThe worst part isn't the cold. It's that I remember dying, four minutes, they'll tell me later, though nobody has to tell me anything...I felt every second of it, felt the exact moment my heart forgot how to keep time, felt myself go thin and scattered like static, and then something else poured into the space I left behind the way water finds the shape of an empty glass. I didn't invite it in. I want that understood, even if there's no one left to understand it but me. I didn't open a single door. It walked through the wall where the door used to be."Don't turn around," I tell her again, because she hasn't moved, because some stubborn, magnificent part of my wife has decided that whatever's standing behind her in this hallway is a problem to be assessed rather than fled, and God, I love her for it, and God, I need her to run."Ryan, what...""Please." My voice cracks on the word, and I hate that, hate how human and small it sounds, hate that fear has stripped me down to a singl

RyanThere's a version of tonight where I never wake up, and some part of me... the part still tangled in whatever the light did to me... thinks that would have been the mercy.I don't open my eyes so much as get handed them back, the way you'd hand someone a coat that isn't quite theirs anymore. The ceiling tiles above bed fourteen swim into focus one water-stain at a time, and there's a weight on my hand that I recognize before I recognize anything else... Zara's fingers, laced through mine, her thumb moving in small anxious circles against my knuckle the way it does when she's trying to convince herself everything is fine by acting like it already is."Ryan?" Her voice cracks on the second syllable. "Hey. Hey, look at me."I say her name. I mean to say I love you or I'm sorry or run, and what comes out instead is, "You're here," small and stupid and true."Where else would I be." She laughs, and it's the worst sound I've ever heard her make, wet and thin at the edges. "You scared m

RyanI come back to the world like a diver breaking the surface too fast, lungs first, thought second, and the first thing I understand is that Zara's face is too close to mine and too wet."Zara? Why are you crying?"She doesn't answer right away. Her hand is still locked around mine, fingers white at the knuckle, and when I try to sit up the room tilts sideways and settles wrong, like a picture hung a half-inch off level. Bed fourteen. The smell of antiseptic and something under it, something I can't name, like a struck match gone out too fast to leave smoke."Hey. Hey, look at me." My voice comes out sandpaper-rough. "What happened? Did I..." I stop, because I don't actually know what I'm asking. Did I die again? Did my heart do that thing it's done twice tonight already, that thing the doctors keep writing down in careful, bloodless language on a clipboard I'm not allowed to read."You scared me," she says, which isn't an answer, and she says it the way you'd say something true to