Lahat ng Kabanata ng Marked by the Alpha: Kabanata 121 - Kabanata 130

RyanThe first thing I understand is that I am not alone in my own skull, and the second thing I understand is that I have been not-alone for longer than tonight. That's the part that undoes me before anything else does, not the presence itself, but the realization that it has structure, history, a way of moving through the rooms of me like it's memorized the floor plan like it's lived here before.I can hear everything. That's the cruelest design of it. I hear the monitor's green rhythm, I hear Zara's breathing hitch and steady and hitch again in the chair beside me, I hear my own voice come out of my own mouth saying things I would never say, in a cadence that is mine but hollowed out, mine the way a coat is still a coat after someone else has put it on. I try to move my hand and nothing happens. I try to open my eyes and something else opens them for me, on its own schedule, not mine.You're awake, it says, and I don't hear it so much as feel it arrive, a voice with no air behind i

RyanI am screaming and no one can hear it, that's the truest way I can put it. I'm in here... behind my own eyes, behind my own mouth and I can feel every word Damon makes my lips shape, feel my hand close around Zara's wrist like it's still mine to close, and I can't stop a single second of it. I've been trying for six days. Six days of drifting somewhere under my own skin, surfacing for half a breath at a time, just long enough to know exactly how bad it's gotten before I get dragged back down.I know his name now. That's new, that's the last hour's work. Damon. I heard Zara say it once, months ago, in that careful voice she uses when she's talking about pack business she doesn't want me carrying home with me. I didn't know then that I'd end up carrying him instead.I throw it at whatever's left of the space between us, the thin membrane where I still exist. You don't need her. You need me...I'm the one with the bond, I'm the one Simon actually wants dead, so take it out on me.He

RyanThere's a version of drowning that doesn't involve water at all, and I have been living inside it for six days now, coming up for air in stolen seconds and going back under before I can even fill my lungs. This is one of those seconds. I can feel the shape of it already narrowing, some vast dark hand closing around me again, but for now I'm here, I'm in my own body, and Zara is three feet away with her back against a door that used to open for me."Zara." Her name costs me everything I have left. "Listen to me, you have to..."I don't get to finish. I never get to finish anymore. Damon doesn't yank me under gently, he drags, claws dug into whatever part of a person is actually them, and I go down screaming words I never got to say, and the last thing I see before the dark swallows me whole is her face, and the terror in it, and I think, not for the first time, that I would rather he kill me than make me watch this happen to her one more time.Then there's nothing. There's never a

RyanI'm not gone. That's the thing nobody tells you about being buried alive inside your own skin... I'm not gone, I'm just far down, pressed under something vast and cold and patient, and every so often I get close enough to the surface to feel what my body's doing without any say in whether it stops.Right now my hand is closing around Zara's wrist. I feel the exact shape of her bones under my fingers, feel how thin they are, how breakable, and some part of me that used to be a husband and is currently nothing but a passenger screams at a volume that never reaches anyone but me. Six years I spent learning how much pressure this hand could take before it hurt her, gentling myself around her the way you gentle yourself around something you've decided matters more than your own strength. Damon doesn't know that math. Or he does know it and doesn't care, which might be worse, because I can feel him deciding, right now, exactly how close to the edge of breaking her he wants to walk with

RyanI'm still in here, that's the part nobody tells you about losing your body to something else... you don't go anywhere. You don't get to close your eyes and wake up when it's over...you stay, pressed up against the glass of your own skull, watching your hands do things you would tear off at the wrist if you could reach them.I felt the knife before I saw it. A thin line of fire along my forearm, and for one heartbeat that pain was the best thing that had happened to me in six days, because it was mine. Mine to feel, mine to flinch from, and Damon flinched with me, which meant for half a second the flinch belonged to both of us and I could ride it like a wave all the way up into my own face.Then her hand landed flat on my chest, and she said my name, not his but mine.I don't have words for what that did. It wasn't light, it wasn't some clean bright rescue-scene shove where the hero kicks the door open. It was smaller and it hurt more, because it meant she'd known the whole time.