Inhumane

022

DAMON

The bruises on her face haunted me. Her pained huffs of breath had me wincing with every inhale. She was in pain, even in her sleep. I couldn't bear to think I had left her alone and trusted my pack to do the same. I couldn't even think of who would do such a thing. She was bonding with them, the Alphas were trusting her, the others had no reason. It didn't make any sense.

I stayed up most of that night, propped up against the headboard, watching her sleep. I stroked my hand across the line of her spine and evaded sleep. There wasn't a chance that I would close my eyes and take them off of her. My ears picked up the steady thud of her heart and I ached internally. My thoughts processed the previous weeks. Where things were starting to feel easy and simplistic, routine like, with her.

With her I was whole.

She was what I had been missing my whole life and suddenly, inexplicably, it felt like I was losing her. Involuntarily, my mind wandered back to the bleak day where I had found her and the grizzly. Her blood was everywhere, red soaking the snow.

I hurled my body into the bear, wrenching it off of her. We careened into the thick line of trees, I was nearly as big as he was. His claws swiped out in an attempt to catch any part of my body though I defended easily. When the beast reared up, I tore into his belly and throat until his grunts diminished and his blood stopped flowing out. He wreaked of her essence, her blood coated his muzzle and the fur of his neck. Their metallic tastes combined in my mouth and clogged my nostrils.

When I had turned back to her, I thought I was going to pass out. Her insides were exposed, chest and belly torn open. I thought she was dead and I couldn't function. But there were her eyes, distant, but alive. She was fighting even when her body couldn't. Her eyes were on me, hazel like the Earth: greens and browns and blues all intermixed.

Blinking, I looked down at her sleeping form and couldn't bear to think anymore of the day I had found her. She was there, alive... But I couldn't help but feel distance begin to grow, beneath the surface, invisible to the eye.

When daylight finally started to hint in the sky, I left her in bed to do something more productive. I felt like utter shit. With the raid coming up and Paige getting attacked, life quickly started to feel out of control. In the weeks to follow it would only worsen. Instead of letting the sense of dread consume me, I cleaned, gathered wood from the shed, organized the shelves, dug out the path to the front door.

Outside the cold was blistering, brutal. It had to be below zero. The sky was milky white with the slowly rising sun. The trees looked stiff and immovable with the horror frost that clung to every surface. My breath puffed out in billowing white clouds. Even in my furs, I began to shiver and made my way back inside. By that time, I could hear that her heartbeat had changed pace and she was awake.

Inside of our room, she was sitting up, hair mused and eyes tired. The bruises looked darker in the dim morning light. I couldn't stop looking at her eyes that were avoiding mine, finding some spot on the comforter and resting there. They were empty, dark, and lifeless. There was a deep depression that was constantly eating at her, gnawing at her bones, weakening her spirit. I wasn't sure what had exactly planted it there, but I would find out.  At the time, I was continuously wondering had the attack scared her that badly? It didn't sit right with me. She was a tough female, tougher than anyone I had ever met. Surely an altercation hadn't disrupted her that aggressively. Faith had thrown her out of a window and she didn't react this way. I looked at her knuckles, they were hardly bruised, like she didn't try to defend herself.

In hindsight, I already knew what was going on. There had always been a deeper part of me subconsciously aware of her previous life. But there were bigger things on my plate.