Page 116 of Knot Their Safe Haven

"I'm not?—"

"You are." I shift so I can look at her properly. "Which is why I need to ask, what romantic experiences did you actually have with them? With Knox, specifically?"

Her expression shifts, walls trying to rise before consciously lowering.

"Why?"

"Because I need to understand what you think love looks like. What you've been taught to accept."

She sits up, creating distance, but I don't chase. This has to be her choice.

"Knox and I were... physical. From the beginning. Angry sex in the gym after hours. Desperate fucking in storage rooms. Quick, hard, hidden." She picks at the blanket's edge. "I got pregnant during one of those encounters. We never talked about it properly. Just... continued the pattern for twenty years."

"No dates? No public acknowledgment?"

"He said public would complicate things. The gym, the Haven, our arrangement." The word drips bitterness. "Everything was always too complicated for daylight."

"And Adyani?"

"Adyani visited sometimes. Before transition, we had a few nights that felt like more. After..." She shrugs. "Everything became theoretical. Someday. Eventually. When she was ready."

"Malcolm?"

The silence stretches long enough that I almost withdraw the question. When she speaks, her voice is small.

"It's not... it's hard to explain without making you angry."

"Try me."

She meets my eyes, searching for judgment and finding none.

"We... developed a routine," Velvet said, voice so low I had to lean forward, as if closing the inches between us would make the words any less malignant. "I'd take sleeping pills. Leave my door unlocked. He'd come in hours later, always after I was unconscious, and..." She trailed off, the rest unspoken, but the implication so loud it rang in my skull.

For a moment the air felt thick with rot, the citrus and spice of the picnic overtaken by the sour memory of old sorrow, dread, and shame. It was, in a way, jarringly mundane—Omegas, in every circle I’d ever known, developed maladapted strategies for love or its imitation. But Velvet was not just any Omega. She was the one we'd waited for, the one who broke every mold and reassembled the shards into a stained glass window. And hereshe was, admitting she’d spent years being taken, nightly, in a manner that required her anesthesia.

I could see her hands, knotted in the blanket. The pale knuckles. The way she pressed her tongue against her canine, drawing a bead of blood to anchor herself in the now.

"Velvet," I said, because I had to say something. Because in the absence of words, abusers always win.

She didn’t look at me; her eyes stayed fixed on the creek, as if the water might carry her confession downstream to be lost among the stones. "I know how it sounds," she said, rushing the words as if to outrun what they meant. "But I wanted it. Needed it. It was the only way he’d touch me—when I couldn’t respond, couldn’t ask for more. Like he needed me helpless to want me."

The silence that followed was not the companionable sort that had blanketed us all afternoon. This was a hollowing, suffocating kind, and I realized with horror that I was witnessing the moment an Omega confessed a secret so warped it still bled even after years of daylight.

My voice was calm, even as my vision narrowed to a pinprick.

"He conditioned you to accept that as affection. That doesn't make it right."

She shook her head, a lock of silver hair falling across one eye. "I know. But it’s what I thought I deserved. It’s what I thought love was—being needed only when you’re silent and still."

I wanted to tear that story from her like a spoiled bandage, to find the version where she’d been loved gorgeously, loudly, with honest hands and mouths and laughter. But the past is a tattoo; you can cover it, but it’s always there.

At the edge of my vision, Alexis’s posture shifted—her jaw set, her fingers drumming minutely against her knee. She had the look of a wolf who’d scented a trespasser at the pack’sborder. When she spoke, it was in the measured, lethal tone that usually preceded someone losing a limb in a boardroom.

"Did he ever apologize?"

Velvet’s laugh was a broken-glass thing. "He said he was grateful I never made a scene. That I understood his boundaries." She paused, then, "He called me his perfect Omega."

The words tasted like battery acid. I wanted to split time, go back, protect her, but what would be the point? She was here, now, and she was letting us see her as she was, not as she was made to be.