Page 196 of Psycho Alphas: Part Two

“I don’t want anyone confused about who I belong to.”

“Shit.” She frowned. “Didn’t even think about that.” She was already rummaging around in Bunny’s stuffing. “It’ll go a bit around the back, though,” she said, finding her knife and pulling it out.

“Fine by me.”

She gave me a smile, flipping the blade, then paused, eyes tracing over the new additions. I could see the cogs turning in her mind, a sharp spike of relief slowly saturating her scent. “Actually. If we’re going to change it… I noticed that uh… some people seem to think it’s spelled… wrong?”

“Oh. The K?” I asked, as if it was possible I hadn’t noticed every document in my life turning up with black scribbles upon it. “Yeh. Had that issue my whole life.”

She chewed on her lip. “The bank misspelled it—and then I even saw one from thegovernment?”

“Oh, yeah, I know why,” I said, waving a hand. “My parents got it wrong when I was born. Everyone copied them after that.”

“Damn.” She tapped the flat of the knife on her palm. “Well, we should probably add it, then? Just in case the bank needs to like… know?”

I let out an internal sigh of relief. “I never thought about that. Not a bad idea.”

“Okay, great. I mean it’s stupid. But I think it’ll make everything easier…”

I laid down on the bed as she got to carving, smiling at the hum in her chest as she worked, every ounce of anxiety she’d had fading away as she fixed it.

EPILOGUE TWO

ROGUE

The morning after Thistle had fixed up the ‘Knox-spelling-issue’, I woke up in her nest, surrounded by the slightly dulled scent of moonflower, which meant she was already up and out for the day. Sunlight filtered beneath the curtains, and I checked my phone to see it was early afternoon.

I needed to sort out a schedule, but I was binging a decade’s worth of video games into the early hours of the morning, and I wouldn’t apologise to anyone for it. Thistle quite liked it, telling me it meant she had Alphas to cuddle whenever she pleased. She’d creep into my room in the early evening (or if she woke in the middle of the night), often with Poptarts, and would curl up on my lap and watch me play. She already had a list of the ones she wanted to try herself.

After the video gaming binge, I’d have to figure out unnerving stuff like my future, and what I wanted to do with my time, but I wasn’t thinking about that yet. Knox had finally split the accounts so I had my fucking money back, and even Ace’s Mansion was under his name again. He’d received a letter in themail with the deed, signed to him by Roman, and an offer of his services for anything we might need.

Enough to be spared? I’d wondered that until those services really had come in handy.

Carrion was a prolific figure in politics, which might have posed a problem, but his connections to the Ring meant he kept his affairs deeply private. Roman, however, was in with a lot of well-off art collectors, many of whom crossed into political circles, so he was able to redirect the trail. Between him and Knox’s connections in law enforcement, we were able to fabricate a story of a car accident to explain his death.

Knox had finally taken down the ridiculous number of cameras set up around the north wing, too. Though the Ring weren’t all dead yet, they weren’t an active threat. I knew the cameras weren’t just about Knox’s paranoia with the Ring—they’d been to make sure I couldn’t undermine him.

To be honest—valid concern.

I stretched before exiting Thistle’s nest to see a small package outside my room. I picked it up, opening it to see a handwritten scrawl:

Don’t tell him I said this, but thank you for protecting Vance. We wouldn’t be the same without him.

-Petal

Ps: One of us might have filed down all the suture tips in your old one.

Sorry…

At the bottom was an upside-down smiley face.

I opened the package to find a fresh suture kit that looked similar to the one I had downstairs. I snorted, tugging my shirt up to get a look at the job I’d done on the gunshot wound on my side. It did look gnarly, but I’d attributed that to my knowledge extending to online videos—and the angle.

Skill was probably still mostly to blame, to be honest.

It didn’t matter if they resented me—I had grown up as everything they feared and hated. But as I re-read the letter, I felt a little warmth bloom in my chest.

They did seem to be settling properly now, and perhaps it was because there weren’t likely to be many new additions to the Misfits’ family on the horizon. Doyle’s team had managed to get out as many survivors as possible.