Page 30 of Toxic Revenge, Part Two (Mafia Omegas #2)

Chapter

Twenty-Eight

TALIA

Thanks to Mercer’s familiarity with the Residence’s layout, I was less than a minute late for my appointment time. Dr. Jalisco’s office door was wide open, the woman waiting for me inside.

“I’ll pick you up in an hour,” Mercer promised, dropping a kiss on my cheek.

“I could walk back to the nesting room by myself just fine.” I was still catching my breath from the brisk pace we’d used to get here.

“You might get lost. Besides, I’ll miss you.”

He was right about getting lost, but it was easy to turn myself back around with all the signage. But missing me? That was obviously an excuse. He was worried therapy was going to break me.

Maybe I was a little bit worried too.

“Fine. See you in an hour.”

He gave me one more kiss on my other cheek before striding back off down the hall.

Breathing deeply, I turned to the open door. She stood by the entrance, wearing a blue turtleneck sweater and black jeans along with her soft smile.

“Come on in, Talia,” Dr. Jalisco greeted me warmly.

I swallowed and followed her into the office, dreading the sound of the door closing behind me. When it clicked shut, I clenched my hands into fists.

I really had to talk about it.

All of it .

What happened that night, and how Benjamin was still in my damn head, no matter how tall and thick I built my walls to keep him out.

But maybe if I didn’t say it out loud, it wouldn’t seem so real.

“Take a seat wherever you’d like.”

I scanned the room. There was an armchair in front of her desk, an uncomfortable looking padded chair sitting in one corner, and a small loveseat in front of a window.

I chose the loveseat, sitting primly on one of the cushions.

Dr. Jalisco turned the armchair to face me and settled down into it, a clipboard resting on her lap. “Feel free to kick your shoes off and get comfortable, if you’d like. During the session, this is your space.”

I kept my shoes on, crossing one leg over the other and anxiously tapping my foot. “My mom wanted someone to talk to me, to make sure I’m alright after everything. But I don’t think I really need to be here.”

The lie tasted like copper on my tongue. Was I chewing my lip?

She made a note on her clipboard.

I tried to read it, but her handwriting was unintelligible from this far away.

“Would you agree that you’re not pleased to be here, then?” Dr. Jalisco asked.

I hesitated, but eventually nodded. “I’m not.”

“Are you comfortable talking about that?”

I cleared my throat, holding my hands together in my lap. The loveseat was comfortable, tempting me to lean back and relax, but I kept my posture upright.

This office wasn’t as intimidating as I’d been expecting, but it still had a few features that made it very distinctly a therapist’s space. A few posters of therapeutic frameworks speckled the walls, in between landscape paintings. Large, waxy-leaved plants sat in strategically-placed pots.

Most of all, she had that clipboard on her lap. She was ready to assess me, to note down everything wrong with me and boil it down to one precise diagnosis.

In my case, probably PTSD.

“Is anyone ever pleased to be here?” I had to clear my throat again after.

Dr. Jalisco reached into a discreet mini fridge and grabbed a bottle of water, passing it to me. I chugged half of it, but my throat was still desperately dry. My fingers dug into the flimsy plastic, collapsing one of the sides.

“It all depends on the person. Some are.”

“I’m not one of those people.”

She didn’t press for more information or say a single word. The silence spoke for her, coaxing my secrets out of me.

“What if I talk about what happened and it makes everything worse?” I blurted out eventually. “I’m doing fine now. I don’t need to be fixed.”

“I’m not here to fix you, Talia.” Her tone was achingly kind. “We can talk about whatever you’d like, whether or not it’s related to the incident that brought you here.”

My entire body stiffened at the mere mention of it. Without my alphas grounding presence, Benjamin rose up like a phantasmal force in my mind, taunting me.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I whispered.

She didn’t say anything. I was hyperventilating. Focusing on my breathing for a moment, I got it back to normal with a monumental effort and tried to pretend I was fine.

“A momentary lapse.” I couldn’t look her in the eye. “Aren’t you going to ask me questions? Assess me?”

“It’s best if the patient leads in sessions like this.

I’m not testing you for anything,” she explained.

“Sometimes, I have to go through diagnostic questionnaires to determine if a patient is a candidate for medication, but today I’m less psychiatrist and more therapist. Would you like me to explain why I think we should talk about your experience, even when you’re doing fine? ”

I already had an inkling.

I was a nurse, for fuck’s sake. There was some amount of training in mental health involved in my profession, and I’d done extra study into therapeutic methods on my own time.

When it was applied to me, all my knowledge went out the window.

“Please do.”

“The issue with trauma is that often, we feel fine after it happens. That’s a normal, human response.

The brain goes into survival mode and keeps you going.

But survival mode isn’t acknowledging the trauma; it isn’t allowing us to feel our feelings.

Without a healthy outlet, they’ll build over time.

The brain’s trauma patterns become set, harder and harder to break. ”

“And talking about it does what, exactly?”

“Allows you to discover how you feel. If you explore those feelings in a safe place, you can learn to manage them. Otherwise, you’ll likely be shown the emotions at a moment of stress, and have no idea how to deal with them because you’ve never explored them before.”

I chewed on my bottom lip and took another swig of water. “What if I’m not ready to do it?”

“I’ll never push you. We all work on our own timeline.”

I wanted my timeline to be slow. I wanted to talk about my childhood, my pack, anything but that horrible night with Benjamin.

Yet, I might see him at any moment. Emilia could track him back to wherever he was hiding out, leaving us with the option of grabbing him then or risking him running.

There was no guarantee I would have any warning before I was faced with him.

I didn’t want to be some meek, broken omega waiting for him to come ruin my life all over again.

If I left these feelings unchecked, they might swallow me whole when I saw him.

Exhaling shakily, I nodded. “Alright. I’m going to start at the beginning. The night I caught Benjamin cheating on me.”

After the first few sentences, the stories spilled out easily.

The tale of his betrayal and finding the pack I wanted for life, then my time at Villem Central Hospital.

I even found myself talking about those moments with the feral alphas I’d faced in the emergency room, and the earth-shattering instinctual response they’d brought on.

Once I reached the moment in the story where I was on the side of the road, on the precipice of heat, my words dried up. I knew the next part of my story was the moment of the bondmark.

All I had were the memories of pain.

I didn’t realize tears were sliding down my cheeks until Dr. Jalisco leaned over with a box of tissues. Sniffling, I took a few and patted the tears away before blowing my nose. “Thank you,” I mumbled.

“There’s more if you need them.” She put the box on the corner of her desk, within arms’ reach of me.

“I don’t know how to talk about the next part,” I admitted.

“I can guide you through some questions about how you feel, if you’d be alright with that?”

Hesitantly, I nodded.

“When you think back to that moment, I want you to pay attention to the sensations in your body. Where do you feel something?”

My eyes fluttered shut and I let out a heavy breath. I finally let my body sink into the loveseat as I went back in time to that moment.

The bondmark. The abandonment. The pain and fear.

My stomach tied itself in knots and my chest went tight. Every muscle seemed to be strained. “My stomach and chest, mainly.”

“Can you name the emotions that give you those sensations?”

“Fear and dread, sitting in the pit of my stomach. In my chest… I felt betrayed. Abandoned.”

“Are there any other feelings?”

I paused. “The tension in my muscles is anger. I’m so furious he did that to me and left me like that, when on some level I still thought he was a good man who’d made a mistake. Not someone who was out to get me from the start.”

“Good. I want you to try a breathing exercise with me. You’re going to breathe in for four, then hold, out for four, then hold. Keep letting yourself feel the feelings—don’t try to push them down. Breathe with them and let them diminish on their own.”

They weren’t going to diminish on their own. I’d be breathing forever if I waited for that. The emotions were too big—Benjamin was too damn close to my mind. I needed distraction or my alphas to bring me back from this.

But that was why I was here, wasn’t it? Because I didn’t want to need them like this.

So there was no harm in trying her way. I still had over forty-five minutes in the session, and if I spent all of it breathing, well… In some ways, that was better than talking.

Dr. Jalisco guided me through the first few breaths, counting out each step, before having me continue on my own.

My dismay settled heavily in my stomach, anger making me move my arms and tap my feet anxiously. The fear tried to keep my heart rate up.

Despite my doubts, letting the emotions run rampant didn’t make them worse, nor did it make them linger. It took more breaths than I could count, but eventually they dissipated like faint clouds in the wind.

I opened my eyes and blew out one final breath.

“That… helped,” I admitted.

She smiled. “Now you know one method for managing it when those emotions come up again.”

“It’s more practical than I expected therapy to be.”

“Practical is what we do here. A lot of people see Omega Haven Residence as a last resort. Our residents come in thinking they’ll never be able to leave and live independently again, but that’s only a very small percentage of the omegas who come here.”

I’d always thought that too. When I’d watched omegas get referred to the Residence, I felt bad for them. Like this was some shameful place to be.

But now I was here and, temporary or not, I’d needed their shelter. Mom was right after all—I could still benefit from their help, even though I was leaving.

“Can we go through some more options?” I asked awkwardly. “In case breathing doesn’t work all the time.”

“Definitely.”

She launched into a simple explanation of common techniques people used, and I listened intently.

With Benjamin in my head, I would never have the peace I had before, but if I worked on it, I could have something close. Something tolerable. Something that would keep me going if I had to step out on my own, away from my supportive pack.