BENEATH THE SCARS
1801 Words
Sera's POV
I woke slowly.
No belt. No cold floor. No smell of turpentine.
Just pale morning light pressing through heavy curtains and something soft beneath me that took a moment to place.
So it wasn't a dream.
I lay still, letting that settle. Then I reached under the pillow. My fingers found the knife and I exhaled.
A knock at the door.
I pulled my hand back. "Come in."
A young woman entered — the maid from last night, the one who had brought the food cart after Nicklaus had left. She moved with quiet efficiency, already scanning the room, already calculating what needed doing.
"Good morning." A small, polished bow. "I hope you slept well. I've come to tidy the room."
She moved toward the bed.
"I'll — I can do that." I was already standing, positioning myself between her and the pillow. "The bed. I'll make it."
She stopped. Looked at me with genuine discomfort. "Oh — I really couldn't allow that. Alpha Nicklaus's guests aren't — it wouldn't be appropriate for you to—"
"I prefer it." I kept my voice quiet. Stayed where I was.
She hesitated, clearly weighing something. Whatever she was weighing involved Nicklaus on one side and my expression on the other.
"I'll just—" She gestured vaguely at the rest of the room. "The other things, then."
She moved away. I turned to the bed, smoothed the sheets slowly, and worked the knife deeper under the pillow with my palm before straightening the case over it.
When she began loading the used dishes from the food cart a small silence fell. I heard her movements slow. A quiet sound — something between a murmur and a question — as she lifted each item, checked beneath the cart, lifted the cloth.
"I'm certain there was a—" She turned. Looked at the cart. Then at the room. Her brow creased.
My heart was beating in my ears.
She didn't finish the sentence. Just stood there frowning at the cart with the expression of someone genuinely trying to retrace their steps.
I said nothing. I smoothed the already-smooth pillow with both hands and looked at the window.
The silence stretched.
"Perhaps I miscounted," she murmured finally, more to herself than to me. She didn't look convinced. She glanced at me once — brief, uncertain — and then wheeled the cart toward the door.
When it clicked shut I sat down on the edge of the bed and released a breath I had been holding so long my chest ached.
I reached under the pillow.
The knife was small. Practical. The kind of thing designed for a dinner table, not for what I was considering. I turned it over in my hands and I thought about Nicklaus — about the size of him, the quality of his stillness, the way a single look had silenced Cole mid-sentence — and I thought about what it would actually require to use this against a man like that.
I was still thinking when the door opened.
I shoved the knife behind my back and stood.
Nicklaus stepped in.
He looked the same as he always looked — unhurried, taking inventory of the room in that quiet efficient way of his before his eyes settled on me. I stood very still with the knife pressed flat against my lower back with both hands and kept my face arranged into something I hoped resembled neutral.
"Did you sleep?"
"Yes." My voice came out smaller than I intended.
He looked at me for a moment. Something moved behind his expression — that slight, unclassifiable shift — but he didn't comment on whatever he saw.
"Your ointment. You'll need it this morning." He glanced toward the bathroom. "Bathe first."
I needed to get the knife back under the pillow. I took a half-step sideways toward the bed, trying to make it look like nothing.
"What are you doing?"
I stopped. "Nothing."
He watched me. I did not move and I did not look at the pillow and I waited.
He turned toward the window.
I exhaled. Turned to the bed in one quick movement and slid the knife beneath the pillow and straightened before he could turn back.
"Your clothes." He was still facing the window. "You won't be putting those back on."
"W..Why?"
"They're rags."
"They're what I have."
"Not anymore." His tone closed around it the way his tone closed around things when they were finished. "I will have some clothes brought to you."
I looked at his back. At the breadth of his shoulders. At the absolute stillness of him standing at the window.
"Could you—" I stopped. Swallowed. "I need to undress."
"I'm not looking."
I stood there.
"Go on," he said. Perfectly patient.
I turned my back to him and undressed as quickly as I could, watching his reflection in the dark glass of the bathroom door the entire time. Every few seconds checking. Every few seconds finding him exactly where he was, exactly as still, exactly as facing away.
He didn't look.
"How long does it take to undress? I have some patience but not infinite." He said and I quicked my pace and hurried to the bathroom naked.
---
I had never seen a bathroom that size.
I stood in the doorway for a moment and took it in — the deep tub, the clean tiles, the shelves lined with things I didn't have names for. Then I stepped inside and drew a bath and sat in it and stared at the ceiling and gave myself exactly enough time to feel like a person before getting out.
When I came back into the room with a towel wrapped around me Nicklaus was still at the window. On the bed there was a dress. Dark green. Simply cut. Soft.
Whose is this, I thought, with a slow cold feeling. Who wore this before me? One of those ladies Rhea talked about?
I picked it up without asking.
The ointment jar was on the nightstand. I sat on the edge of the bed and opened it and started on what I could reach — my arms, my ribs, the bruising across my collarbone.
My back was another problem.
I tried to reach the worst of it, contorting, and felt the pull of the belt mark that still hadn't—
"Give it here."
I looked up. Nicklaus had turned from the window. Hand extended.
"I can manage," I said.
He looked at what I was doing. "You can't reach half of it."
He sat beside me on the edge of the bed and I went rigid so completely and so immediately that the air left my lungs. He was right there. Close enough that I could feel the warmth of him and my heart was suddenly very loud and every thought I'd had since arriving in this territory about what he intended and what happened to the girls who came before—
He held out his hand for the jar.
I gave it to him because there didn't seem to be an alternative.
His touch was careful. That was what I hadn't expected — the carefulness of it, the deliberate precision, nothing rushed, nothing reaching. He worked across my upper back without speaking and I sat with my spine locked and my hands flat on my thighs and I stared at the pillow six inches away.
The knife was under it.
I was aware of that with my whole body.
"The towel," he said. "I need to reach the lower section."
Everything in me went cold.
I looked at the pillow.
*Not yet. Not like this. Not without a plan.*
I loosened the towel and lay face down on the bed with the fabric across my waist, arms folded beneath my chin. My eyes stayed open and fixed on the pillow directly in front of my face and I breathed in and out and told myself to be still.
He was quiet for a moment before he started.
"Why don't you heal?" he asked.
"I don't know."
"Your wolf — did she awaken?"
"She did." A pause. "But she's gone now."
His hands slowed slightly. "Gone how."
"I don't hear her anymore. I don't feel her. She's just... gone."
"Since when."
"Gradually. But it started—" I stopped. Steadied. "It started the day my parents died. The day they were *murdered*." The word came out harder than I intended, edged with seven years of poison.
Nicklaus’s hands paused on my back.
"The eastern border," he said quietly. "The rogues. Your parents must have fought like legends to save you. They died as heroes, protecting their daughter. You should remember them that way. Not with guilt. Not with blame. Your brother and the rest of that pack... they were wrong to punish you for surviving."
I turned my head slowly.
My eyes were wet, but the tears didn’t fall. I looked straight at him — at the man whose face had lived in every nightmare for seven years.
"No," I said, voice trembling but clear. "They weren’t heroes. They died for nothing. They ran in to save me and they died for *nothing*. I should have died with them. It was all my fault. I was the one who convinced the others to go to the forbidden border. I was the one who thought I was invincible."
My voice cracked, but I kept going, staring directly into those amber eyes.
"And their killer... he stood inches away from me. In the middle of all the bodies. He looked straight into my eyes. Then he just... walked away. That face has haunted me every single night for seven years. He should have killed me then."
I swallowed hard, the words burning like fire in my throat.
"Because I am going to kill him."
The silence that followed was absolute.
Something shifted in Nicklaus’s expression — a flicker, a crack in that perfect composure. His hands stilled completely on my back.
"Those eyes..." he whispered.
Recognition flooded his face.
"The little girl in the mud."
He looked at me like he was seeing me for the first time.
"It was you."
The air left the room.
Nicklaus reached across slowly and pulled the pillow away.
The knife lay there between us on the white linen.
"Do it," he said.
I stared at him, confused, frozen.
"Draw that knife out," he said, voice low and steady. "I won’t stop you."
My hand moved before my mind could catch up. I picked up the knife with shaking fingers, the blade trembling in the light.
Nicklaus looked straight at me, calm and unflinching.
"Don't be afraid, Sera. Aim for the heart," he said quietly. "I deserve it."
- Writer
