Page 4 of Knot That Delicate

“Ash, can you go grab her some clothes?” I said.

Asher nodded. “I’ll grab one of my hoodies. How about that?”

“Perfect,” I muttered.

The omega desperately needed a shower. Her long, wavy masses of black hair were matted and tangled, her nails were full of dirt, and her feet were filthy.

Dylan returned into the room, carrying a pile of towels. “Here, I thought these would help,” he said, handing them to me. His face was tense, his shoulders hunched. He wasn’t happy with the intrusion, which was understandable.

I smiled thankfully at him. “Can you start drying her hair a bit?”

He didn’t bother to reply, simply picking up one of the large towels and sitting on the bed near her head, scooping up piles of her hair and gently drying it.

“This is really tangled,” he said.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “We’re going to have to do something about that. But first, we need to make sure she doesn’t freeze to death.”

This was the last thing I had expected to happen when we’d decided to come away to the cabin for the winter. We all wanted a reprieve from our day-to-day lives, and despite living in a small city, there was something beautiful about living in a cabin in the middle of nowhere for the entirety of the summer months.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t summer. We had stupidly decided to come visit over the winter, when access was difficult. The skies had decided to open, and now we were subject to landslides and a whole litany of other issues.

Working as fast as possible, I stripped her clothing from her body, doing my best to avoid gazing at the more intimate areas as I did so. Her entire body was covered in bruises, and her ribs stuck out in a way that made it clear she was far too underweight. Had she been eating properly? That, combined with the bruises on her wrists and ankles, made me think she had been imprisoned somewhere, kept against her will. My blood boiled at the very idea of it.

Omegas were tiny, fragile. They should be protected at all costs.

After wrapping her in several blankets, I ran a towel over her legs, trying to dry her body as much as possible. I wasn't sure if it would be enough to keep her warm, but I hoped it would be enough to stave off the worst of the cold. The last thing I needed was her developing hypothermia and dying on my watch. Hell, the weather was hard enough for me to deal with, and I was easily three times her size. She was minuscule, and the cold had probably seeped through to her bones within minutes.

While I continued drying her off, Asher focused on the bruising on her arms. "Carter, there's a lot of swelling here," he said as he gently moved the joint. "I'm not sure what's happened, but it could possibly be broken."

I cursed mentally. We were nowhere near a hospital, and there was no way to leave anytime soon, given the state of the weather.

"What can we do if it is broken?" I asked.

Asher grimaced. "There isn't much. I can probably splint it, but that's all, really. I'm hoping, once she wakes up, I can ask her how she got this injury. It's possible it could just be a dislocation or a nasty sprain."

I nodded, a movement I had done several times in the last few minutes. I was desperately hoping it was nothing more than a sprain. Despite Asher's background as a medic, he wouldn'tbe able to do much in the cabin. Mentally, I ran through the supplies we had, but I didn’t know much about that—anything medical was Asher’s perview. I knew he kept a small stash, so I turned to him.

"Hey, have you got anything for pain here?"

Asher tilted his head to the side. "I think I have something we can give her, but I don't want to give her anything until we've spoken to her."

A frown covered my face as I looked at my pack mate. "But if she's in pain now—look at this bruising. She's going to be in agony."

"She's going to be in pain, but I need to ask if she's had any allergic reactions to pain medication in the past. Imagine if I give her something strong and she has a bad reaction to it. Then we are well and truly fucked. I only have a small amount of epinephrine, and we keep that on hand because of Dylan."

Dylan had an allergy to peanuts, so we tended to keep everything with peanuts out of the cabin. It wasn't a severe allergy, but he'd gone into anaphylaxis once or twice over the years, so Asher liked to be prepared, and we had EpiPens in the medicine cabinet. He had even taught me how to use them. So, even though Dylan hadn't had an allergic reaction in years, we were all well-versed on what to do.

As I dried her legs, I noticed the vicious cuts on the soles of her feet, which gave me pause, because she had been wearing those flimsy shoes.

"Hey, Asher," I said. "Can you check out her feet? They look pretty slashed up."

My pack mate looked up from the elbow he was moving and nodded before walking around the bedframe and lifting one of her tiny feet to inspect the injuries.

"These look pretty superficial," he said after a moment. "I'm going to take a look at her face first, I think, and then comeback to these. There's nothing urgent about this, but the bruising around her eye looks pretty nasty."

I turned to look at her face. I had been avoiding looking at the deep purple and blue bruising that surrounded her left eye, but I couldn't deny it for too long. The bruises were giant. There was no way they were made by a woman. It was obvious that it was the impression of a man's fist against her skin. The idea that some bastard could lash out at something so small and fragile made my stomach turn violently. I was about to open my mouth and say something when Dylan walked back into the room, his face etched with a scowl.

I wasn't too concerned about his facial expression. He tended to wear a scowl most of the time, including when he was deep in thought.

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