Page 195 of Psycho Alphas: Part Two
She’d been sitting on my lap as I worked at my desk one day, sketching away, when her scent had gone sour with panic. I’d looked down to see her staring at a piece of mail I hadn’t opened.
It took me a moment to understand.
It was the first time she’d seen my name written out.
And the first time she’d realised the letter she’d carved onto my neck was the wrong one. Not that I cared, her claim was all that mattered, but it had sent her into a spiral.
Since then, it had been unending. As if in compulsion, she’d snuck into my office at night, digging through my drawers to find every possible document with my name on it.
They all now looked the same as the letters I’d dropped on Rogue’s bed.
Every ‘K’ had been scribbled out with black pen, the marks getting more distressed as the number of documents piled up. She’d scribbled a hole right through my birth certificate.
“Have you brought it up with her?” Rogue asked.
“I don’t know how.” It wasn’t even that I didn’t want to, but every time she spotted the mark on my neck, she balled up with anxiety.
“Have you considered changing your name?” Rogue suggested with a snort.
I groaned, laying back on the bed. “That would takemonths. Security told me she got up early yesterday to stalk the postman.”
Rogue chuckled, but cut off at the look on my face.
“Show me,” Rogue said. “See if we can change it.”
I sighed, straightening and tugging my collar down. I’d tried already, but there weren’t many ways to turn an ‘N’ into a ‘K’. I’d looked at it a million times. The ‘N+T’—I loved it. It wasperfect. I didn’t give a shit how she spelled my name. But her distress was turning it sour.
Rogue stared at it for a long time.
“You know, IthinkI can fix it.”
“I want mine to be bigger than Rogue’s.” I dropped onto her bed in the nest beside where she was sketching a little while later.
“Your… what?”
“My mark,” I said, patting my neck. Like always, at the mention of my mark, she tensed, a flood of distress coming down the bond.
“Bigger?” she asked. “Like you want me to do… more?”
“Is that allowed?”
She frowned. “Because you don’t like it?”
“I love it.”
“Oh.” She sounded fragile. “Good.”
“Can I show you?” I asked. “I drew out what I want.”
She nodded.
I undid my collar to show her the sharpie marks Rogue had made across my neck. We thought we’d managed to make it work out just right.
The original scar was an ‘N+T’ in a haphazard scrawl. Rogue had managed to fit an ‘O’ between the ‘N’ and the ‘+’ that made it look like the fully written word ‘Nox’. Then he’d finished off her full name after the T.
With the marker, it read: ‘Nox and Thistle’.
She peered at it. “Oh, you want me to write it all out?”
