“It happens to a lot of people,” Lincoln says softly.
“And even if it didn’t, there’s nothing to be ashamed of,” Everett adds. He wasn’t even there when it happened, but apparently the other two called him or something, so here he is.
“It’s not a big deal,” I try to say. “It’s?—”
“It’s as big a deal as you want it to be,” Cash says. “If you don’t want to talk about it, we don’t have to. We only care that you’re okay.”
The other two nod.
“How do you feel?” Lincoln wants to know. He passes back a bottle of water, and I chug from it gratefully. My mouth feels like sandpaper right now.
“Like I got hit by a bus,” I tell him honestly. Then a thought hits me, and I’m immediately ashamed for not thinking of it as soon as I came to. “Where’s Cora?”
Lincoln leans back so I can see my niece curled up in his lap asleep. One hand is fisted in his shirt, and the other clutches the stuffed cow she won tonight.
Relief crashes into me hard and instant. Thank fuck. Thank fuck she’s okay.
“We calmed her down,” Lincoln says. “And she went right to sleep.”
“Been a big day for her,” Cash offers, and his smile says he doesn’t mean that she had to watch her guardian break down in front of her.
“Yeah,” I mutter back, feeling hollow. “I guess so.”
“Home?” Everett asks.
I just nod.
There’s some shuffling, since all the men arrived separately for the festival. Lincoln straps Cora in beside me in the back, and I smooth her hair back from her face, whispering to her as she sleeps.
As soon as we get back to the house, I take Cora upstairs and help her get ready for bed. She wakes up as I help her change into pajamas and throws her arms around me, holding on tight.
I rub my hand down her back and cling to her a little bit too.
“Are you okay?” I ask her, pulling back to see her face.
She nods and then reaches up to pat at my cheeks.
“I’m fine, baby. Don’t worry about me.”
I can only imagine how she must have felt. Her mother is dead, and all she has is me. I have to be strong for her, but there I was, falling apart in a public place. She had to rely on the threeAlphas, who are still essentially strangers in a way, and that never should have happened.
Cora pats my cheeks again, and I find a smile for her. “Are you okay to sleep by yourself tonight? It’s okay if you want to sleep with me, if you’re scared.”
She seems to think about it, and then goes to climb into her own bed. There was a time when she would have clung to me and refused to let go, so this is a good thing, and I try not to feel worried about it.
Instead, I tuck her in and kiss her forehead, waiting until she goes back to sleep before I leave the room.
In my own room, I close the door and drop onto the bed hard. I still feel shaky after what happened, and even though it’s not as bad as it was at the festival, there’s a pit in my gut that won’t let up.
I put my head in my hands and try to focus on my breathing. In and out, in and out. It sounds too loud in my ears. My heart isn’t pounding as hard as it was before, but it’s not a steady, even beat either. I just feel bad. Wrong. Mortified.
I’m supposed to be better than this. I’m supposed to be strong, independent, and capable. I’m supposed to at the very fucking least be able to take care of myself and Cora, but I fucking lost it so bad that she had to rely on others to get her to safety. What if they hadn’t been there? What if it had just been the two of us, and she was alone with strangers and?—
Fuck.Fuck.
It’s so easy to start spiraling like this, and I have to force myself to breathe all over again. Nothing terrible happened, unless you count three powerful Alphas seeing me like that, so it definitely could have been worse.
But it fucking sucks that it happened like that. That I fell apart at the first loud noise. I was supposed to be better, but that’s pretty fucking concrete proof that I’m still broken from thethings I’m running from. They still have power over me, if they can make me react like that.