After, she alighted from the bath, toweled off briskly and donned her robe. Then she gave herself a manicure and pedicure.
All of this was done with practiced ease and precision.
When finished, she went to her medicine cabinet and pulled out the injection.
She had an extremely rare blood disorder inherited from her father. Every night of her life (and Gregor had done it until she was eleven when he patiently taught her how to do it herself), she took the injection.
She hated them but as her father told her, again, many a time, she could die without them.
She’d once, as a rebellion during her early teens, stopped taking them. This she hid from Gregor. He would have been livid if he’d known. He was very careful with her injections and was just as adamant as her father that she take them every day without fail.
When she didn’t, it was a mistake.
Two days after she stopped, while she was in bed asleep, she woke having the strange, terrifying sensation she was coming out of her skin.
Seriously.
As if, at any second, her tingling skin would split and she’d boil straight out of it, her blood felt that hot. She could feel it, every last cell of blood, boiling through her veins.
She’d crawled to the bathroom, so immense was the pain, to give herself the injection and, like now, as the needle pierced the flesh of her right buttock, she felt the injection invade.
There was no other way to put it. Just like the boiling of blood cells she’d felt that awful night, the injection invaded. Searing through her system, down to the ends of her toes, up, around and down to her fingertips, up through her scalp and out, even to the ends of her hair.
But this sensation only lasted minutes. Unlike that night where she’d fought it for hours before giving in.
As usual, when the burn ended, she clutched the basin, took deep breaths and gave her system several long moments to settle. The she disposed of the needle in a small sharps container and walked to her bedroom.
Gregor nor Yuri, although he’d very, very (very) much like to, had ever seen her bedroom.
This was because it was not sleek, modern and elegant.
It was comfortable, countrified, farmhouse splendor.
Mismatched, homey furniture. A colorful wedding ring quilt on the bed. Scalloped shams on the pillows. Vibrantly colored braided rugs. A poofy dust ruffle and even poofier shades in the dormer windows which had even poofier pads on the seats.
Her bedroom was beautiful and she adored it, more than Clear, more even than Christmas.
Because it reminded her of home.
Not the elegant townhome she shared with her socialite mother and United States Senator father in DC when her father was at work. Or their gracious, rambling home in that very city.
Their real home.
The cabin in the mountains.
She glanced around her room and saw, amongst her plethora of toss pillows in the middle of the bed, her wolf. Like her Christmas lights did, every night, all year long, the sight of her wolf made her smile.
Her father had it made for her and given it to her the first Christmas she could remember.
She was two.
And she slept with it every night since she was two.
It was a stuffed animal the exact replica of her wolf, the one who had, very unfortunately, died the same night as her parents.
She’d known it was her wolf the minute she’d seen him (she did have a stuffed animal to prove this fact).
And she’d loved him with an inexplicable and unfathomable depth from the moment her eyes fell upon him.