Chapter 24
CADE
Jess dozed off in my arms. Perfect. I slid away from her and got a few things from my bedside table. A little while later, she opened her eyes, looking puzzled. She tugged at her limbs and found herself helpless and vulnerable. Just the way I liked it.
“What the fuck?” She thrashed as much as she could, which wasn’t much, given she was cuffed and tied to the four bedposts.
I leaned up on one elbow and ran my hand over her stretched-out body. She twitched in her bondage and my cock twitched in appreciation.
Her green eyes flashed. “I knew you were kinky, but aren’t you supposed to get consent before you tie up your partner?”
I stroked down, gently, from her throat to her breasts. As I circled her nipples, slowly closing in on the point, both nubs grew hard and her breathing escalated. “D’you want me to release you?”
She hesitated. I let my finger drift lower. She moaned instead of answering.
“Sounds like consent to me.”
“Bastard,” she muttered. But I didn’t hear a safeword.
I was tempted to play with her a bit. Get her way up there again, where she couldn’t easily turn away from the pleasure I was giving her. I also wanted to indulge myself. My dick was painfully hard again. The sight of her spread out for me was delectable.
“I know what you’re trying to do. You think that if you make me really frustrated and angry, my wolf will get so aggressive that she’ll spring out of me, whether I like it or not.”
She was probably right. “Why won’t you talk to me?”
“Why do you even care?”
I realized I didn’t know the answer to that. Why the hell was it so important to me that I know all her secrets?
As she’d said, she was my soon-to-be-ex.
A year from now, I’d be sharing my bed with other women, other conquests. Just as I’d done for years. No strings, no commitments. You got secrets, honey? Keep ‘em because I’m not interested.
“You keep secrets from me. If I’m not sharing, maybe it’s because you’re just as elusive.”
That surprised me. “I don’t know what you’re referring to since I don’t have any secrets. When have I ever hidden anything about myself? Everyone knows what a fuckup I used to be. The various ways I’ve messed up. I’m a goddamn open book to the whole shifter community.”
“Still, there’s a lot I don't know about you. It's not as if we’ve talked much these past few weeks. We have a lot of sex, but we don’t talk.”
“I admit I can think of better things to do with that sweet mouth of yours than chat.”
“All right, then.”
“So I’ll trade you. If you want the info on me, you have to give me the info on you. I give a little, you give a little. How about it?”
“Fine, if it's fair. I am not going to tell you my whole autobiography in exchange for your favorite movie or something.”
“Truth or Dare.”
“You're fucking kidding me. What is this, high school?”
“Come on. Let’s try it. Give me a question that I have to answer truthfully. If I don't wanna answer it, give me a dare.”
“Fine. Untie me first.”
“Prove you’re really going to play and I’ll untie you. I’m going to ask you a question. Truth or Dare.”
She rolled her eyes. “Ask.”
I’d already decided not to go in for the kill on the first question. That would just piss her off. So I said, “Okay, this shouldn’t be too hard for you. When you were a kid in Montana, before your dad died, did you used to shift?”
She frowned, but she answered, “Ok, I’ll tell you the truth on that. Yes. I started around the same age as most of the other kids.” She added, although I hadn’t asked it, “Everything was fine then. It was only after we went to Scotland and got involved with the other pack that shifting became a problem.”
As gently as possible, I untied the ropes binding her wrists and ankles. “What pack was that?”
I thought she wasn’t going to answer. She said nothing at all for several seconds. I busied myself with the ropes, winding them up into neat coils. Pretending I wasn’t that eager to hear the answer.
“After my dad died, my mum fell apart. Well, we both did, really.”
I lay back down beside her and put my arm around her.
“I was crushed by Dad’s death, but my grandparents and I comforted each other. Mum felt alone, I think. Montana wasn’t her home. She wanted to go back to Scotland. I was only 13 and had no choice in the matter. So we went.
“But it turned out that Mum’s parents, my other grandparents, were still angry over her marriage to my father. She had defied them by marrying a man they didn’t approve of.”
“Whoa.”
“Yeah. They’d planned an arranged marriage for her. Ironic, isn’t it? A few years later, she tried the same scheme on me. She wanted me to marry Cameron Malloch, my second cousin. That’s part of the reason I returned to the States—so I wouldn’t have to marry a man I didn’t love.”
“Oops.”
She laughed, which was reassuring. “Life is strange, isn’t it? Anyway, for about a year we wandered around the Highlands, visiting family, being vagabonds. Then something unfortunate happened. My mother got mixed up with a man. An alpha wolf named Martin.”
This was the first I’d heard of Martin. Or Cameron Malloch, although that name sounded familiar. I could swear I’d heard it before.
“She joined his pack and dragged me along. Martin was the alpha. His son Jonathan was a year younger than me.” She paused. I could feel the way her body had tensed. “Jonathan was the shifter who kidnapped and assaulted me. Years later, when we were both adults.”
“So,” I hesitated as I tried to process this without leaping out of bed and going out to kill Jonathan, wherever he was. Or—maybe not. She’d told me before the wedding that her attacker was dead.
“This Jonathan guy was your stepbrother?”
“Not officially. My mum never married Martin. He was a strange kid who tried to bully me. But I was a tomboy—tough, strong, and scrappy. I think he hated me for that. As we got older and he gained height and muscle, he grew more dangerous. He was a psychopath. Narcissistic. Incapable of empathy. Sadistic. I was his favorite target.”
“Fuck.”
“Yeah.”
“His father must have known. It was his responsibility to see that everyone in the pack was safe. ”
“This pack was different. Women were subservient to the males. Martin was almost as bad as his son. Before she realized what she’d signed up for, my mother was in too deep. She admitted later that she’d gone into a dark place and didn’t know how to extricate herself. Or me.
“The pack lived deep in an isolated part of the Highlands. But we didn't live as wolves. You’ve wondered why I don't shift more. We weren’t allowed to shift, except on the alpha’s orders. At first, I did it anyway. Rebelliously.” She stopped again before adding in a low voice, “They punished me for shifting.”
I could feel my hot blood pounding. I was furious on her behalf. What kind of a pack punished anyone for shifting? I wanted to fly over to Scotland and rip out their throats.
“Punished you how?”
It was too much. I could see by the look on her face that she was done. She wasn’t going to tell me the rest of the story. Not now, anyway. She took a deep breath and said, “I’ve answered more than one question. It’s your turn to be interrogated.”
“Fair enough,” I said quickly before she could withdraw. But I was trying to process what she had told me. It was worse than I’d guessed. She’d been abused and it had apparently gone on for several years. I was surprised that she was as together emotionally as she was. She must be really strong inside. And resilient.
“Ask away.”
She had her question all ready to go: “Why did a kid like you, who grew up in a nice family with great parents, turn into such a messed-up dick as a teenager?”
I should have known she wouldn’t hesitate to pull out the big guns. I guess it was only fair. It was spill your guts time. “I can answer that. Truth.”
She pushed herself up on the pillows. “Okay, let’s hear it.”
“I was always a fucked-up kid. My father and I clashed a lot. He was stubborn as all hell and I’m the same.
“Then there was Aaron, the golden boy. I adored him, but I was jealous. He was bigger, stronger, smarter, and generally perfect. Everyone loved him. Our teachers favored him. They tried not to show it, but, well….” I shrugged, reminding myself to stay detached. Always hard when remembering Aaron. “He was the archetypal good boy, with whom I could never compete, so I devoted myself to being the opposite. I was good at being bad. I fucking excelled at that.”
“Seriously? Is that the way you thought about it back then?”
“What teenager thinks? I was just a seething mass of feelings. Did I consciously set out to walk on the dark side because my brother had already claimed the light? Maybe not, but in retrospect it's obvious.
“I caused trouble, talked back, acted out, disgraced the family, brought shame upon my house—the whole thing. Petty crime, drugs, girls, and the MCs. I wallowed.”
“I think I have a soft spot for the bad boy in you.”
I chuckled. “I know you do, you badass. But I carried things to extremes. It’s amazing I didn’t end up dead or in prison. I harmed myself and I hurt a lot of other people. My family, especially.” I paused again as my buried pain rose up to sabotage my nonchalance. “I loved Aaron, though. He had the sweetest, most generous nature of anyone I’ve ever known. Even when I was at my worst, being a complete asshole to him and everyone else, he never gave up on me.” Fuck it. I was getting choked up. “It just about ruined me when he died.”
She squeezed my hand hard. “That must have been a nightmare.”
“Yeah.” I stayed silent for a few moments to compose myself. “You mentioned your mother being lost after your dad died. I get that. I was lost, too.”
“But you got your true self back.”
I snorted. “My true self? Who would that be? I play a good game, that’s all. The stains I put on my soul during those years remain. You can't do shit like that for as long as I did and come out clean.”
As I said this, I knew I still wasn't clean. I’d been through a long period of hell after my brother had died. I’d missed him. I’d felt guilty. No one knew what my brother had been doing in that motorcycle club bar that night. The general belief was that he’d gone there to try to get me to stop fucking around, drinking, and hanging with the kind of folks who frequented the place.
As if she read my mind, she said, “What happened to your brother? I’ve heard a couple of different versions of the story.”
“Have you heard the version that I set him up to be murdered so I could step into his place in the pack?”
“No!” She sounded shocked. “Who the hell says that?” She sat up straighter, looking the way I must have looked a few minutes ago when I’d been all primed to take off for Scotland and avenge her mistreatment. “That’s bullshit! You would never do such a thing.”
“You’re right, I wouldn’t. The possibility has always existed that someone else did, though.”
“That’s what Grandpa told me, too,” she admitted. “That maybe someone had killed him on purpose, except that it seemed unlikely because he had no enemies.”
“Yeah. Believe me, I suspected everybody for a while. Including other members of the pack.”
“Like who?”
I shrugged. “This is probably just another example of me being jealous, but I had my eye on Brandon. While I was dicking around as a teenager, he’d come along and endeared himself to everybody. Including my father. He’s a strong alpha and ambitious. I don't like him or trust him.”
“I don’t, either.”
“You hardly know him,” I pointed out. “Anyway, he was Aaron’s friend, not mine, and Aaron liked him well enough. Brandon seemed just as devastated by Aaron’s death as the rest of us were, and there was no evidence against him. He did challenge me for leadership, though. I thought we were going to have to fight it out with an old-style dominance duel.”
“But you didn’t?”
“Nope. Before Dad died, I’d proved myself with the pack a bit. Resurrected myself would be more like it. Dad ordained me as the leader at the end. There was an election that I won. Brandon accepted the results.”
“What about Suzanne?”
“You don't like her, do you?”
“Actually, it’s she who doesn’t like me.”
“Probably not. You’re a threat to her. I think Suzanne wanted Brandon to fight me. But he declared in front of everyone that he respected the democratic process. To my astonishment, he bent the knee to me. I thought Suzanne was going to fucking kill him.”
“She wanted to be the alpha female.”
“You got it. She still wants it.”
“Your mother is the alpha female.”
I looked at her, not speaking. She probably knew what I was thinking: You’re my mate, Jess. It should be you.