Prologue
Jasper
During Dash
“Where in the hell have you been,” he spat in my face.
Most people got a “welcome home, honey” or at least a smile of some sort. My mom used to drop everything and kiss my dad as soon as he got home from work. I got Rot Mouth in my face daily, accusing me of something—everything.
It was when I wasn’t greeted like this, I knew something was up.
Because when he was nice to me, I knew things were about to get bad.
A clump of his greasy hair broke out across his brow, and I shut my mouth just in case a stray piece of dandruff decided to flutter in my mouth’s direction.
“I went to work, Dash—you know that. You always do this.” I tried to shrug him off by rolling my eyes and moving around him. His enormous hand slammed into the wall beside me—I flinched and nearly swallowed my tongue. As it passed my face, I felt the wind of its motion, and my eyes burned with the beginnings of unshed tears.
“You’re deflecting, little male.”
I somehow managed to subdue the gag pulsing in my gorge. He always called me little male and sometimes asked me to call him Daddy—it was vomit inducing.
How in the hell did it come to this?
And why did I put up with it?
Because he’d said he was my mate, and, for some reason, I accepted it, although we’d never taken the mate test, and the only blood he’d ever had me taste was my own.
I couldn’t even claim he’d once been sweet. He hadn’t. He was stacked, muscles head to toe, because he spent all day in the garage pumping iron. And I could shallowly admit his built-like-a-mutha body was what I fell for. That was where the attraction and interest ended. But I’d apparently read too many bad-boy books where the guy is rude in the beginning until the boy breaks him and then he’s Romeo in tight jeans with a motorcycle.
Because I couldn’t break this motherfucker to save my life.
Maybe I just didn’t have a big enough wrecking ball.
Or maybe his head was made of marble.
Or maybe I’d confused fiction with bullshit psychology, and now I was sitting in a heaping, steaming pile of it.
“Dash, please. I worked all day on my feet. I’m exhausted, and the house still needs to be cleaned, and I have to make dinner.”
His lip curled as he processed his options. “Fine. But don’t think I won’t know later. A man can feel when his mate is…not the same. When he’s been with someone else.”
He was off his rocker. I worked twelve hour shifts at a shady gas station that sold smoking paraphernalia and lubricants in the display counter. My feet ached, and I always looked like crap.
Who would want someone like me?
And let’s just be real here—I could give a rat’s ass about extracurricular activities when I was this tired, with Dash or anyone else.
Gods, please make me a sledgehammer so I can bust his paranoid balls.
I smiled off the whole tiff. “You know I wouldn’t ever be with someone else. What do you want for dinner?”
He shrugged and moved back to his carved-in place in the corner of our secondhand couch.
“Shit if I care. But make it quick, I’m starving.”
“Yeah, of course.”
I hung my satchel and lunch bag on the hook by the door and dumped the empty Ziploc bags from my lunch sandwich into the sink. That was how poor we were—I had to wash out the damned Ziploc bag I used for my cheapest bologna sandwich on cardboard white bread.
The sink was full. Dash ate tons of eggs because protein and more muscles. So, he fried the eggs—which I didn’t understand since I thought all butter was counterproductive—ate them on a clean plate, and then allowed the yolk to congeal on the plastic surface. We didn’t have real plates; we had the ones the local superstore put out for summer. We had red, yellow, and orange—all bought for one dollar for a five pack on the summer clearance aisle—’cause we were just that high class.
Washing dishes gave me time to wrestle with myself. Dash had his DJ-looking headphones on, playing Xbox Live, while I washed, so it always gave me ample time to rewind and reflect on things.
Like who in the fuck had I become?
Like I was a detriment to the wolf species.
Like a little arsenic on his cookies would make them pretty and slowly make the giant fall.
I had become a professional at making spaghetti in thirty minutes. And spaghetti was cheap. I’d dropped out of school at seventeen for Dash, the part-time crabber—I didn’t like crab. And when I told people what he did, I could see the judgment written all over their face—um, yeah, he catches crabs—the crustacean, not the STD. My mother warned me, my friends warned me, but did I listen?
Well, take a look around, big boy. No, you didn’t listen.
I guess I’d been attracted to his lawlessness, his rebellion. He didn’t need to work a clock-in clock-out mundane job for the man. No, he was above those petty things. I convinced myself we could live on love. I figured out that was a crock of shit after I ran out of toothpaste one day and had to brush my teeth with just water.
“Oh God, spaghetti again? Shit, male, can’t you cook anything else?” He spat a little on my bare shoulder, and I envisioned the amoebas crawling into my pores.
I wanted to spray myself down with hydrogen peroxide.
“It’s all we have until payday tomorrow, Dash. I’m sorry.”
See? It was when those kinds of pathetic words spewed from my mouth, I wondered if my womb was marching downtown with a picket sign reading, “Dismantle Patriarchy!”
I dished up two servings, mine on a salad plate. He closely monitored what I ate. He said he didn’t want me to become a fat slob. This was coming from the man who created golden splatters on our white plastic trailer walls and left masterpieces of skid marks in his white briefs.
But he was concerned about me becoming a slob.
I ate quickly, knowing a houseful of work had its finger in its ears, singing “Na na na boo boo.”
“Get everything cleaned up by eight. My boys are coming over. And go grab some beer while you’re at it. We’re gonna have an Assassin’s Creed all-nighter.”
I couldn’t help but secretly laugh at a stray centimeter of pasta stuck in his sideburn.
Seventeen-year-old me somehow found those chops appealing.
How does one get a noodle all the way over there?
I nodded and took his plate and put it in the sink.
“Great, another night of no sleep.”
I didn’t acknowledge the motion until I was slammed against the refrigerator, but he’d used my hair as a handle.
“What did you just say?”
I instantly crumpled into the pitiful, apologetic boy whose voice and demeanor sometimes got himself out of a beating—sometimes.
“Nothing, Dash. I’m just really tired.”
“Why do you do this? You and your effing comments. Always with the comments. Do I care what you think about what I do? You think you’re better than me?”
Even after a full plate of spaghetti, all I could smell was sewage breath and stare at the noodle hanging from his born-and-bred redneck side-hair.
“No, no, you and your friends just get loud sometimes—especially when you drink. I have to get up at four to work. I’m sorry.”
He slammed my head back one more time against the cold metal of the fridge. A riptide of terror weaseled down through my skeleton knowing what was in store for me.
“Why do you do this? You always do this. Why? Why can’t you just shut up? That mouth should be used for one thing and one thing only. When are you gonna get it?”
“Never.” I knew when I said it I’d handed him the ticket, and he was the carnie that would throw this deranged ride into gear.
It had been a full month since he’d beaten on me—he was right on schedule.
If he didn’t explode like this once a month, he couldn’t function properly.
Like it was his menstruation cycle or something.
His hand closed in on my neck, and my eyes felt like cartoon caricatures, bulging, ready to burst from their sockets. The skin on my face reddened—I could feel the blood scrambling to my cheeks, warning me of the impending impact. My hands fumbled desperately for something to make it stop, his shirt, a spatula, something. My feet hung down, his hand holding me inches from the floor. The other hand made a fist then cracked into my face. He was still yelling, but now I couldn’t make out the words. I saw his mouth moving and I could spot a concave black hole in the back right of his mouth—the man never went to a dentist. And his lips, they were always chapped and peeling. I focused on a sliver of skin as he ground his methodologies into me—I didn’t hear a one of them, but I knew them all by heart.
He did this a lot. I had a plethora of turtlenecks and cover-up to prove it. People who worked with me thought I was trying to dress like a celebrity or something.
He waved a little in my face and rolled his eyes like I’d disappointed him by caving so fast.
My left leg twitched once—it felt unattached to my hip. I called it the twitch of death, and I welcomed it because I knew it wouldn’t be long now before I blacked out completely. It was the only way he’d leave me alone.
Warm urine pooled in my bladder then released the flow down the un-twitching leg.
And then the world went cold.
Hours or minutes later, I didn’t know which, my knee jumped, spasmed. Musty smelling air pushed against my face.
Was the heater on?
I opened up my eyes, only a splice to get a hold on my situation. Black folds of rippled plastic puffed out another wave of hot air in my face. I still didn’t know where I was. My hair was wet. It was plastered to the side of my face and it stunk—ammonia? Pee, it was pee. I heard one sound, and I smirked a little at the sound of the clunky, cranky compressor. Refrigerator, I was horizontal in front of the refrigerator. Then it all came back to me. I didn’t move yet. I had to assess the situation.
I could hear the familiar clicks and toggles of the Xbox controllers. I flexed different muscles, still sprawled on the floor, testing out my ability to walk before I lifted my head from the floor. All limbs seemed present and accounted for, but my neck was frozen in a vice of pain, and, as I realized my injury, the pain reared its head and made sure I knew it was there.
I used my arms to prop up my torso first. I was wet from head to toe—pee. And though the stinging pain in my neck almost blinded me, I kept my mouth shut. There was still a chance I could get to the shower and to bed without another incident—especially with his friends here. Yes, he’d choked me and left me to lay on the floor while he and his friends went Xbox wild. It didn’t surprise me—there was the real sadness.
I slid first through the puddle then crawled down the narrow, wood-panel walled hallway until I reached the bathroom. There was no use in stopping to look at myself in the mirror. Give me some purple, black, and blue crayons and I could draw it for you better than da Vinci himself.
I lay flat on my back and pushed my hips upward, peeling my jeans from my legs and kicking them off as quietly as possible. Then I finagled the buttons on my shirt and flailed around until I was naked. The side of the bathtub acted as my crutch so I could bend over it and start the hot water. I mounted the rim of the bathtub like getting on the saddle of a horse then threw the other leg over until I was prostrate under the cleansing spray. I washed my hair with bar soap since I was still scared to stand, and my shampoo was lazing in a plastic hammock hanging by the neck of the sprayer.
“You suck, shampoo,” I garbled at it.
I lathered everything I could reach in this posture and managed to wrestle myself back out of the tub. I didn’t bother the hamper with my nasty clothes; I just let the trash can take care of the mess instead. My clenched hand and a sturdy vanity finally allowed me to stand and bundle myself in a towel. I cracked the door open just enough to reassess the dunderhead situation and hear more of the same ticking and grunting. My toes whispered down the rest of the hall to our bedroom, and I slipped on an old pair of pajama pants and a tank top, downed some aspirin, and gently lowered myself into bed.
But there was something triggered in this attack. Some sense of “survival of the fittest” attitude sprung from the rest of the complacent nature and kept me wide awake.
I’d had enough.
Homelessness was better than this, though I knew Travis, our alpha, would never allow me to be homeless.
Death was better than this—at least it would afford me sleep.
Never-ending sleep would be my Heaven, met at the gates by a warm blanket and given the tour by a feather pillow.
I lay on the edge of the bed; bugs flew around the yellow light outside, right above the trailer next to us. A gold halo surrounded it. My mind swirled with more thoughts of the pearly gates, and a fear lodged itself in my throat—I’d probably never get in.
I was losing it quickly.
I had around twenty-seven dollars in my pocket, but not many clothes, so I could grab those easy as pie. I had a few pieces of my grandmother’s jewelry in a deposit box at the bank, but I’d rather starve than to sell those.
An hour or so later, the cabin shook with his skunk-ape footsteps coming down the hall, and I commanded my body to act relaxed and play possum—or at least sleep.
He slammed into the doorframe, and I somehow kept the startle within me—he was drunk. He cursed the doorway to hell then fell into the bed, mumbling still. I knew his breathing by heart—not the cutesy way some women know their man’s sound as they deepen in sleep. No, I had to know for my sanity. I was only free when he was jailed in slumber.
Shallow nose breathing turned into a chortling snore, and I turned over to look at the beast and test the waters. I watched him, muscled and chiseled, such a Trojan Horse if I’d ever seen one. I lifted one of his hands and let go. It flopped down on the bed, not disturbing its owner. This was my chance.
I got out of the bed, grabbed one of my discount store fake gym bags, and stuffed jeans, shirts, underwear, socks, and the only two bras I owned into it. I grabbed my flip-flops and carried them, afraid of the noise they’d cause. In hindsight, I should’ve done something horrible to him like superglued his balls to his thigh, but I didn’t have the will.
I only had the will to leave.
I couldn’t take the car. It was his, in his name, the insurance was in his name, the whole shebang. But I had two legs. I got to the main gate on the outskirts of Distance, and to my right was the city where I knew I could get somewhere with my twenty-some-odd dollars. And to my left was my mother’s house, at least a three-hour drive, and I had no car. But she’d kicked me out when I dropped out of school and married Dash because he claimed not to believe in sleeping with someone before marriage. It was all horseshit, of course, because I later found out I was one of many.
But he married the dumb one who would stick around and not defend himself.
And then I froze, unable to take that final step—the step that might lead toward freedom. If I did this, if I really did this, he’d find me, and, instead of piss and blood covering my body, it would be a casket. I turned around and snuck back home, hating my cowardice every step of the way, but unable to choose otherwise.
One day maybe.
The next week he was hired and had me stay home, quitting my awful job. Not because he was making so much money he wanted me home. No. It was his way to control me. To make sure I wasn’t sleeping with the deadbeats buying crappy bongs and cigarettes.
But it gave me hope. Hope that he would feel worth having a job. Hope that being around the hard-working men on his team would rub off on him. Hope that he would see my worth and treat me as an omega should be treated.
My hope was in vain.