Knot Your Pucking Secret (Heat & Havoc #2)

Prologue

Lennon

Ifucking hate Alphas.

And Betas just as much.

At this point, if it has a cock attached to it, it can go straight to hell. Especially them.

Holden, Sasha, and Dominic.

The three men fate had the audacity to chain to me. My scent matches. The very pack the universe deemed worthy of my heart and soul. What a cruel fucking joke.

They threatened to destroy me, and they came close.

That’s the part that keeps me awake at night.

Not because they won. They didn’t. I’m still standing.

Still breathing. Still dragging myself through each day, even when every instinct tells me to crawl back into my nest and let the world carry on without me.

But survival was never the problem. It’s what surviving cost me.

They came close enough that I caught a glimpse of the woman I would’ve become if I stayed.

A woman who would’ve accepted breadcrumbs and convinced herself they were enough simply because fate had been the one serving them.

A woman who would’ve mistaken manipulation for love and bled herself dry just to earn affection from men who already decided she was expendable.

But that woman isn’t me, and she never will be.

Yet, for one fleeting, unforgivable moment…she almost was.

I almost let myself believe they were something other than the monsters they’d always intended to be.

I gave in to them in ways they didn’t deserve.

On my knees, submitting my body willingly to them because it was as natural as breathing.

The way they commanded me, the certainty in their voices, the absolute expectation that I’d obey…

It unearthed something I didn’t know existed.

A language my body seemed to understand long before my mind could catch up and realize what the fuck was going on.

I hate that it answered them. I hate that for one terrifying moment, I handed myself over to them on a silver platter like a good little Omega, and the loss of that control is what haunts me.

Because that’s the thing about betrayal.

People think it steals your trust, but it doesn’t.

Trust can be rebuilt. Betrayal steals your certainty.

It makes you question every memory you once held close enough to call your own.

It forces you to replay conversations until the words lose their meaning, searching for the exact moment sincerity became manipulation and affection became nothing more than another strategy.

They didn’t just lie to me. They rewrote my reality.

My name. My father. My inheritance.

They knew my life was built on one big fucking lie and still chose silence. They looked me in the eye, watched me mourn a man I thought I knew, watched me defend a legacy that was never what I believed it to be, and said nothing.

Sometimes I think they should’ve made good on their threats and finished what they so eagerly set out to do.

It would have been more forgiving than forcing me to live with the truth.

That Lennon Gilmore was a lie. One that every male in my life told so fucking well, and for what?

Pussy? To end me? To break me in a much more theatrical way because simply hurting my feelings would not have been enough for those psychopaths.

They broke into my house, desecrated the nest I had spent my life building, turning the only place that had ever truly belonged to me into just another crime scene.

Then they marked me. Branded my skin and left behind a scar that I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to hide beneath ink and fabric, because looking at it means looking at them. Visions of that moment flood me, the feel of their hands on my skin, their heat, the way they made me theirs.

No. No. I refuse to think about that moment in any other way than in unadulterated rage.

A violation. They don’t deserve another second of my thoughts.

I spent years protecting myself from people like them.

Alphas and Betas. Not because they were the so-called superior designation, or that I feared what they were.

I feared what they could make me become.

I’d built my walls so high I convinced myself no one would reach me.

My heart. My dignity. My trust. The pieces of myself I had guarded for years.

Then they came along and tore through every last one of them as though they had never existed.

Holden obliterated any kind of warmth I had been developing for him, and he did a damn good job of it. He had me right where he wanted me as he went behind my back, willingly torturing me with the fear I had been forced to live in when I got there.

Dominic, on the other hand, was much sneakier about it.

He never needed to bare his teeth to be dangerous.

I saw his darkness. Saw that quiet side of him that had me second guessing everything I thought I knew.

He was the kind of man who could make brutality feel intimate.

He had quite literally carved himself into my skin, branding me like I was nothing more than cattle.

A possession. Something to be claimed. And in doing so, he ensured I’d carry him with me for the rest of my life, whether I wanted to or not.

Every glance in the mirror, every night beneath the shower is a reminder that some monsters don’t leave fingerprints.

They leave scars that never let you forget. And I will never forgive him.

The only one who ever let me see their true colors was Sasha.

I’d always known he carried some kind of hatred for me.

Even during those rare moments when he cracked.

When the mask slipped, and he wasn’t some tyrannical Alpha hellbent on making me pay for sins that were never mine to begin with.

He was just…Sasha. A frightened little boy trapped inside the body of a man who had forgotten how to be anything else.

I don’t even think he remembers who that version of himself is anymore.

I think he surrendered to his anger years ago.

Fed it. Nurtured it. Let it hollow him out until there was nothing left except bitterness masquerading as purpose.

And as much as I despise him, all three of them, a part of me understands why.

Not enough to forgive him. You couldn’t pay me enough for that.

But just enough to forgive my own naivety for believing there was still something left of the man beneath the jersey.

I believed him when he told me his story that night. Believed him when he laid his heart bare at my feet, trusting me with the ugliest parts of himself. And then I turned around and walked away. Not because I didn’t care, but because I care about myself more.

I fucking matter. My heart matters. My life matters.

Even after the bullshit lies I’ve been fed by every man I’ve come across, that whole experience taught me something. The only person guaranteed to choose me…is me. It was a lesson that cost me almost everything, but there’s one thing they’ll never have. Something their money can never buy.

Me.

The Cardinals are done. Brett saw to that.

My uncle. The man that I didn’t know existed until the game that sealed our fate.

Turns out Ars Mortis weren’t the only ones carrying a vendetta against the Gilmore name.

The Monday that followed, I was pulled into countless meetings.

The Cardinals’ conference rooms became my new home for days before the head of the NHL and their lawyers finally delivered the verdict.

The Cardinals aren’t mine. At least not if I can’t buy them out.

I may make good money as a lawyer, but not enough to meet the multi-billion-dollar asking price that took my breath away.

I think that’s what makes me hate those three pricks even more. If they had any kind of decency left in them, they wouldn’t have seen hundreds of jobs being lost. Players getting drafted mid-season to teams already bursting at the seams.

Because it wasn’t just me who left that day.

Half the staffing team handed in their resignation letters.

Players refused to take the ice, inciting a club-wide strike in anger over how unfairly I had been treated.

The way they saw it, blood didn’t matter.

My name, or the name I had gone by my entire life, was listed on the Will, stating that the team was mine.

The only issue is that, according to the law, Lennon Gilmore doesn’t actually exist. It was too much of a legal battle, one that would take years to sift through, and I don’t have it in me to fight it.

Not when the man who raised me was a liar. A criminal. I had to ask myself if I wanted to be tied to that for the rest of my life. I had to decide if, once all of that got out to the press, I’d be able to recover emotionally from the scrutiny. The truth is, I’m not so sure.

So I let it go.

To grieve, and to heal.

Because there comes a point where carrying the weight of what someone did to you becomes a choice, and I’ll be damned if I spend another day carrying theirs. So here I am, back in the west. A city I didn’t think I’d see again after returning to Vadena. Back at my regular job. And I’ll be just fine.

It’s been five months since I left Vadena. Left them.

The wounds are still fresh, and the scars always will be. But scars aren’t reminders of weakness. They’re proof I survived.