28. Ryn
Chapter twenty-eight
Ryn
If I should die, I will welcome it, for I’ve found happiness in arms not meant for me- Ryn Raines
Tyr leans close and brushes my cheek. I can’t look away from him. This glow of happiness is an illusion, but I want to happily live here forever.
The last few days have been a fever dream.
I smile up at him and shake my head as he brushes a kiss on the corner of my lips.
I watch him stride away. The view from the back is as perfect as the one from the front.
“Well.”
It’s one word, but it fills me with fear. I tense, my shoulders rising to protect myself, and turn to face my father.
“Dad.”
“I thought perhaps they had it wrong.” It’s not the tone that turns my legs to jelly, but the way he angles his head, talking to me the same way I’ve seen a thousand times, right before he beats the living fuck out of my mother.
“It’s not what-”
“Spare me the lies, Auryn. Come with me.”
He gives me no opportunity to deny him. The bark lashes the air. I have one hope in this and that’s to keep control, to keep the mask on. He cannot find out I’m an omega.
I follow behind him, wishing that anything else would come up to stop what’s going to happen, but alas, my luck holds, and we’re escorted to a private room .
The room is bare but for a stinky lounge in one corner and a mirror on the wall opposite. It must be some kind of practice rehearsal room, but the band was never offered it.
I walk into the middle of the room and stop, standing perfectly still with my hands clasped in front of me, while my father paces in slow, measured steps. It’s a delaying tactic, a way to build fear. It’s working.
He turns back to me only after he’s made me sweat. A thousand disjointed thoughts have gone through my mind, nothing staying long enough for me to register.
Where’s my out? What’s my plan? Denial? We’re just friends? I need to play this down completely. Compliance. I need to surrender to him, feign obedience. Submit to his narcissistic tendencies.
He steps up to me; it takes me too long to register the raised hand. I look away from his narrowed, flat brown eyes and clenched jaw to take in the threat of his raised palm.
“Are you going to hit me, Dad?” I whisper.
“You are going to be bonded to a pack that I decide. This is for the company, our legacy.”
“It’s archaic and outdated,” I snap back, breaking my own resolve to give him what he wants.
“It’s for family. Everyone has fucked up so far. All we have is us. I need you to bring the security that Locke, Lia, Raider, and Kelly have thrown back in our faces.”
“Dad, the company will survive.”
“This is not up for debate, Auryn. I’m your father, and I know what’s best for you, your mother, and your future. You are a beta, a mere beta. You can’t possibly see beyond your need for approval and acceptance. But I can. And I know a pack who would treat you-”
“Like a whore?” I snap, incensed.
His hand lashes out, gripping my wrist, grinding the bones together. “If you act like a whore, then you’ll be treated like a whore. Had you been a son, a useful heir, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, but you can’t be what I need, so you will get me what I want, whether you need to whore yourself out or not!” he growls savagely.
I swallow hard and relax my arm, not fighting him.
“Why do you hate women so much?” I whisper.
He stands up, letting me go, and adjusting his cuffs. “I don’t hate women, don’t be ridiculous. I find you useless and tedious. There is a difference. Women are emotional. Irrational.”
Is there?
“So, it doesn’t matter if they hurt me, if I say no, and they ignore me, if they- ”
My father raises a hand, silencing my questions with the threat. “As long as you get us that merger, I don’t care what happens.”
I stare at him. In some distant part of my mind, I think I’d been hoping that he’d find something to love about me, something to be proud of. I think I thought that I could eventually earn his love. There was hope. I didn’t know it was there, but it was.
I feel it die inside me. Part of me crumbling and falling into the ocean of ruined things. I lose my dad.
“I’ll send you to another band. Or back home. You obviously can’t be trusted.”
What? No!
“It’s a harmless flirtation,” father, I can’t even say the word out loud, it drips with scorn. “Nothing serious.”
“All the same-”
“No! You gave me this job, and if you want me to do it-”
“Don’t talk to me like that!”
“If,” I say over the top of him, “if you want me to go peacefully into the merger without making a scene, you’ll leave me to do my job. I know that I’m not allowed to be with the band. They don’t want me like that, anyway.”
My father raises an eyebrow. “Threatening me now?”
“Negotiating,” I say back with equal coldness.
His scowl returns, and he opens his mouth to answer, but his phone rings. I don’t know if that call has saved me or not, but I watch him as he talks, realising that for all he’s my dad and he’s familiar, I don’t know anything about him, and what I do know, I hate.
I avert my eyes as he turns in my direction. He ends his call and stalks towards me, gripping my chin so hard it brings tears to my eyes.
“I don’t care if they are your pack, if they are fated fucking mates, you’re not having them. You will go through with this merger. That is the condition that I’m allowing you to stay.”
My eyes widen as something that has been eluding me suddenly makes sense. They are my scent matches. They’ve always been my scent matches.
“I understand,” I whisper.
“Auryn Lilith Raines, hear me very clearly. If you think you can fuck me over or get out of this, you underestimate me. I will hunt you to the end of the world and pull you apart piece by piece.”
I shudder, but he still has hold of my face, gripping me so painfully I can’t move .
“I hear you.”
His fingers dig in hard enough to make my eyes water. “Remember who the fuck you are and what your future is. Stop pretending to be an omega to save yourself. You don’t belong with any band trash. You’re destined to bring this legacy into its future.”
I stare at him, wishing I had the courage to strike out at him, push him off me, anything.
“Remember who owns you.”
His words send a blast of ice through me, right to that void he so happily created with his cruel words. The wound hasn’t healed yet, and he’s digging it deeper.
“Who owns you, Auryn?” he snarls into my face.
“You do.”
“That’s right. I own you.”
I flinch at his minty breath, and then he hurls my head back, and I stumble back several steps before I get my balance.
“Stop making a spectacle of yourself in public. If even one whisper of anything between you and that band goes public again, I will ruin them.”
“They didn’t do anything wrong!”
“I don’t really care. They are almost as bad as Derision. Pains in the asses demanding too much and wanting more.”
“Creative freedom isn’t too much-”
“Are you running this label?” my father snaps.
I shake my head, backing down. “No, sir.”
“Then shut your fucking mouth, and do as you're told. Get some damn distance between those assholes and stop getting photographed with them because in weeks, I’m signing that contract, and you will officially become a part of pack Ellis. Get your head out of the clouds, Auryn. You have one damn job in this life, and that is to help this family become bigger and better.”
I stare at him. Does he even see me as a person? Am I anything at all to him but leverage to be used to get his will?
He leaves while I stand there staring at the floor. I’m shaking. I don’t even realise until I look up and see my mother.
Her fear is in me. I am her, and she is me, and we’re never going to escape him.
She creeps towards me and sighs gustily. Her face has too much makeup on, which means he’s been hitting her again. My mother wears makeup the way some people wear armour. When she’s upset and anxious, it’s thick.
She’s never happy.
“Why would you get involved with them? Auryn, you know better. You don’t draw his eye. ”
“Mum, I love them.” I don’t know why I confess this to her. Because I haven’t been able to vocalise it to anyone else because, right now, it feels like the two of us share some terrible secret that is crushing us to death, and maybe I want her permission to leave.
“You don’t, though. You’re too young to know love. When you have pack bonds and a pack or an alpha who takes care of you-”
“Beats me.”
“And loves you.”
“Rapes me.”
“When he looks after all your needs-”
“Publicly sexually assaults me and laughs while I cry.”
My mother blinks out of her stupor. “No, it’s not like that. Alphas aren’t like that.”
“Dad does it to you.”
My mother flinches and rocks back on her heels. “No, he, he loves me.”
“He is a monster, Mum. He’s a user and an abuser, and we are more than what he says we are. I can sing, Mum! I can sing so well, and I write songs, and I found people who love me. Don’t I get my dreams? Don’t I get five minutes in the light? Don’t you remember how it felt to be Chile Raines?”
My mother’s pain-filled eyes flutter closer, her hand raising to grip her throat. “I remember, but it’s fleeting. The lights, the music, the love, it’s all there until it’s gone. You can skip all that and go straight to-”
“A domestic violence situation that will end up with me cutting my own throat rather than staying.”
My mother’s eyes water. “Don’t say such things.”
“Help me get away from him.”
“There is no escape, Ryn. I tried. I tried so hard. He owns the world, and you and I are nothing but ornaments.”
I glare at her, terrified by the complete acceptance she has over this life of hers.
“I don’t want that, Mum. I don’t want to be scared anymore. And I don’t want to wonder if every day is going to be my last. Walking on eggshells, listening to screams. The police. The questions, the lies. I don’t want it. Mum, I want to feel good, to have people touch me and have it feel pleasant, to be joyful in their embraces. I do not want to endure my alpha’s touch. I want to yearn for it.”
My mother steps back. “It’s the way it is. Life isn’t fair to people like us.”
“We have the entire world at our feet. Why are we the exceptions? The days of staying with people who hurt you because marriage and packs are forever are over. We can leave him. Start a new life. Come with me. ”
I’m begging her. I’m pleading with her. My whole heart is straining with the need to hear that whispered yes slip past her lips.
But my mother’s mouth tightens, and she shakes her head. “I’m not going to tell your father what you said because of all the help you gave me, but I’m warning you now, Auryn. You need to put all these delusional thoughts behind you. Accept the merger your father has made for you. Forget the music, the songs. This is the best course of action.”
“You condemn me to my death.”
“Don’t be so dramatic!” she snaps.
“This isn’t dramatic. This is the truth. If they don’t kill me, I’ll find a way to end it myself.”
My mother stares at me with bruised eyes. “Then I hope you never have a child, so they never take that option away from you.”
Her words haunt me for hours after she leaves. I stand there in that room hearing them over and over. Am I the weapon my father uses to keep my mother chained in this relationship with him? The horror of that, all the beatings, goes through my mind. Every single time I’ve resented her, every time I didn’t understand.
My world is reshaped. It’s reformed.
I’m going to get free of my father, and I’m going to take away the knife that’s being held to my mother’s throat.