Chapter 4
Lynn
When I woke up, I knew who was to blame for drugging me. Miranda. That anaesthetist bitch.
Someone had given me more pain relief, though, because I couldn’t feel a single mangled part of my body, so that was a win.
“Easy,” a warm voice said. Male. Not Devil. I sucked down air, tasting crackling flames and burning wood. Not familiar. “Can you hear me? It’s Giant, the medic at the Alpha Knights compound.”
I groaned, letting myself slump back into the mattress. It wasn’t as comfortable as my bed in the sanctuary. I wet my lips, trying to speak. “F—”
“Here,” Giant said, and I cracked my eyes open—sore, gritty, dry—in time to see him angle a glass of water with a straw towards me, then realise I couldn’t drink it while I was horizontal. He winced, helped me sit up, and returned with the water.
“Thanks,” I croaked, and pretended that was what I planned to say all along. “Where am I?”
“There’s a room off from the main clinic where I see patients. It’s been your bedroom for a week while your body recovered.”
“A—what?” A week. I’d been unconscious for a week. They could have done anything to me.
A machine began to beep in my ear, rapid, alarmed. I drew my upper lip back in a snarl, wanting to drive my fist through the damned thing.
Giant batted my hand away when I reached for the machine. “Jane, you were severely injured. Not to mention dehydrated, in bad need of nutrients, and fighting an infection on the scale I’d like to never see again. You needed time to heal.”
“My name’s Lynn, you dick,” I muttered—and then froze. “Shit.”
A smile filled Giant’s whole face, making his eyes glitter. Ugh. Why was he so happy? What sunshine and rainbows existence had this man lived, to smile like that? “Lynn,” he echoed. “It’s nice to officially meet you. How do you feel?”
“Stabby.”
He nodded. “Don’t leave out any scalpels, got it.”
Ugh. Something annoying happened in my chest. Some raspy vibration of sound. I didn’t want to laugh when my head was full of darkness and my body was rife with pain and—oh, my pain was gone.
“Nice drugs,” I said, sitting up further, giving Giant a very odd look when he rushed to prop up my pillows. “Explain it to me.”
“Explain what?” He moved back, dragged over a stool that made a god-awful scraping noise on the linoleum floor.
“This whole situation.” I assessed the bandages wrapped around my hands, then the splints. Uncomfortable fuckers, but if they fixed my fingers, I’d allow it. “The Knights, the rescue, the sanctuary. Bringing me here, giving me medicine and—whatever else you did. Why? What do you get out of it?”
Because my initial fears, that blind terror that they’d used my unconscious body for their own vile desires struggled to hold itself in my chest when Giant was sitting here, smiling, his eyes soft as he regarded me. He was either an amazing actor, or he was genuine and I was missing something.
Plus, scents didn’t lie, and this room smelled clean, neutral except for my own acrid, damaged scent and Giant’s crackling woodfire.
None of the vile scents from the barn. Not even the ordinary fluids from perfectly harmless missionary sex.
It was like he’d left me untouched. So I was definitely missing something.
Giant sighed, like my question made him sad.
“Everyone here, every Knight, and the people in the sanctuary, even the clubwomen who make themselves available for sex with my brothers—everyone’s lives have been touched by violence and abuse.
Either we’ve experienced it first-hand, witnessed it, or lost someone. ”
“Okay,” I said slowly, not sure how that related to me.
“It leaves a mark,” Giant sighed, rubbing his jaw. “Either you take that messed up stuff inside you, and become like the abuser you witnessed, or you spend your whole life abhorring it. Making sure it never happens to anyone else.”
“Huh.” I blinked at the clean, medical room, realisation dawning. “I’m your proxy. You couldn’t save whoever was important to you, so I’m the stand-in.”
“If that’s how you want to think of it,” he replied dubiously.
“It goes against an alpha’s very nature, to see someone in a vulnerable position abused by someone in power.
It—” Giant exhaled roughly, his hands flexing on his massive knees.
Everything about this guy was massive; it was no mystery where his name had come from.
“It makes my skin burn and something crawl down my spine and every instinct I have scream, like an untuned violin.”
“Very poetic.”
He wasn’t dissuaded by my commentary. “It is instinct to protect those who can’t protect themselves. Not to take advantage of them while they’re wounded or weak or forced into a heat or—” His next sigh was a borderline growl.
“You’ve seen some shit then,” I deduced. “Like the barn where I was—held.” I skittered away from all the other words like a spooked horse. Held was as close as I could get right now.
“Nothing as bad as that,” he admitted, hunching over in the chair, dwarfing the thing. “But yeah. We all have. Years ago, we set out to make sure the shit that happened to our friends and family would never happen again.”
“Seems delusional.”
He shrugged. “It feels like that sometimes. But even if we can only kill one abuser a month, it’s worth it.”
My eyebrows shot up. “You kill them?”
Giant met my eyes, held contact. “Every single one we find. Their kind is a disease, and it’s been allowed to spread too far, infect too many people. Usually men. Usually alphas, but not always.”
I blinked, processing that, a little weight lifting from my chest. “Are they all dead? The handlers, traffickers, farmers, whatever the fuck they called themselves.”
“All but a handful,” he confirmed, reading something in me if the brightening of his eyes was anything to judge by. “And the ones left are… getting acquainted with my most unhinged brothers.”
A smile pulled at my mouth. “Good. I hope they die screaming.”
“Oh yeah, definitely,” Giant agreed, pushing his hands against his knees as he stood. “Tybalt’s a total psychopath. And Cobra has no line he won’t cross when it comes to punishing abusers.”
I vaguely remembered him. Eyes the colour of green venom. A face made of harsh angles. Ink practically everywhere. Him calling me asshole but without any heat or malice.
“So it’s a sense of justice and anger that drives you lot,” I mused. “You want revenge for the people you’ve seen hurt and killed.”
“What we want,” Giant said, crossing the room and riffling through a stack of plastic boxes, “is for no one else to suffer because of their designation, and for betas to not get caught in between.”
“The main selling point of the farm was omegas,” I guessed.
“And alphas,” he agreed. “But there were three barns with beta captives.”
“Evil will always settle for a beta when they get bored of omegas,” I said, carefully crossing my arms over my chest and feeling more like myself for the motion. “Even if we’re more breakable.”
Or because of it. He didn’t say it, and neither did I, but we were both thinking it.
“I’ll call Ndidi,” Giant offered, without apparent prompting. “She can talk you through everything that happened in your surgery.”
“Surgery?” I demanded, stiffening. I knew it was bad but not that bad. “Who the fuck cut me open?”
“A licensed, qualified professional,” Giant assured me with that warm, syrupy voice again. The bedside manner personified. “She knew exactly what she was doing, and you’re going to make a full recovery.”
But there was a wince in his eye where it squished against his eyebrow, and I knew the look of a man keeping secrets when I saw one. The machine I was hooked up to went crazy again, and I whipped around, teeth bared.
“Get me off this fucking thing,” I spat.
“It’s there for your—”
“I don’t give a shit. Unhook me, or I’ll start ripping out wires.” I’d leave the tube attached, though. I knew that was where the pain drugs came from, and they were blissful. I almost, almost felt like a normal person with them in my system.
“Alright, alright,” Giant huffed, almost matronly as he bustled over, giving me a look of severe disapproval. He pointed out the wires hooked up to sensors on my chest and made sure I was okay with him touching me before he removed them, and then there was blissful silence.
Blissful silence and Giant’s loud worry, the hesitation coming off him in waves, and that goddamn wince.
“Just tell me,” I forced through gritted teeth. “Whatever it is.”
“It’s better if you hear it from Ndidi—”
“Tell me,” I snapped. “I can handle it.”
Giant slumped back onto his chair with a sigh, looking like he was going to clasp my hand in his before he realised that would get him bodily harmed. “I don’t know the nuances and details,” he began. “I’m an army medic; I’m used to patching people up on battlefields, not…”
“Vaginas?”
The smile when it reached his eyes was sad. I tensed, my shoulders by my ears. “The damage was so extensive that… some of it was irreversible. I know the surgeon did her best but—”
“Giant,” I barked, my breathing racing, hands sweating inside the bandages.
“Jane,” he said gently, then corrected, “Lynn. I’m sorry, but you won’t be able to have children.”
I blinked. Felt the impact like a gunshot to the chest. “Ever?”
Giant shook his head. Those sad eyes made me want to scream.
No children, ever. A laugh bubbled up and burst free, rattling around the room.
I was going to name my first daughter Linda, my mum’s name. All firstborn daughters in our family carried the name. My grandma had been Belinda, and I was Lynn. But I was never going to have a daughter, never going to have a single child.
Of course not. Why would I expect otherwise when the world had consistently, and relentlessly, shafted me up the ass?
I swallowed the lump in my throat, blinking back tears, refusing to let them fall.
“Ndidi can tell you more, let me get her on the phone for you,” Giant offered, so fucking kind. It scratched my skin like razorblades, made me want to scream and tear apart his pristine fucking room.
I ripped the needle from my hand, and swung my legs over the side of the bed, not even caring if the pain returned.
I could handle that. I knew what to do with pain.
But this? This grenade blasting my insides apart, leaving only shredded flesh and pulp behind…
I didn’t know how to handle it. Couldn’t.
No children, ever. Alone, forever. No family. No one. Just me, and the pain, and the darkness in my head. Forever until eternity.
The darkness swelled until I was sure another grenade would go off, but this time blast my brain to bits until there were no thoughts and sense left, just… just this ache. This pain. This—I didn’t want to name it. Didn’t want to be fucking here anymore.
This was it—my limit.