Six
SIX
Mia
I WASN’T SURE WHAT to expect as we moved carefully into the stairwell... only that it wasn’t going to be good. Luca flipped on the overhead bulb so we wouldn’t be stumbling around completely in the dark, but it did little to chase away the shadows deeper in the basement.
The fact that Luca was apparently a skilled lock picker was an interesting twist, and it reminded me sharply that he hadn’t always been a style-conscious, twenty-something professional grant writer. The world of seedy gangs and criminality hovered around this pack like threatening storm clouds. It had touched all of them, except maybe for Zalen—and even he hovered on the edges, trying to drag teenagers to safety before they succumbed to the undertow.
A plaintive meow came from somewhere ahead of us.
“Emiel?” I asked hesitantly, needing some kind of sign that he was at least awake and aware of our presence.
“ Stay the hell away from me .” A growl underpinned the words.
That angry tone sent a shiver through me. Ahead of me, Luca’s scent soured with disquiet. Neither of us were about to let this go, however.
“No,” I said softly, knowing alpha ears would be able to hear me easily.
“We already tried that, and look where it got us,” Luca added. His voice was surprisingly steady, at odds with his distressed pheromones.
“Get. The Fuck. Out .” It was almost a bark. Almost .
“Not happening,” I shot back, as we reached the bottom of the stairs. “You’re not going to get us to leave by growling at us. We aren’t afraid of you.”
It might have been an exaggeration in Luca’s case, but not in mine. And it was the plain truth that neither of us were leaving until we’d said our piece.
“You should be afraid.” The raspy words came from the area near the water heater, where Emiel had set up Princess’s food and water when she first came.
Luca fumbled for a second set of light switches at the base of the stairway. Light flooded the basement, illuminating the partially finished space. Emiel sat stiffly against the far wall, still clad only in the filthy blue boxing shorts he’d been wearing when the others dragged him away from the cage fights. He winced in the sudden brightness and turned his face away. Princess gave an unhappy yowl.
“Well, we’re not,” I reiterated. “Emiel, I need to apologize to you.”
He looked at me sharply with the eye that wasn’t completely swollen shut.
“And as soon as she does that,” Luca said, “I need to yell at you until you promise never to do this stupid, self-destructive shit again.”
Somehow, I doubted yelling would be involved. Then again, I’d seen Luca blow his top before, so I might’ve been dead wrong about that.
“I don’t wanna talk about it,” Emiel said, looking away again. “Not any of it.”
“Well, tough shit !” Luca flared, and apparently actual yelling was on the table after all. “Because SSG sent someone to follow your stupid ass back to the house, and if the others hadn’t noticed in time, my old gang would know where we live !”
I’d been trying really hard not to wonder if anyone in the pursuing car had thought to jot down Zalen’s Missouri license plate number. I wasn’t an expert, but I was pretty sure that number could be used to find his personal information online. I wondered if Luca had made the same connection yet.
For now, though, I wrapped a hand around Luca’s whipcord-tense bicep. “Hey. I thought I got to do my thing first, before the shouting started,” I reminded him.
Luca made a noise of frustrated disgust, but he subsided.
I took a deep breath, trying to choose my words with care. I’d had a pretty speech all planned, but somehow it had turned into a jumbled mass of word salad now that Emiel was actually in front of me.
“Look,” I began. “I know I blew right past your boundaries when you took me down to see Nat, and I’m so sorry , Emiel. Zalen said you were worried that you’d done something I didn’t want, and—”
“I raped you.” The simple declaration sounded like it had been dragged across broken glass.
“No!” I gasped, appalled. But Luca cut across me, his voice rising in anger.
“Oh, get your head out of your ass, Emiel! I had to talk her out of approaching you to help her through her heat last week!” He jabbed an accusing finger in the air, punctuating the words. “ Just because you’re a rape victim, it doesn’t mean that every sexual encounter for the rest of your life is automatically nonconsensual !”
The sense of what he was saying took a second to sink in. When it did, it felt like I’d just crested the top of a rollercoaster, my stomach left behind as the world dropped out from underneath me. Deafening silence fell over the basement. Not even Princess seemed interested in breaking it.
Luca closed his eyes and sucked in a deep breath. It escaped in a rush, his shoulders slumping as it went.
“Luca,” I whispered—but he only shook his head, his attention fixed on Emiel.
“I guessed a while ago,” he said, in a much calmer tone. “Like recognizes like, I guess. How old were you when it happened?”
Every drop of blood had drained from Emiel’s face, leaving a gray cast beneath his dark brown skin that made his bruises look absolutely garish beneath the harsh basement lighting. I didn’t think he was even breathing.
“I was fourteen the first time,” Luca continued, when it became obvious Emiel wasn’t going to speak. “Didn’t know my own ass from a hole in the ground when I went into heat. They gang-raped me, over and over. Held me down and injected me with contraband hormones to bring on my estrus whenever they felt like it. And they did that to me for four years.”
My arms had come around my own body, and I was squeezing so tight I would probably leave finger marks. I didn’t even remember moving.
There was absolutely no question that Luca had hit the mark. The truth of it was reflected in Emiel’s ghastly complexion... in the utterly blank, glazed expression on his swollen face.
I wanted to cry, to rage, to throw things. I wanted to stand in front of the monsters who’d hurt these two with a loaded gun and shoot them, one by one... but not to kill. I pictured blowing off kneecaps, genitals, parts of faces.
That heavy, awful silence settled again, and this time, Luca let it deepen until it was suffocating. Princess weaved back and forth, rubbing her body against Emiel’s legs. I wasn’t sure he was even aware of her.
“It was my Ma’s boyfriend.” The words sounded like they’d been spoken by someone much younger than the towering, musclebound alpha in front of us. Heartbreakingly younger.
Neither of us moved a muscle.
“Dunno how old I was in the beginning. Too young to remember, I guess.” Emiel hugged his knees. “I was eight when he left.”
When he left . Not ‘ when my mother left him .’ The slow-burning rage rose higher in my stomach, churning like acid.
“He was an alpha?” Luca asked quietly.
Emiel gave a single, slow nod.
“He and Ma fought a lot. He’d get drunk afterward, sometimes. Come into my room at night. ‘ Don’t try to pretend, boy,’ he’d say . ‘I can tell you want it’ .” Emiel’s voice sounded far away, disconnected.
I wanted to say something. Needed to say something. But before I could, Emiel looked up, pinning me with his gaze.
“When you were in heat, I could tell you wanted it.”
My throat closed up. I forced the words out anyway, desperate to get them into the world. “That was completely different. There’s no conceivable way it could be any more different.”
“I almost bit you,” he said.
“But you didn’t!” I told him.
“I would have,” he shot back. “Only I heard his voice in my head, and I remembered.”
“And so you didn’t,” I said again. “Emiel, you’re the victim here. You didn’t do anything wrong. I did.”
“You were in heat, Mia,” Luca said, sounding unutterably tired. “Emiel, she’s right. You didn’t do anything wrong. Thinking about biting someone isn’t the same as doing it. Mia wasn’t responsible for her actions while she was in heat. Her husband might be an asshole, but he was within his rights to come here and make sure she was okay. Zalen made a reasonable assumption that the dampeners would make it safe for you to take her down to see him.”
I closed my eyes, trying to calm my racing heartbeat. After a moment, I opened them. “I don’t think anyone’s really to blame for what we did together. It just... happened. I was on birth control. There aren’t going to be any bad consequences, although I guess it would be smart for both of us to get tested for STDs at some point, since I’ve been sexually active, and we didn’t use a condom.”
“Correction,” Luca said, his voice hardening again. “There wouldn’t have been any bad consequences... except someone spiraled and then decided that the best way to deal with that was to go beat the shit out of people and get beaten up in turn. Which brings us back to the part where your terrible decision-making almost led my old gang straight to me.”
Emiel’s unnatural stillness began to crumble. First with a nearly imperceptible tremor, which grew into a full-body shudder, and finally into silent, wracking sobs. He folded at the waist, his forehead coming to rest on his knees. Princess yowled in distress.
I was crying, too—unsure when I’d started. Luca, by contrast, was dry-eyed and grim.
“Emiel,” I said, my voice a pathetic quaver. “Please let me hug you. I... I won’t make you if you don’t want it, but I really need it. I’m coming over. Shake your head no if you want me to stop.”
Emiel didn’t acknowledge the words at all, and I wasn’t sure if this was a terrible, cruel thing to do, or a good thing. But the sight of this alpha I’d come to care about silently breaking into pieces was too much for my omega instincts, and my body was drawn to his as if by a magnet.
I stumbled over, watching his head carefully for movement through a blurry veil of tears. I half fell to my knees next to him. He flinched hard at the first touch of my fingertips on his shoulder, but he didn’t move away. It was hard to find places to put my hands that weren’t bruised, but I carefully sidled close until my body was curled against his. The concrete floor was cold and unforgiving beneath me. I barely felt it.
When Emiel’s trembling tension broke, accepting my presence inside his personal space, I looked up at Luca pleadingly. He appeared torn, his green eyes wide and wary, but after a moment he slowly approached and lowered himself on Emiel’s other side. When Emiel didn’t shake him off, he settled tentatively into place, bracketing the alpha between us.
Princess climbed onto my lap so she could wriggle her head and shoulders beneath Emiel’s arm, which still encircled his bent knees. Too tired to fight the emotion, I let the tears come as they would, my breath hitching and catching in counterpoint to Emiel’s silent sobs. Luca’s arm crept around Emiel’s back until his fingers rested on my shoulder, a grounding touch.
Emiel was the first to succumb to exhaustion, his body going limp and pliant by degrees until his breathing settled into a congested snore. Princess’s soft purr vibrated against us in gentle counterpoint.
My head and body ached, sore from emotion and my recent heat. When Luca murmured, “Go on, I’ll keep watch,” it took only moments for sleep to claim me. When my dreams came, they were full of two young boys, alpha and omega, dark-skinned and light, clinging together for comfort against the threatening shadows beyond.