Chapter Twelve – Kayla
The doors swing shut behind me, and I’m frozen as I stare at my brother. His mouth is tugged tight into a deep frown, and his hands hang at his sides, in a constant state of flexing and relaxing. I can see the anger bubbling beneath the surface. He’s pissed.
“Jeremy,” I say his name, still very much frozen where I am. No one else is in the lobby. It’s just us. Just us and the old, dingy walls and dirty floor that probably hasn’t seen a mop in years. “What are you doing here?”
“I could ask you the same thing,” he growls out, and before I know it, he’s on top of me, taking me by the arm and pulling me along roughly. He doesn’t care that he holds my arm at an awkward angle, doesn’t care that I wince as I helplessly follow him along. He just doesn’t care.
He never does.
He smashes the up button, and he doesn’t say a word more as we wait for the elevator doors to open. All the while, he keeps hold of my arm like I’m a child he has to take somewhere private to punish.
After what feels like an eternity, the doors slide open, and he pushes me inside, nearly making me trip with the force behind him. He hits our floor, his hand tightening around my arm and making me whimper.
Here I thought glass in my legs would be the worst pain I’d be in today.
It’s only after we’re inside our apartment, with the door firmly shut and locked behind us, that Jeremy whirls on me and demands, “Who the fuck was that?” His green eyes might as well be rimmed with red with how furious he is.
I’m not new at this. I know nothing I can tell him right now will calm him down. It’s a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation through and through, and unfortunately the only loser here will be me.
I don’t have time to pick out a lie, so I say the truth: “He’s just the groundskeeper at Bradford’s.”
“Is that why you left later this morning?” The question sounds innocent on paper, but the way it’s spoken, so accusatory, makes me flinch.
“He’s driving me, that’s all. He offered—” Before I can finish, Jeremy pushes me back to the wall near our small table, and I grunt at the impact. My head hits the wall harder than the rest of me, having not been prepared for such a move, and for a moment, I see stars.
“He offered,” my brother hisses out. “Is that right?” He finally lets go of my arm, but I’m not out of the woods.
No, he’s so enraged that he brings that same hand to my neck, curls his fingers around my throat, and squeezes hard enough to choke.
“Nobody offers anything for free in this city, Mackayla. You know that. What the fuck did you agree to give him?”
“Nothing,” I croak out, although it’s hard to. I learned a long, long time ago that fighting him only makes him more enraged, so all I can do is close my eyes and wait for his anger to pass—and if it doesn’t? Well, then I guess this is it for me.
Oh, well. It’s not like I have much of a life outside of this apartment, anyways.
“I don’t believe you. No one helps a stranger out of the goodness of their heart.
” His grip tightens around my throat, and my lungs burn with the need to fill with new air, but no matter how many times I try to inhale through either my mouth or my nose, nothing comes. The air is effectively blocked off.
And I am getting woozy.
“I—” It’s about all I can get out. No other words can break free. I don’t have enough air in my lungs to get anything else out in the open.
“Fucking hell,” Jeremy hisses out, his spit hitting me in the face.
He squeezes for a few more seconds, and then he shoves me away from him and takes a step back, running his hands through his hair and pacing the area in front of me while I sink to the floor and bring a hand to my neck as I labor to breathe.
Pain emanates from my throat, putting the pain I felt earlier in my legs to shame. My heart beats so fast in my chest it feels like it might burst, and when I open my eyes, I see stars everywhere. Blotted vision, a burning chest, and a neck that feels like it just got wrung out to dry.
“He’s the groundskeeper,” I say, although my voice doesn’t come out strong. It’s cracked, hoarse, wispy. I sound broken, but I suppose that’s because I am. I’m not proud of who I am or where I come from, and I’m definitely not proud of my brother and the relationship we have.
But where would I be without him? At a place like Solus Academy? Oh, sorry—New Omega Academy now.
Jeremy keeps pacing, not addressing what I said, so I feel pressured to add, “He’s nice. That’s all. He doesn’t want anything from me—”
That gets my brother to stop pacing. In a split second he kneels down in front of me and takes my face in his hands, forcing me to look into his eyes. “No man would do something nice for a woman without expecting her to give him something in return. Grow the fuck up.”
He lets go of me, but he doesn’t get up. Though his nostrils still flare with anger, he studies me hard, like I’m some alien he doesn’t quite know how to handle yet. I already know what’s coming next out of his mouth; the same thing he always says when he starts to cool off.
“Shit,” Jeremy mutters with a hard frown. “Look what you made me do. You should know by now not to make me mad like this. You make me lose control. Why do you keep doing this?” Blaming me, because he’d blame anyone except himself.
And I’m a weak, pathetic nobody who has nowhere else to go, so every damn time I take it. I take it because there aren’t any other options for me.
With another long breath, he sounds eerily calm when he asks, “Why were you so late tonight?”
Though it hurts to talk—like knives up my esophagus—I manage to say, “Mr. Bentley wanted to meet in his office downtown after work to talk about his son and how I’m doing at the house. That’s all.”
The sigh he lets out you’d think he’d been holding for years. “That’s it? Fuck, my mind went everywhere, especially when I saw you getting out of that truck. I assume the meeting went okay?”
Though I’m dizzy from the whole choking thing, I still remember the suggestion Bentley Sr. had.
I don’t bring it up to my brother. I can’t.
Jeremy would hang anyone out to dry, even me.
Telling him that Bentley Sr. wants to know if Bradford is interested in women isn’t something I want to share with anyone.
All I do is nod.
Jeremy is slow to stand. “You’d tell me if something was going on between you and the groundskeeper, wouldn’t you?
Something like that could put everything in jeopardy.
” It’s crazy how calm he can seem so soon after losing his shit; it’s a superpower of his, one that makes me feel as if I’m the one who lost my mind, not him.
Like I really do push him over the edge and he only does what he has to.
But I know that’s not true. It can’t be. We’re all responsible for our own actions.
“He’s just being nice,” I say with a single nod. “That’s all, I swear.” I don’t feel like talking about Hayden, not to Jeremy, but also because it hurts to say anything. I really just want to hop in the shower, wash off this evening’s events, and go to bed.
It takes him a while to say, “Okay, but if he tries anything on you, I want to be the first to know. No one makes a fucking move on my sister.” He sounds like a protective older brother and not someone who’s damn near lost his mind.
He knows if someone makes a move, I might be tempted to leave him, and he couldn’t have that. No, he has to keep me himself, remind me I’m nothing, that I have nowhere else to go and no one to turn to I can trust.
And the sad thing is, it’s worked so far. I haven’t tried to run. Realistically, where would I go? What would I do? Look at me. I couldn’t hold my own against anyone.
“I’m going to shower,” I say as I get to my feet, keeping hold on the wall behind me for support in order to hide the shaking of my legs. My body doesn’t want to cooperate. I shuffle my feet to the bathroom, and thankfully Jeremy doesn’t stop me.
The moment the door is shut, I hit the lock and let my shoulders slump. I stand there for a while, catching my breath, thankful for the barrier between me and him even if he could bust it down. Only when I’m ready do I run my hand against the nearby wall and flick on the light.
A world-weary sigh comes from my chest, and I slip off my shoes before going to the tub to turn the water on. This building’s water heater sucks, or the boiler, or whatever. The water takes a good minute or two to get warm, and it never, ever gets as hot as you want it to.
I don’t look at myself in the old, crusty mirror above the sink. I can’t. I know what it is I’ll see, and I already know I won’t like it.
My reflection. It’s not a pretty thing, not nice to see.
A twenty-five-year-old omega who starves herself half to death, with eyes a bit too wide for her face and a mouth that looks like it belongs on someone else.
An omega whose cheeks are too sunken in and whose body shows every single bruise that a normal body wouldn’t.
My neck? Oh, my neck is definitely going to be black and blue by the time morning comes. Heck, it still hurts, even now. It’s as if I can still feel Jeremy’s hands wrapped around it, squeezing the life out of me.
Can you blame me for not wanting to see that in the mirror? It’s nothing to be proud of. Nothing to fuss or fawn over. It’s just me, and I’m… I really am nothing.
So I shed my clothes slowly, careful to avoid any quick glances at myself in the mirror. On the bright side, I don’t feel a thing on my legs now. I actually forgot about the bandages and the suture on the one leg until I take off my new pants and see them.
Good thing Jeremy doesn’t know a thing about fashion. I hate to imagine what he would’ve done if he would have realized these pants are new and more expensive than our monthly rent.
I step into the tub carefully, greeted by warm water. I let that water pelt me in my face for a bit before I turn around and give it my back. While I stand there, letting my hair take the brunt of the water, I carefully reach up and touch my neck.
The skin burns where Jeremy held onto me, where he…
choked me. A painful reminder, and it would remain such for a while.
I don’t have the kind of makeup to hide something like this, so I’m going to have to wear a shirt with a collar tomorrow.
I have one that’ll work, but one of the buttons is missing; hopefully no one notices.
I close my eyes again. I stopped crying a long time ago, when I learned that tears don’t serve a purpose. They don’t really release the sadness inside you; that sorrow lingers long after the tears finish up. All it does is dehydrate you, make your head hurt and your face puffy.
Crying is pointless. It doesn’t do anything. It just makes you feel more pathetic.
So, as I stand there under the warm water, I don’t cry.
No, but I do do something that might be equally as foolish: I wonder what Hayden would do if he witnessed that whole exchange.
Even as a beta, he’s bigger than my brother.
My brother has never quite nailed the alpha dominance thing, so unless he pulled that card out of his ass, Hayden could probably beat the shit out of him.
Now that would be something to see. I’d pay money for it.
And then, strangely, my thoughts go to Bradford and everything I learned about him. The scars on his back, the way his father acted—not to mention the things he said—and then what Hayden had brought up.
Bradford might have had a shitty childhood, too. I’m not saying it excuses what he did or how he acts, but I can understand it. I get wanting to prove yourself to someone who looks down on you, wanting to make someone proud even though you know nothing you could ever do would be enough.
It’s a terrible thing. It’s not something I’d wish on anyone.
Bradford is an über, even though he doesn’t radiate the typical über alpha energy. Even so, he could make my brother stop without touching him. An über can push their dominance on other alphas; it’s why they’re a cut above the rest.
Honestly, I don’t know why I let my mind wander there. To him or to Hayden. Ultimately, they’re just silly daydreams. Nothing would ever come out of them. They live in different worlds not only to each other, but to me as well. The three of us couldn’t be more different.
I don’t know how long I stand there in the shower, letting my thoughts stray to places they shouldn’t, but it’s a while, and by the time I get out, the water has long since turned cold.