Chapter Sixteen – Kayla #2
“We’re just worried about you,” he whispers. “If you won’t tell me who did this to you, can you at least tell me how long it’s been going on?”
I don’t say anything. I can’t even hold eye contact with him too long. It was one thing to assume he wanted something from me in return for him being nice, but for him to genuinely be a good person and to find this out… it’s hard for me to reason with.
“That’s okay,” he says. “You don’t have to say anything, but you need to know I’m here for you, okay? I mean it. I’m here for you, and I’m not going to let anyone hurt you again.” The earnestness in his voice is startling, the confidence behind each word; it’s something you’d detect from an alpha.
He gets up. “I’ll leave you be for now, but if you need anything, and I mean anything, you know where to find me.” He starts for the hall.
He doesn’t really have a smell, as most betas don’t, but that could be due to a number of factors. They make creams and lotions of all kinds now, not to mention injections that supposedly tamper those things down.
Everything else, though… like how I want to believe in his sincerity, how I feel safe with him, how he oozes that primal confidence; everything, down to his stature and the muscles beneath his clothes—it all screams alpha, but I was too busy dealing with my own crap to really pay attention.
And that’s why I muster up the courage to ask him a single question: “Hayden, are you an alpha?” As I ask it, I turn my head over my shoulder to see his reaction.
He stops near the archway to the hall. He doesn’t tense up. He is remarkably at ease as he tosses a good-natured smile back at me and says, “Alpha, beta… who could say?” But of course, with the way he says it, I have my answer.
I’m not the only one hiding my designation, but why on earth would Hayden hide the fact he’s an alpha? I don’t get it.
It’s because I’m so confused that I don’t say anything else, and he continues to smile at me for a few more seconds before he walks away and disappears around the corner, leaving me to sit with that revelation.
Hayden’s an alpha. He didn’t outright admit it, but that twinkle in his eye had to mean something.
I always thought he was too big to be a beta, but I chalked it up to natural variations.
I’m too small to be a beta, but most people I come across accept it in the end, so why wouldn’t I accept him as a beta at face-value too?
So far, the morning has been a doozy.
I sit there for a while longer, running over everything in my head, but eventually I get up. I do have work to do, I’m sure. I close the lid on the donut box and leave it there as I head to my office.
And here I thought what Mr. Bentley had suggested last night was crazy. Little did I know that suggestion—the one where he said I should try to seduce Bradford—would be the tip of the iceberg, that everything would start falling immediately, like dominos.
My life isn’t a game, but it feels like it.
I’m trapped on a gameboard, a lowly pawn, and I don’t know the rules to the game.
I don’t know how to win. Or, worse, being a pawn myself, it might be literally impossible for me to win.
Everything could be stacked against me, and it probably is. I’ve known this my whole life.
As I sit there at my desk, I can’t help but wonder what I should tell Jeremy.
I need to tell him something, give him some excuse as to why I won’t be home this weekend.
Something to throw him off the scent, basically, to stop him from snooping around here and discovering the absolute catastrophe this whole thing has turned out to be.
It’d be too suspicious to send him a message right now. I should wait until the afternoon.
The morning crawls by. I get a bit of a headache, but I attribute that to the donut and the sudden influx of everything that donut had in it. Eventually I can’t fight it anymore, and I have to get up to get myself something to drink from the kitchen.
I’m walking back to my office after having downed a glass of water in the kitchen when I pass Bradford’s open door—something it wasn’t when I passed it the first time. He must’ve heard me and was waiting for me to return, because he calls out to me: “Kayla.”
I’m just past his door when my legs halt and I wait for him to say something else, to give me some clue as to why he said my name.
He doesn’t, which means I have to go in there and see what he wants.
I hope it’s work-related and not, you know, related to me and everything that happened this morning.
Turning around, I inch toward his door and step inside his office. I hold my hands in front of my stomach and say, “Yes?”
Bradford sits behind his desk, a pen in his hand, though it looks like he’s fiddling with said pen more than he is using it. “How are you feeling?” His question catches me off-guard. Out of everything he could’ve said… that’s what he went with?
So much for keeping this about work.
“Okay,” I lie. I don’t want to tell him about my headache—or the fact I’m dying for a second donut. I might fall into a coma if I eat another so soon.
His dark eyes study me, and even though we aren’t close, I can tell when his gaze drops to my neck.
I don’t know how much of the bruise there he can see, but it doesn’t matter.
I still want to fluff up my collar and try to hide it as much as possible, but seeing as how it’s useless, I stand there, motionless, waiting for him to say something else.
Because there has to be more. He can’t have called me in here just to ask how I’m doing.
“Are you working on that list?” he asks quietly.
“Um, I haven’t gotten to it yet.”
I’m not sure if he takes that as some tactic to delay the whole staying-here-over-the-weekend thing or what, but the moment the words slip out of my mouth, he stands and says, “Follow me. There’s something I want to show you.”
All I can do is stare at him as he approaches me, and then passes me. I don’t know where he’s going or what it is he has to show me, and at the rate we’re going today, I’m not sure I want to know—but it seems I don’t really have a choice, so I bow my head and follow him anyway.
Down the hall. I don’t know where our destination is in the house. Maybe he’s taking me to the room he took all the extra clothes to? I don’t know what else he could possibly have to show me.
We head to the other wing of the large house, and after a while, he steps into a normal-looking bedroom. “Here,” he says, stopping just near the door. “What does this room look like to you?”
I stand near him and quickly glance around the room. A bed, a dresser, a door that I assume leads to a closet; no windows, but otherwise, it seems normal. “A bedroom,” I say, pretty confident in my answer.
“Look harder,” he says, and he waits for me to examine the room again.
I do. I let my eyes roam over everything, assuming there’s something I didn’t see before, but everything I see looks utterly normal to me. The moment my eyes snap back to him is when I notice it: the locks on the door he stands near. They’re on the wrong side of it, which means…
“This is the room I planned on keeping Raeka Whittenhall and Colter Chase in when I had them brought to me,” he says.
“The door locks from the outside. It’s perfect for when you want to lock someone up.
” He runs a hand down along the door’s edge, so slowly, meticulously, and the way he does it makes me feel strange.
Like he’s reminiscing.
“I wasn’t planning on hurting either of them,” he goes on. “I learned young that the threat of violence is often enough to get people to do what you want.”
Hmm. Kind of sounds like he’s admitting to being a terrible person. Suddenly I feel a little claustrophobic in this bedroom that has multiple locks on its outer door. Maybe I should step in the hall; surely I’d feel better and less, uh, trapped.
He must finally realize where my thoughts are, because he’s quick to add, “I didn’t put these here, the locks on the door.
They’ve been here since… since I was young.
Very young.” He tugs his hand off the door and walks deeper into the room.
“I don’t like returning to this room. It brings up many memories I’d rather forget. ”
Wait a minute. If those locks have been here that long, and he knows it, that means…
that means he grew up here. This house was the house he lived in when he was a child.
I guess a part of me already knew that. I don’t need him to explain anything else; I can put the rest together on my own, but he doesn’t know that I saw his back, so I know exactly what horrors his past holds.
“This room was mine,” he whispers. “My father would lock me in here when I disappointed him, when I angered him—when I did anything that upset him in the slightest. Sometimes it would be days before he’d let me out.”
My throat gets dry as I listen to him. He’s reminiscing all right, but not about anything good. Being locked in a room for days… I can’t imagine it. As a child, it must have been hell.
“What about your mom? Or siblings?” Although, if they lived in the same house with the same über alpha in charge, it was quite possible they all knew not to raise a finger against Bentley Sr., otherwise they’d get caught in his rage, too.
His tall stature heads for the bed, where he gingerly sits down and rests his hands on his knees.
“My mother died just after I was born. Complications from the pregnancy. I was their only child. My father took it upon himself to raise me as his father raised him. Locking me in this room was one of his more merciful acts.”
Hearing all this, I understand him better now. I know why he holds his emotions close to his chest, why he doesn’t have a pack of his own. His father probably never showed him an ounce of love in his life, and Bradford doesn’t want to perpetuate the cycle.
I get it. Some things need to end rather than become traditions passed down from generation to generation.
Though I don’t know if it’s a good idea or not, I meander to the bed and sit beside him—although I am careful to not sit so close as to touch him or brush my leg against his.
His boundaries are understandable, especially to me.
Even if he doesn’t outright say he doesn’t want to be touched, I can respect it.
“Why didn’t you ever move?” I ask.
“My father made certain to cut off any opportunities for me in any other city. He blackballed my name so that I had nowhere else to go. The only thing he was ever concerned about was training me to take over Alpha Life—and trying to push me to make heirs of my own.” Bradford shakes his head once.
“I’m sure I have half-brothers and half-sisters out there, but my father is old-fashioned.
He’d never name a bastard the new head of Alpha Life or the Bentley name. ”
We sit there in silence for a while, neither of us saying anything more.
I run my hands along my knees, feeling strange, like I want to comfort this man, make him feel better, help him forget all of the terror he surely had to grow up with.
Stuff like that sticks with you, molds you, makes you someone you’re not.
Who knew what kind of person he would be now if his father had actually loved him?
Eventually, I whisper, “I’m sorry.”
Bradford lets out a long, even breath. “I didn’t tell you any of this for your pity. I told you because I want you to know that you’re not alone, even if it feels like it.”
“It’s not pity. It’s sympathy,” I say.
“Still, I’m not in the throes of it anymore. You are. The upcoming decisions you make will have a lasting impact on your life. You should take them seriously—and you should accept help when it’s offered.”
I look at him. “Would you have accepted help twenty years ago? If you could have, would you have gotten out and away from all of this?” Somehow, even as I ask, I know what his answer will be.
“This is my life. Where would I have gone? What would I have done? I never had friends, anyone who would have listened if I’d have come to them and told them what was happening. It’s always been me. Me and my father.”
Besides the money and the last name, he sounds exactly like I would if I was talking about Jeremy. His father, my brother… family really can be the ones who hurt you the worst, huh? The ones who know how to use you and what to say to stop you from ever leaving. Master manipulators.
He goes on, “You might not be ready to tell us everything, but the first step is, I’m told, admitting it to yourself and to others.” He gets up after that, and I watch as he walks through the room, heading to the door.
Guess that’s that, then.
“What’s the step after that?” I ask him.
Bradford stops near the doorway. He tosses me a glance over his shoulder. “I don’t know. I’ve never gotten that far. You’re the first person I ever told.” He gives that last statement only a few seconds to sink in before he says, “Don’t forget to get me that list.” And then he leaves.
I sit there, staring at the empty doorway as that statement wriggles around in my head. In all his life, I’m the first person he ever told? There’s no way. Surely he had to have tried to tell someone else, back when he was a child?
Although, I suppose the fear of his father’s retribution might have stopped him. Maybe Bradford had never felt an ounce of hope for the future, and if that’s the case, then there’s nothing in his mind worth fighting for.
I understand that hopelessness, that feeling of emptiness inside. It’s been me and Jeremy for so long, I can’t picture a life without him or without his anger. I wouldn’t wish my circumstance upon anyone, but at the same time… I’m paralyzed with nowhere to go.
There used to be a time when I’d be envious of other omegas, when I’d dream about what it’d be like to be born to a family with money.
Not even one of the rich bluebloods who can trace their lineage all the way back to when this country was founded.
No, just the regular ones. Middle class.
Just regular omegas and their regular families.
What would it be like? What would having a family feel like? The love, the acceptance; it’s not easy for me to imagine anything like it.
For years now, I thought wishing for normalcy was a thing of the past, something the old, young, and stupid me would have done, but now… now I find myself wondering again what it’d be like, how different things would be.
I don’t know how long I sit there, by myself, analyzing that conversation, but after what must be a long time, I get up and wander through the house. I’m back in my office soon enough, and when I sit down, I pull out a notebook and a pen. I tear off a page and do the only thing I can do.
I make that list.