14. Kane
Kane
I can’t move.
I’m stuck.
Frozen.
And I fucking hate it. I feel the fire burning inside of me, despite my body feeling cold and numb.
I know where I am. The North wing of the house. I know because I memorized the carpet. The stupid white carpet that my mom loves so much.
I’m being held down on the floor by a faceless being. I can never remember their faces.
There are taunts. Laughter. Jeers.
The only faces I can see are my parent’s faces.
There are tears. Begging. Screams.
Mom is on her knees and her head is wrenched backward by her hair as tears stream down her face.
“Please don’t hurt my baby, please, he’s just a child.”
“Shut the fuck up, you traitorous bitch,” One of the faceless men growls, slapping her across the face.
My dad lets out a snarl as he struggles against four guys holding him pinned down to the floor. Someone punches him in the face.
“You’re gonna pay for leaving the Southside and selling out to these Northside fuckers.”
“She didn’t fucking sell out to anyone!” My father roars, spitting blood onto the floor. “Let her go!”
More taunts. More laughter. More jeers.
Then there’s a knife.
My mother’s eyes go wide. Her cry for help is cut short, turned into nothing but a gurgle as they slit her throat.
Red blood splatters onto the carpet in front of me. I can smell its metallic tang. They drop her body to the floor along with that godforsaken knife, its blade dyed red.
My dad lets out a guttural roar that shakes the floor near me as if all that was left of his humanity left with my mom’s last strangled breath.
The weight on top of me leaves me.
Bang.
Silence.
My dad’s body slumps to the floor, a bloody mess of skull and brain matter on the backside of his head where they shot him.
My ears ring. My vision goes red.
“Kane!”
I know that voice.
“Kane! Please, wake up! You’re not there anymore, I promise.”
Peppermint. Comfort. Safety.
I know that perfume.
My eyes meet deep pools of blue. I jerk backward when I feel the warm touch of her hand against my cheek.
She woke me up from a nightmare.
She actually managed to wake me up.
No one’s able to do that. Not even any of my pack mates. The last time Chase tried to wake me up from one of them he ended up with a black eye and a dislocated arm.
Madden had to pin me down to the floor. From the way they described things to me, it took me a really fucking long time to get out of that red haze.
“What the fuck were you thinking?” I growl, clenching my hands into fists to hide their trembling.
Flashes of the red haze falling away to reveal Luna’s broken body on the floor, her blood soaking into the carpets, have me pushing myself up to my feet and away from her.
I have to get away.
I’m a danger to her.
I rest my forehead against one of the shelves, the sharp edge digging into my browbone. The pain grounds me in the sea of panic. My fists are still clenched and shaking.
I can’t believe I fell asleep in the first place. This is why I usually don’t fall asleep until I’m completely exhausted. It’s so much easier to just slip into an exhausted, dreamless sleep than have to deal with that hell.
“I—I’m sorry,” Luna says, her soft touch feeling like a jolt of electricity down my spine when I feel it against my back. “You were just having a really bad nightmare.”
I sigh, turning to face her. Her eyes are wide with fear. Despite that rightful fear of me, she’s still concerned enough to try and help me.
I trace her cheek with the back of my hand. It’s still trembling despite my best efforts to calm down. I guess the effects of my nightmares still linger, even if the red haze didn’t follow me.
She leans into my touch, her eyes fluttering closed. Her peppermint perfume swirls around us, calming my nerves.
“How did you wake me up?” I ask, when I’ve finally gained some semblance of control back.
“You were making all of these noises,” she says softly, reaching up to hold my hand. “It sounded like you were in a lot of pain. I tried calling your name first, but I ended up having to shake you awake.”
“You touched me?”
My tone must not have been as calm as I would’ve wanted it to be, because she flinches at my words.
“I—I’m sorry. Should—should I have not done that?” She asks, biting the inside of her cheek.
I scrub a hand down my face. Regret washes over me in waves. I should’ve never fallen asleep around her. Now I have to reveal the kind of person I am.
“No one’s been able to touch me and wake me up without me hurting them in a long time,” I grunt, taking a step back from her and dropping her hand.
She looks so delicate, so vulnerable, standing there all alone. She wraps her arms around herself as if she feels the lack of my presence just as hard as I feel the lack of hers.
But scaring her would be worse. She deserves to be able to run away if that’s what she chooses.
“I—I’m sorry,” She whispers softly.
“No, you don’t get it. You’re not the one who has to apologize.
I’m the one who fucked up. I should’ve never fallen asleep around you.
” My eyes turn to the ceiling. “Chase was the last person to try and wake me up from a nightmare and he ended up with a black eye and a dislocated arm. Madden and Archer had to pin me down like a feral beast. I could’ve killed you. ”
I wait for her to freak out. Or leave. Or both. Just something.
She takes a while to answer as if she’s giving things a lot of thought.
“I—I have nightmares too. I—I think we scream the same. Like we’re screaming but our mouths won’t open?” She says, her eyes are glued to the floor.
My chest squeezes. Out of everything I expected her to say, her sharing her own experiences wasn’t it.
“I wake up and I’m not actually where I wake up.
” She looks up and meets my eyes, an unexpected, almost steely determination there.
Almost like she’s completely sure of what she wants to tell me.
“Knowing what I do about you, how kind your soul is, I know you didn’t hurt Chase or any of your packmates on purpose. ”
She doesn’t know the full story. She deserves to know it before giving me this loyalty.
I’d never be able to live with myself if I let myself grow closer to her, and she leaves me after she learns the truth.
“What do you know about the big riot?” I ask. I’m careful to keep my hands by my sides, even though all I want to do is reach out to her.
“Not much. I only know it happened when I was a little kid. My parents didn’t tell me much about it though, so I only heard about it in kindergarten.”
She’s twenty-one so it must’ve happened when she was around six years old.
“A bunch of alphas and betas from the Southside were really unhappy with the way a lot of omegas, even ones born in the Southside found their way up North. They decided the only way to fix their problem was to start a riot and try and kidnap omegas from the Northside.” I swallow hard, my fists clenching at my sides as the memories I try to keep locked away swirl in my mind.
I feel her soft fingertips brushing against the back of my hand and weave our fingers together.
It’s like she’s the only thing tethering me to this reality.
Because she is. She’s the only thing that’s keeping me from being swept away into the red haze of my past. I sink into the blue of her eyes, letting her peppermint perfume swirl around me.
“There was an extremist group that was trying to make demands of the Northside but no one was taking them seriously. So when they came, there was bloodlust in the air.” I focus on the soft feel of her skin as I brush my thumb slowly back and forth across the back of her hand.
“They had no regard for the fact a lot of the omegas in the Northside, especially ones who came from the Southside, already had families and alphas of their own.” I swallow hard. “My mom was one of those omegas. ”
I close my eyes, struggling to pull in a breath as my throat closes.
“Oh Kane,” she says, squeezing my hand gently. “It’s okay, you don’t have to tell me if it’s too hard?—”
“No,” I interrupt. “I have to. Please, I have to get this out now.”
“Okay. Whatever you need,” she says, her voice as soothing to me as every other aspect of her presence.
“They killed my parents in front of me.”
A small gasp leaves her throat and her eyes grow wide with shock. “Oh my god.”
Her eyes fly to the bookshelf in the corner of the room. My mom’s corner. The corner no one’s touched since my mom was murdered. Until her.
If I could have my way, I’d want her to have her own corner in my library. Right next to my mom’s. She would’ve loved Luna.
But I can’t let myself dream. Luna has the power to crush those dreams in her tiny, delicate hands and I need to be prepared for that.
“That was the first time I ever killed anyone.”
I don’t remember that part of the night. All I remember was a red haze falling over everything I saw.
And the knife.
And the gun.
The tools they used to kill my parents were the tools I used to kill them.
Someone made the mistake of not holding me down and leaving the same knife they slit my mom’s throat with in front of me.
Next thing I knew, I had the knife in one hand, the gun in the other, and I was covered in blood and surrounded by dead bodies.
“I’m so sorry, that must’ve been so horrible for you to go through. How old were you?"
“Thirteen. ”
Anger sparks in her eyes and my chest squeezes.
I drop her hands, staring down at my trembling fingers. If I think about it too hard, I can still see the blood underneath my fingernails. I can still feel the warm, sticky wetness.
I turn my gaze to the ceiling, bracing myself. She knows I’m a murderer now. Everything is on the table.
Now that I know of her existence, I don’t think I could ever bring myself to forget her, but I can protect her from a distance. I don’t have to be her alpha to protect her.
“They were going to kill a child?” The way she growls her words shocks me to my core. First, because I didn’t expect that sort of fierceness from her, and second because her anger isn’t directed at me. She’s angry for me.
“I—I guess so.”
“Why would they want to do something so horrible!” she says, reaching out again and trying to wrap her hands around my wrists. Her hands are so small they don’t reach all the way around.
“I don’t know, they were angry,” I shrug, soaking into her presence. She knows everything now. And it doesn’t look like she wants to leave.
I was never one for getting emotionally involved with omegas. Losing control like that wasn’t something I was interested in before. Until now. Until Luna.
I could easily lose myself in her.
“But yeah, that’s why I have trouble sleeping,” I say awkwardly.
She takes a tentative step forward, reaching her arms slowly around me and tucking herself into my chest.
She’s hugging me.
It’s the best hug I’ve ever had.
It also doesn’t escape my notice that she’s the one initiating this touch. And she’s doing that after everything I’ve just shared with her.
“It’s almost like your body is expecting it to happen again,” she murmurs, resting her cheek against my chest. The way she says it, almost like an afterthought, makes it seem like she knows from personal experience what that’s like.
“Yeah,” I say.
I think she’s right. It makes sense considering they dragged me out of my bed and to my parent’s room. That’s why none of us go to the North wing of the house, even though everything’s been cleared out and that horrible carpet was removed years ago.
“I can’t believe you managed to wake me up,” I murmur, stroking her hair. It’s as soft as silk and looks like spun gold in the flickering light from the fireplace. “I can’t believe I managed to fall asleep in the first place. I guess there’s just something about you that grounds me.”
Her scent. Her softness. Her warmth.
Her.
She purses her lips in thought. “Maybe—Maybe that’s something I can help you with? Chase gave me your guys’s shirts to help get me used to your scents and it was kind of comforting when I was sleeping earlier.”
I blame what I say next on sleep deprivation and the adrenaline still buzzing through my body. I’m not Chase. I’m not bold or forward, never have been.
But I still open my mouth. “I don’t think I’d want to settle for just your scent on a shirt.”