Chapter 12 #2
A whine slipped free, followed by a messy tumble of sobs.
“Is that why you’re still wearing this?” He pinched the shoulder of the jacket and I—growled? “I’m not going to take it from you,” he said in that even voice. It was the antithesis to the chaos of hurt inside me. “It’s not my size, anyway. It’d look like a fucking crop top on me.”
I was too far gone to laugh, but it did get a smile out of me as I shifted my head closer to his neck, dragging in breaths of his scent like it was medicine that could cure the sickness in my soul.
“Fucking Prodigy,” Tyb muttered, his hands sliding under the jacket to stroke my back. “He’s got you all this shit and I haven’t got you a courting gift.”
“My phone,” I disagreed, the frequency of sobs slowing, my breathing back under my control.
“That was yours to begin with.”
“My shirt.”
“Your—I didn’t give you a shirt, warrior.”
“I stole it. Still counts.”
His snort warmed some of the cold in me.
“Hurts,” I admitted, the contrast between his warmth and the cool kiss of the rain calming the chaos a little.
“I know,” he sighed, stroking up and down my back. “It always will, but if I healed from it, so can you. I won’t lie to you, it’s going to be fucking hell for a long time. It feels like it will never end. But you either key his bike and plan his murder, or you find a way to live with it.”
“Murder,” I answered immediately.
Tybalt’s laugh was like rich chocolate and warm sunlight. “Unfortunately for your bloodlust, he’s not here. Neither is his bike, so keying it is off the menu. Looks like you’re gonna have to find a way to live with it. I’ll help.”
I would have argued with that, but he kissed my temple, as if Prodigy’s kisses earlier had opened the floodgates to physical affection between us. I sighed, the very sharpest edge leaving the pain.
“It annoys me that you were right.”
“I’m always right. But about what?”
“It helps. Touch, contact, being close to someone. Being close to you.”
There was a smile in his voice when he said, “Told you so.”
“So mature,” I drawled, feeling a little more like myself. If you ignored the fact I was plastered to him and kept rubbing my face against his throat, covering myself in his scent. “How did you do it? Move on, I mean.”
“I—” Tybalt sighed, his voice a little rougher, the gravel more familiar when he continued speaking. “I didn’t have a typical meet-cute situation. I met my mate after some pretty fucking fucked up shit happened to me, so it was… abnormal.”
“Fucking fucked up shit,” I repeated with a raspy laugh. “You have such pretty speech patterns.”
“Don’t be a dick, Miraya.”
“Just evening out the score, Tybalt. I’m nowhere near your impressive level of dickness, but I’d like to catch up. I’ve already learned a lot under your tutelage.”
“Sarcastic little shit,” he said warmly, pinching my hip. “Don’t ever lose that. The sarcasm, the humour—that’s what will save you. It’s the opposite of pain. If you can laugh in its ugly face, you’re already winning.”
“It’s easier to be sarcastic when my heat isn’t trying to murder me,” I muttered. “What—what happened to you? Am I allowed to ask?”
Another deep sigh punched from him, pressing his body to mine.
“You’re allowed. It’s not something I can talk about easily, but—cards on the table, I don’t plan on letting you go.
You’re hot and vicious and I wanted you from the first time you called me a dickhead so creatively.
I’m keeping you. So yeah, you can ask about the shit going on in my head. ”
“What if I don’t want to be kept?” I challenged.
“Then I hope you enjoy being stalked, because I’m not leaving you alone, warrior.”
“That’s so fucked up,” I muttered.
“So why are you purring?”
Dammit. Apparently the part of me that loved Tyb beating the shit out of Lance Brown had the controls for my purr.
I couldn’t shut it off either. Especially not when Tybalt’s lower, thunderous purr joined mine, a sound of affection and admiration and a fuck-load of possessiveness.
That only made me purr louder, made me melt against him.
His hand flexed against my spine and then he said, “Way before I ever found my mate, my piss-poor excuse for a family decided I was dead weight and they’d be better off selling me to provide a nicer life for the child they actually wanted.”
A growl crammed into every space in my chest, the sound of it cracking through the garden like thunder.
“Are they still alive?”
“Yeah, as far as I know.”
“Not for long,” I seethed, my voice low and violent. I found I liked that voice, liked all the darkness and danger in it.
“You gonna let me finish my sad story, warrior, or keep thinking about scooping my family’s eyes out?”
“Actually, I was thinking about cutting out their tongues for all the vile things I know they must have said about you, and then shoving those tongues down their throats until they choke on their own words.”
I stunned Tybalt into a moment of silence, and then his purr returned, as deep and loud as a motorcycle. “Damn, warrior. That’s the hottest thing I’ve ever heard.”
I tilted my head back to look at him, and my heart skipped at the hungry gleam of need in his eyes. I licked my lips, my mouth suddenly pooling with saliva, and his scent was so thick in the air that I could taste it, could imagine how it would be to taste him.
“Do you have a torture room?” I asked, my voice a low sultry thing that betrayed how badly I wanted him.
“I—yeah. It’s a basement, but yeah. Why?”
“Is my buyer strung up in that basement?”
He paused for a moment, then seemed to read the expression on my face, saw the dark pleasure in my eyes.
“For obvious reasons, I’m a little sensitive to people being sold.
” His thumb stroked circles on my back, and I wished I could magically dissolve the cotton shirt to feel his hand on my bare skin.
“I hoped he’d die after I beat the shit out of him, but when he survived, well…
he hurt you. I’ve seen the bruises all over your body, warrior. ”
When… oh, the first night, when Giant checked me over. “I told you not to look, asshole.”
“I turned away, but there was an unfortunately placed mirror. I saw your back. I saw a fucking bootprint.”
“I’m fine.” I wasn’t. The burning decay in my soul had overshadowed my physical injuries, but they were all there, screaming, punching deep into my ribs. My ankle still throbbed if I put too much weight on it.
“He deserves to suffer for years for what he did to you. For having the fucking audacity to think he could buy you, and then harming you when he should have treasured you.”
My purr deepened, sweetened. “Years seems like a long time to spend on a piece of shit like him.”
Tybalt shrugged. “I’m committed. I’ll make time.”
He was psychotic, but that only made my smile deeper. At least until I processed his words, his past. “I’m sorry the same thing happened to you.”
He shook his head, a few strands tumbling from the loose knot of his hair. “I wasn’t beaten. My buyer was a different sort of monster. She never hit me. Treated me like a prized pet.”
A deep, aching spike went through my heart, sitting alongside my rejection and shattered bond. “Tyb,” I breathed, feeling bad for asking.
“She had her own traumas, a fucked up mess inside her head, so when she heard about a family selling off their alpha son, she snapped me up for a great deal.”
I wiggled an arm free from between us and wrapped it around his back, clutching tight. “How old—”
“Eighteen. All fully legal and above board, except for the fact I was fucking sold.”
There was so much rage in him, so much hurt that it ate at him even now. To be betrayed by the people he should have trusted most… I couldn’t even imagine it. Even with my shitty uncles, and the cousins who talked shit about omegas and their place, they’d never sell me.
“She needed a purr, you see,” he laughed, a bitter, jagged sound that sliced deep into me.
“To ease her nightmares, to shut up the voices in her head. A purr, and a growl, and a knot. It didn’t matter who they came from.
I’m fine,” he said when a growl pumped from my chest. “That was eighteen years ago. I’m a grown ass man now, and the family I have now are a thousand times the people my biological assholes were. ”
“Was she—the woman who…” I had to swallow the growl to speak. “Bought you. Was she your mate?”
“No.” Tybalt let out a soft laugh, almost self-deprecating. “I found my mate a year later. Ran into her in the street when my mistress sent me to do her fucking shopping.”
I reached up and pulled the tie from his hair, running my fingers through the damp strands, needing to comfort him. The omega in me was screaming, hissing, absolutely livid at the hurt that had been done to our alpha.
“I’d tried to run away a dozen fucking times by that point, all failed attempts. It’s hard to disobey an alpha’s bark, even when you’re an alpha yourself.”
“You were so young.”
“Yeah, that’s why it controlled me so well. That, and the fact I was already fucked up by my mum and dad. But that day, the rejection was so blistering and hot, so goddamn painful, that I could ignore the commands she’d used to cage me. I ran the fuck away.”
He’d skipped over the actual rejection part, and not spoken about his mate, but I had no right to press him on it. My own rejection was agonising enough; I didn’t want to put him through this, too.
I didn’t know what to say, so I just pressed tight to his body, running my hands through his hair, and purred.
“I had her scent all over me. My mistress’s,” he spat, the word like poison. “It was like a contagion, like an illness that infected every pore in my body.”
“Tybalt,” I murmured, my eyes stabbing.
“My mate took one sniff of me and knew I was defective.”
“Tyb, no—”
“Nah, it’s fine. I’ve made peace with it.”
I glared up at him. “You are not defective.”
His throat bobbed. “Prodigy says the same shit.”
“Because it’s true.”