108. Chapter One-Hundred-Seven
Chapter One-Hundred-Seven
Kian
It’s been more than ten minutes since Scarlett left to go talk to Xane, and Trick still shakes his head when I start to get up. I flop back down on the sand, deflated.
Riley clears his throat.
I give him a warning glower and he laughs.
“Relax,” he says, taking a sip of water before he goes on, “There’s something I want to tell you guys.
It’s something that happened a long time ago, but if I’m gonna really seriously do the whole clean and sober thing, I’m gonna need to be honest about why I was drinking so fucking much in the first place. ”
Well, that was unexpected.
I exchange a glance with Trick.
“We already …” Trick starts.
“We kinda already know,” I finish for him.
Riley laughs again. He takes another drink of water, starting with a sip and then downing what’s left in the bottle before he puts it back down. “You kinda already know. I doubt that but tell me what you know and I’ll set you straight.”
“Larry tried something with a girl that got him fired and beaten to a pulp.”
“Nice start. Go on.”
“Go on?” I ask, thinking back over what I said. “I don’t think I missed anything out.”
“Then you don’t know the cause of my drinking problem.”
“It wasn’t because of Larry the creep?” I ask.
“Larry was hard to deal with, sure. But he wasn’t a loss to me. Not after what he did.”
“What did he do, exactly?” Trick asks.
Riley raises his eyebrows at us.
“Neither of us were there. We just overheard bits of conversations.”
He nods slowly. “Right. Neither of you were there and that’s the only good thing about it.
At least, I thought so at the time. You didn’t need to know about that shit.
It was a fucking mess. Larry brought a minor back to the room.
He injected her with something, and I had to break the bathroom door down to stop him from doing whatever else he was gonna do. ”
“A minor?”
“Seventeen. She looked younger. He knew what he was doing.”
He scratches at his arm. “Xane put her in the spare bedroom. She slept for a while.”
I get the feeling something bad is coming. Riley’s expression is too serious. He doesn’t really want to tell us all this. It’s just something that needs to come out before it harms him any more than it already has.
“Then, she woke up. And guess what? She’s an Omega, and being in the room with Xane and I makes her perfume.
She decided in that moment that it meant she was supposed to be my true mate.
Xane escorted her out of the room. He took her to her own room.
Before she could say or do anything else.
I know an Omega’s perfume is supposed to be an indicator of a bond, but there’s no way she was meant for me.
Still, it freaked me out. I stopped doing hard drugs after that night. I didn’t want anything bad to happen.”
He sighs deeply, and scratches at his arm again.
“She probably perfumed because of the drug Larry injected her with.”
There are a few ways for Omegas to perfume unnaturally, but in this situation, a drug-induced trigger makes the most sense. Teenage Omegas can perfume if they meet their mates early in life, but when there’s a big age gap it’s a whole lot less likely.
Of course, predatory Alphas don’t want anyone to know that.
Riley nods. “Yeah, we realized that later. It was probably the drugs.”
Trick pushes his hair back from his face. “Holy shit. That’s so messed up.”
“It was bad,” Riley agrees, taking in a deep breath.
It’s awful, but it sounds like there’s even more to come.
“We put new security measures in place after that. Stopped the after parties. Made it so there were official meet and greets backstage for allotted times only. No more inviting women to the hotel. No more Larry, obviously.”
“Yeah,” Trick says. “We remember when everything changed.”
Riley gives us a wry smile. “Sorry, I know the meet and greets suck, but it’s just one of those things Xane decided was the way to go to keep us busier and whatever.
It kinda worked. But a couple of months after we fired Larry, the teenager …
She snuck into our suite in the middle of the night, and I woke up to a lungful of her perfume, and … ”
He sighs, cracks his neck, and blows out another breath.
“She left after she got what she wanted. I don’t know what happened after that. I just tried to forget about it.”
“Oh my God,” Trick murmurs. “I’m so fucking sorry.”
“What?” I blurt. “That bitch! Why didn’t you call the cops? She should be in prison.”
He shrugs. “It wasn’t worth it. No cop would take a claim like that seriously.
I knew that. Xane knew it, too. He let her walk.
There was nothing I could do. It’s not like I didn’t …
I’m used to waking up with a woman on top of me, put it that way.
I never would have chosen her, but I didn’t try to stop her, either. ”
I’m so fucking mad I can barely stand it.
Trick touches my arm. “I would have done the same. It was an impossible situation.”
“Made worse because she was underage,” Riley adds.
“Teenagers can be just as bad as adults!”
“Obviously,” Riley murmurs. “Look, I’m telling you guys because this isn’t gonna be easy and I’m gonna need help to stay sober. I … I was trying to forget about it all this time, but I think what I really needed to do was let it go. It’s just kinda hard to do that when I don’t …”
He takes in another deep breath, closes his eyes briefly, and then exhales.
When he opens his eyes, he looks even sadder than he was before.
“I think I’m gonna need to track her down. Find out if … If we …”
He shakes his head.
“You think she might have had a kid!”
Holy fucking shit. That’s the worst.
“Damn. It’s no wonder you were drinking so much.”
He laughs. “Make me feel better why don’t you, Ki?”
“She probably would have tried to contact you if that happened,” Trick says.
“Maybe.” Riley wipes at the corners of his eyes. “She might not have gotten through security. We beefed that shit up again after what she did.”
We’re all quiet for a few minutes. I don’t think anyone knows what to say.
Serious conversations don’t happen that often in our pack.
Anything that does need to be said, is usually dictated by Xane.
This is completely different.
A stranger hurt our brother.
He’s been carrying that pain for years.
It’s shocking to learn Riley’s been drowning himself in alcohol not because he enjoys partying, but because he’s been struggling to deal with something so tough.
“I wish you’d told us sooner,” I admit.
He sighs softly. “Yeah. I do too.”
“What can we do?” Trick asks.
Riley shrugs. “Honestly, I don’t know. I might need you to remind me I don’t need to drink if I’m acting like I want to go binge. And, if you don’t mind, I’ll need help to find her so I can know if … Well, you know.”
He wants us to help him find the girl who assaulted him so he can find out if she has a kid who might be his. She’d better not be hiding something that big. What she did was bad enough.
“Of course, we’ll help,” Trick says. “We’ll do whatever it takes. Right, Ki?”
I nod slowly. “Course.”
I’m sure by the time we get back to our tour schedule, I’ll be over the homicidal impulses I’m going through right now. It doesn’t feel likely, but spending more time with Scarlett will help.
“Okay, I’m sorry, but it’s been way longer than ten minutes now,” I start, getting to my feet and shaking sand off my legs.
Trick gives me a disapproving look that I’m about to shrug off when I see a drop of water hit his face. I look up and gasp out a breath. The sun is still bright, and I can still see plenty of blue up there, but there are gray clouds, too, and they’re spreading fast.
“Oh, shit,” I mutter.
“It’s just rain,” Trick starts.
“Nope,” Riley says, sighing as he gets to his feet. “There’s no such thing as just rain out here. It’s gonna be torrential. We should get back to the jet. If this turns into a thunderstorm, that’s gonna be the safest place for us.”
“Uh what?” I ask, not sure I’m hearing him properly. “Did you just say the jet will be a safe place to be? What happened to tin-can death-trap?”
“That’s only when it’s in the air, Ki,” Trick says.
“It’s not like there’s a car we can hop into,” Riley grumbles.
“Well, let’s get moving,” I tell them, glad that we’re finally going to check on Scarlett.
“Slow down. We should walk with Riley.”
Oh. Yeah. He can’t exactly walk too well on the foot that got stung.
I take a breath and calm myself down. “Okay, come on. Grab my arm like I’m a crutch.”
Riley shakes his head before he does what I asked.
“We’re not making a habit of this,” he grumbles.
“Course not,” I tell him, rolling my eyes as the rain comes down harder. “We’ve only got a million miles to walk over the next few days, in the mud and rain now, it looks like. There’s no way we’ll be stuck helping you the whole time just like this.”
“Shut up, or I’ll go back into the water and get stung again so you have to carry me.”
I laugh, because there’s no way in hell either of us could carry him.
All three of us know that. Trick snorts.
“Don’t make me laugh,” Riley protests.
“It would be Xane who would be stuck with you if you did that,” I point out. “So why don’t you go do it?”
“Very funny,” Riley says. “You know you two would have to carry our packs and the tents if Xane had to carry me.”
“Okay fine. That sounds worse than this. Just speed it up a bit, would you? I want to see Scarlett sometime today.”