Chapter 6
Chapter
Six
ALED
“What’s going on here is that Gareth stabbed me for the woman,” I say with derision, my lip curling. “You can’t keep her, Gareth. She’s not a dog.”
As if I called the monster, Balthazar bounds into the kitchen with a loud bark.
“He didn’t mean it,” Gareth soothes. “Go lay down in your bed. I’ve got this. Maybe since I’ll be sleeping in my own room again, I’ll move your bed.”
“You’re fucking serious about this?” Maddox asks, a strangled laugh releasing from his lips. “I don’t typically particularly care where you plug your hole, but the omega is missing a dick for that.”
“You could just send me home,” Olivia huffs out. “For people who are trying to fly under the radar, I’m not a good person to kidnap and still go unnoticed.”
“We noticed,” Cai grunts, coming around the counter. When glass crunches under his shoes, he glances up. “What did you break?”
“My ego,” Gareth mutters. “Last bite, Olivia. Be a good girl for me.”
Olivia shifts in her seat with a small whine, but Gareth just smiles as he taps the fork against her lips. If it was anyone else, he’d have stabbed her with it. Instead, he waits until she parts her lips to take the offered food.
“This is unacceptable, Gareth,” Maddox reminds him, standing across from him.
“No, I don’t think so. You rejected our pack’s omega without speaking to me first, which means she is mine,” Gareth says calmly, helping Olivia drink a sip of water since she’s tied to the chair.
“You can’t keep me,” Olivia says gently. “You’d have to hide all the knives, and even then, I’d find a way to die.”
My heart cramps hard at her words, and I feel as if I’ve missed an entire conversation.
The only reason I found them is because I followed the scent of chocolate and angel cake.
While my adopted brother is a beta, I’ve always been very sensitive to his scent.
He’s mine and bonded to me, but will never be what I’d call settled.
Gareth is the wild card, and a part of me likes that. It’s why we don’t need another person in our pack that we can’t control.
My hand fists at how pissed off Olivia makes me. Rejecting her should mean that I don’t fucking care if she lives or dies, but the way that Cai and Maddox are reacting, allows me to see that I’m very wrong.
She’s under our skin and I fucking hate it.
“Excuse me, what? Did they let you out of the mental institution too soon?” Maddox asks, moving closer.
Olivia refuses to look at him, while Gareth strikes in her defense. Maddox’s mistake is getting within Gareth’s long arm span, and his head rocks back when Gareth punches him. Blowing out a breath, I shake my head at how loyal he already is to Olivia.
She’s a goddamned stranger!
“Gareth,” I complain, my fingers pulling at my hair. It’s probably sticking straight up at this point because I can’t stop fucking with it.
“You’ll go bald and be less handsome if you keep pulling your hair,” Gareth says, ignoring my tone as he pushes Olivia’s chin up to gaze into her eyes.
“I will hide everything you could think to hurt yourself with, Angel. I need you to understand that I’m nothing like Mallan and those other dirtbags. ”
“Who?” Cai asks.
“She can’t have alphas if she’s scent matched to us,” Maddox adds, rubbing his bruised face. There’s also a cut from where Gareth’s ring glanced off his cheekbone. At this rate, we’ll all be showing evidence of Gareth’s anger.
“A bite will eventually take if it’s forced,” Olivia says in a dead tone, her gaze on Gareth’s, refusing to look anywhere else.
Outside of her responses, she’s trying hard to ignore our existence.
“That’s illegal,” I say without thinking. It doesn’t matter that my brothers and I often partake in illegal activities, the people who work for my father at the sex club want to be there. Forcing someone to your will as she’s describing is asking to be killed.
“Yes, because you’re so perfect,” Cai chuckles, his gaze trained on the omega who is beginning to drift.
“Olivia,” Gareth yells in her face, making her body flinch. “Stop doing that or I’ll start breaking shit to get you to pay attention to me.”
“Is everyone bleeding but me?” Cai asks, moving to investigate the blood mixed in with the glass on the tile floor.
“I’m sure I could change that,” Gareth mutters, pulling some of the tape off the chair binding Olivia to it. “You and I are going to have a chat, Olivia. I need to know everything my idiot brothers have failed to find out.”
“Repeated acts of rape aren’t typically documented on the internet,” she rasps dully.
“I think we should be a part of this conversation, Gareth,” Maddox says, his lids shuttering as he gazes at Olivia.
“What the fuck are you talking about, Olivia?” Cai asks, moving closer to her.
My lips part to warn him, but not before Gareth backhands him.
“This needs to be a private conversation,” he says.
“My past isn’t any of your business,” Olivia says as Gareth wraps the tape around the back of her sweatshirt to keep her bound. “My stance is that I do not wish to be in the presence, home, or within a hundred mile radius of the males who rejected me. You don’t get to give a shit now.”
“Don’t tell me what to do,” Cai grunts, his voice muffled. His nose is bleeding as he drops his hand. Now we’re all bleeding.
Gareth’s face is even covered in scratch marks. Fuck, we ended up with a hellcat for an omega. My cock twitches in interest, but I shut it down because now isn’t the time.
“This is your new home until we can decide what to do with you,” I decide, ignoring Maddox’s noise of disapproval. He knows I’m right. “Gareth, maybe you can get her to talk to her daughter’s pack to tell them she’s perfectly fine and wants to remain with us to avoid a war.”
“‘Fine’ is a stretch… Nope!” Gareth yells as Olivia tries to spit at him. He squeezes her jaw until it opens before returning the attempted favor…right into her mouth and forcing her to swallow it.
My jaw drops as do my brothers’ as I listen to her muffled screams as she attempts to fight him.
“You’re a damn hellcat with no manners,” Gareth growls, voicing the thoughts I had earlier. “You’re going to learn to like the taste of my spit in your mouth, Olivia. I won’t mind turning your ass red either. I know you like that.”
Maddox, Cai, and I drop further into shock as he ties a clean dish rag around her lower face as a gag, and picks her up in a bridal carry.
Gareth is an incredibly dominant beta but likes to be topped by me every time we have sex.
He says he likes the feeling of my cum running out of his stretched hole.
However, the way that he both dominates and soothes Olivia is something I’ve never seen from him.
“She’s going to cock block me, isn’t she?” I grumble.
“You cock blocked yourself.”
“Gareth, she can’t be here,” Maddox tries again. “Dad is coming for a visit.”
“What?” Cai, Gareth, and I ask together.
“He texted me as we were coming back into the house, following Gareth’s tracker on a wild goose chase,” Maddox sighs.
Gareth grins wildly at the tail end of Maddox’s words. “I attached the fucker to a drone and let it do the dirty work for me,” he says. “If you want any of the trackers to last, they’ll need to go underneath my skin, asshole.”
“Don’t tempt me,” Maddox says, grunting as Gareth shoves his shoulder against him as he passes by. “Did you hear me? Dad is coming.”
“He can’t care if I marry her,” Gareth shrugs.
My stomach flips so fast, I’m surprised by the taste of bile as I swallow it back. Gareth has always been mine. Why do I have to share?
“I forbid it,” I call after him.
“Suck my left ball!” Gareth yells back, exiting the kitchen.
“I would if she wasn’t keeping me from it!”
“Are you done?” Maddox asks, looking around the messy kitchen. “Both of you clean this shit up. I have to attempt to avoid a war with the Irish mafia now.”
“I’d much rather clean,” Cai says, heading for the supply closet. “What are we going to do with the girl?”
“We may be stuck with her,” Maddox breathes. “If Dad meets her, he’ll want to know when he’ll have heirs for his empire.”
“That’s why we rejected her,” I remind him.
Our father has very odd ideals. His father fucked every one of our mothers before he allowed his son to marry them, regardless of how long the marriages lasted.
I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s why my mother couldn’t handle remaining married to my father.
In my father and grandfather’s eyes, it was important that the children be “legitimate”.
There’s a lot of twisted aspects in our family, which is why Dad has never blinked over my relationship with Gareth.
Since Gareth is a man and my dad’s adopted son, there’s also not a chance in hell that the “marriage ritual” will ever happen between them. Shuddering, I avoid my brothers’ glares.
“I’m well aware of all the complications this omega will bring,” Maddox says. “This is fucked.”
“Our carefully built house of cards is crumbling,” Cai says sagely, the broom in his hands, as he deftly begins to clean up. My shock is palpable at how serious he is as he blows out a breath. “She means nothing to us, right? So why don’t we just give her to Dad and be done with it?”
“Because we don’t trade omegas in exchange for our own skin,” Maddox rumbles. “Especially one that has clearly been traumatized so much that she nonchalantly talks about killing herself to get away from us.”
My brothers are shocking the fuck out of me at every turn. Usually Maddox would be the one to throw someone under the bus to save us, and Cai is the bleeding heart. I’m the scared youngest child who hates having the status quo change.
I like my life the way it was, and it’s all changing too damn fast.
“Clean this shit up yourself,” I say, walking toward the door. “I have to call the doctor to stitch up my leg. The blood is already soaking through my pants.”
“Oh, I forgot about that,” Cai says.