Chapter 25
RUNE
LIKE A VIRGIN - MADONNA
Rubbing the towel over my buzzcut, I pause as I catch sight of myself in the mirror and sigh.
Stupid.
Ugly.
Worthless piece of shit.
A waste of skin and bones.
My eyes move over my face, taking in every scarred, tattooed inch.
I was nameless until he decided to brand me. I was no one until they started marking my body. Rune was born the day the first line of ink was drawn on my skin—which I later learned was thurisaz, the Elder Futhark rune for giant—and not when I actually entered the world eleven years before that.
The Circuit wanted a way to make sure I couldn’t leave, that I’d be killed immediately if I was ever smart enough to try, and these marks drawn in metallic ink were how my master ensured that happened.
He had sensors installed, ones that would rip the heavy metals out of my skin, so I couldn’t go anywhere in or outside the compound without someone who could disable them.
He thought that guaranteed I was never going to leave The Circuit unless it was in a body bag.
It’s for your own good. You’re a brainless beast, Rune, and that’s all you’ll ever be.
No one could love a monster; they don’t want a big, dumb ape following them around.
There is not one single person on earth who wants you at all, and nobody ever will.
The marks on your face, on your body, they mean I own you.
The Circuit owns you. A mindless robot to do our bidding.
It’s the only thing you’re good for; breaking people, ruining them, destroying them until there's nothing left. You’re lucky I didn’t drown you the day you were born, and the only reason you’re still alive is because you’re as trainable, and just as goddamn stupid as a circus chimp.
Don’t fuck it up. I won’t make the mistake of sparing your life twice.
My master kept me docile, kept me afraid and ignorant by telling me I was nothing and would always be nothing.
He kept me there out of fear of what the sensors would do to my body.
So, I was a driver, I was the bodyguard and muscle, I was a murderer and cleanup crew but I was never a human being, and he made me believe I didn’t deserve to be treated like anything other than a beast in a cage.
He even kept me in one.
One brick wall, three made of bars. Nothing in it but a pile of fucking hay.
When I was there, I was chained to the floor.
The links ran through a hoop in an iron collar, and it only had about six and a half feet of slack.
I was allowed outside for two hours a day for exercise, chained to a pole in the middle of the yard while I ran the track or lifted weights, and I was surprisingly well fed considering the way I was treated.
Far better than you’d expect in that kind of scenario, but that was because of my size.
He wanted me big and strong, and he made sure I stayed that way.
I honed my skills, nurtured my natural abilities, and I lived in fear.
I was led to believe that I was the weak one, I was the one without any power or control, and if I ever tried to go against The Circuit, I’d be killed. I didn’t know anything different, was never taught anything different, and I bought into that bullshit for over twenty fucking years.
Olive was the reason I finally opened my eyes and saw things differently.
She was in danger, she was mine, and I needed to do something about it.
As soon as I left The Circuit, as soon as I broke the man who spent years breaking me, I saw the truth.
I learned very quickly what I was capable of and what I could withstand, how much power and control I really had, and I used that as easily and naturally as breathing or blinking.
My master was nothing more than a pile of broken bones and bleeding flesh when I walked out and I vowed I wouldn’t let anyone put me in a cage again.
But adapting to life outside of The Circuit, especially while I searched for my omega, was nothing like I thought it would be.
My size, my appearance, everything about me made it hard to fit in, and I had to do something to change that or else I’d fail out in the real world the same way I had at the compound.
I had to be able to function in a society I didn’t understand, one that didn’t understand me, and that meant I had to start with some kind of education.
The first and only word I could read before I left The Circuit, and for the longest time after?
Library, because that’s what my master called the room where he kept an incredibly detailed history of his playthings, omegas like Olive, including any souvenir he might have kept after he finished with them.
When I realized libraries were actually things and not just some sick, twisted trophy room for an undiagnosed sociopath, I found my starting point.
Their actual purpose was completely lost on me, I had no idea where to begin the first time I entered one, but the layout and collection of books was a big green flag. I couldn’t read, and my speech was shit, but I was able to ask a few basic questions and that led me to audiobooks.
Nonfiction audiobooks changed the game for me.
I spent hours and hours listening to textbooks transferred to audio and eventually got into fiction as well.
It helped me the way I imagine parents help their children learn to speak; regularly listening to everyone around them until they start to pick it up on their own.
I did the same and paid attention to the way people talk, the way the narrators spoke, and I used the books to adjust and adapt my speech patterns so they were more fluent.
People don’t grunt one-word responses, they don’t talk like babies who are just learning how.
If I wanted to fit in, if I wanted to sound like everyone else, I needed them to believe I went to school and had some sort of education like they did.
Even if my social interaction was extremely limited and I avoided most people the best I could, it was important to me that I didn’t sound like a brainless sack of muscles if I had to talk to someone, and only because I spent years being ignored, or spoken to like my IQ matched my shoe size.
It’s probably strange that I don’t use a lot of contractions when I do speak, or much slang aside from curse words, and it weirds a lot of people out that I’m insistent on using their full name unless they tell me otherwise, but I spent years trying to learn what I should have been taught, and I don’t want to dumb myself down.
I still don’t say much but it’s more out of habit than insecurity; I found fitting in was going to be hard no matter how I spoke because I’m seven feet tall and covered in tattoos.
I still tried, though.
That’s where the audiobooks helped. I pieced together what little I did know with what I heard in those books, and that became my first form of schooling.
In one town, the one I stayed in the longest, I found encyclopedias on tape and started listening to those. Volume after volume, it had to be close to fifteen hundred hours of the most boring, driest shit I’ve ever listened to, but I learned a lot about things I didn’t even know existed.
The librarian who had been helping me find material to listen to, the beta female named Gwendolyn who was absolutely terrified the first time I walked into her library, she was the one who taught me how to read.
When I ran out of encyclopedias and blew through all of their fiction, she found the nerve and asked me if I knew how and when I said no, she made it a mission to teach me.
That was a lot harder for me to pick up on than normal speech patterns or the vocabulary I was building.
I’m still not very good and that’s after trying every fucking day for ten years.
Gwendolyn was the one who told me the tattoos on my face and hands looked like pagan runes.
She showed me some in a few books they had on hand, told me the meanings and gave me a little history, and that changed how I looked at my name.
My master called me that simply because the person tattooing me decided to use nordic pagan runes to do it, and they chose them because it took hours and hours to cover my body with those tiny symbols. Which meant nearly constant irritation and raw spots on my skin for months.
So, they called me Rune.
I used to hate that he named me that, that he named me at all, but when Gwendolyn shared the power behind those symbols, I embraced it.
It does not, however, mean I’m totally fine with how my face looks.
Leaning toward the mirror, I tilt my head from side to side, examining the crisp, black lines set against the tanned tone of my skin.
I'd almost prefer to have the scars be more obvious if it meant the tattoos took a backseat to them.
Caring about how I looked was never on my radar, not until I had mates who could possibly be afraid of me for it.
Now it’s something I think about almost constantly, and more frequently when I have a near miss at intimacy with one of them.
I blow out a breath and shake my head.
Biology takes care of things like that, though.
They might not be scared of the way I look, but my omegas don’t have to be attracted to it. That’s for damn sure.
“Goddamnit!”
I turn toward the bathroom door as I slowly set the towel in the sink, waiting to see what follows Olive’s hissed cussing.
With her, it could be any number of things, and I learned early on not all of them mean she’s in danger. My omega has a colorful vocabulary and very little filter, and if I go running every time she swears, I’d drop one hundred pounds or more, easily.
“Shit. No, no, no. Shit, shit. Please, no. Fuck,” she whisper-shouts seconds before it sounds like the entire pantry explodes into the living room, and I’m flying out of the bathroom like my ass is on fire.
“Olive!” I shout as I crash into her, forgetting the RV is even smaller when I’m in it as I grab her waist and keep her from falling. “Olive, are you hurt? What’s wrong?”