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“No,” I said softly, knowing alpha ears would be able to hear me easily.
“We already tried that, and look where it got us,” Luca added. His voice was surprisingly steady, at odds with his distressed pheromones.
“Get. The Fuck.Out.” It was almost a bark.Almost.
“Not happening,” I shot back, as we reached the bottom of the stairs. “You’re not going to get us to leave by growling at us. We aren’t afraid of you.”
It might have been an exaggeration in Luca’s case, but not in mine. And it was the plain truth that neither of us were leaving until we’d said our piece.
“Youshouldbe afraid.” The raspy words came from the area near the water heater, where Emiel had set up Princess’s food and water when she first came.
Luca fumbled for a second set of light switches at the base of the stairway. Light flooded the basement, illuminating the partially finished space. Emiel sat stiffly against the far wall, still clad only in the filthy blue boxing shorts he’d been wearing when the others dragged him away from the cage fights. He winced in the sudden brightness and turned his face away. Princess gave an unhappy yowl.
“Well, we’re not,” I reiterated. “Emiel, I need to apologize to you.”
He looked at me sharply with the eye that wasn’t completely swollen shut.
“And as soon as she does that,” Luca said, “I need to yell at you until you promise never to do this stupid, self-destructive shit again.”
Somehow, I doubted yelling would be involved. Then again, I’d seen Luca blow his top before, so I might’ve been dead wrong about that.
“I don’t wanna talk about it,” Emiel said, looking away again. “Notanyof it.”
“Well,tough shit!” Luca flared, and apparently actual yelling was on the table after all. “Because SSG sent someone to follow your stupid ass back to the house, and if the others hadn’t noticed in time, my old gang wouldknow where we live!”
I’d been trying really hard not to wonder if anyone in the pursuing car had thought to jot down Zalen’s Missouri license plate number. I wasn’t an expert, but I was pretty sure that number could be used to find his personal information online. I wondered if Luca had made the same connection yet.
For now, though, I wrapped a hand around Luca’s whipcord-tense bicep. “Hey. I thought I got to do my thing first, before the shouting started,” I reminded him.
Luca made a noise of frustrated disgust, but he subsided.
I took a deep breath, trying to choose my words with care. I’d had a pretty speech all planned, but somehow it had turned into a jumbled mass of word salad now that Emiel was actually in front of me.
“Look,” I began. “I know I blew right past your boundaries when you took me down to see Nat, and I’mso sorry, Emiel. Zalen said you were worried that you’d done something I didn’t want, and—”
“I raped you.” The simple declaration sounded like it had been dragged across broken glass.
“No!” I gasped, appalled. But Luca cut across me, his voice rising in anger.
“Oh, get your head out of your ass, Emiel! I had to talk her out of approaching you to help her through her heat last week!” He jabbed an accusing finger in the air, punctuating the words. “Just because you’re a rape victim, it doesn’t mean that every sexual encounter for the rest of your life is automatically nonconsensual!”
The sense of what he was saying took a second to sink in. When it did, it felt like I’d just crested the top of a rollercoaster, my stomach left behind as the world dropped out from underneath me. Deafening silence fell over the basement. Not even Princess seemed interested in breaking it.
Luca closed his eyes and sucked in a deep breath. It escaped in a rush, his shoulders slumping as it went.
“Luca,” I whispered—but he only shook his head, his attention fixed on Emiel.
“I guessed a while ago,” he said, in a much calmer tone. “Like recognizes like, I guess. How old were you when it happened?”
Every drop of blood had drained from Emiel’s face, leaving a gray cast beneath his dark brown skin that made his bruises look absolutely garish beneath the harsh basement lighting. I didn’t think he was even breathing.
“I was fourteen the first time,” Luca continued, when it became obvious Emiel wasn’t going to speak. “Didn’t know my own ass from a hole in the ground when I went into heat. They gang-raped me, over and over. Held me down and injected me with contraband hormones to bring on my estrus whenever they felt like it. And they did that to me for four years.”
My arms had come around my own body, and I was squeezing so tight I would probably leave finger marks. I didn’t even remember moving.
There was absolutely no question that Luca had hit the mark. The truth of it was reflected in Emiel’s ghastly complexion... in the utterly blank, glazed expression on his swollen face.
I wanted to cry, to rage, to throw things. I wanted to stand in front of the monsters who’d hurt these two with a loaded gun and shoot them, one by one... but not to kill. I pictured blowing off kneecaps, genitals, parts of faces.