Page 269 of Alpha Mates

“After a while, I couldn’t cry anymore. I had no more tears; it was like they all ran out,” I whisper as exhaustion falls over my mind. “I screamed. I just kept screaming. I didn’t need to after a while. It all stopped hurting after a while. I think I thought if I were loud enough, maybe … m-maybe someone would hear me. So I screamed and screamed and screamed.”

Julian sniffles, trying to hold it in as his tears fall to join mine.

“I didn’t get why they were doing it,” I admit quietly. “It wasn’t a game. They weren’t doing it for fun, but then why? Why were they so determined to hurt me? Was it a mission? It had to be, because that was the only reason that made sense. Ithadto be their job to torture me, to break me completely and … eventually, that’s what they did.”

I feel something pull at my shoulders and I don’t even fight it.

I let myself fall into Julian’s arms. I let my sobs join my tears until I’m crying in his arms.

Even now, I still want to scream, if only to escape the torment in my mind, but what’s the point? I’d screamed then, and it had done nothing.

“You can stop. You don’t have to continue,” Julian says—begsas he rocks me. “You can stop, Aiden.”

“I can’t,” I cry as I cling to him so that the memories rushing in and out of focus can’t claim all of me. “If I stop now, I won’t do this again. I can’t.”

I’d tell this story once and never again. Never. Again.

I feel Julian nod against me while he tries to hold me, protect me and console me all at once, but he has no idea how. It’s almost too much for him—all of this sprung now, but it’s too late to turn back. So he clings to me almost as hard as I cling to him, and tries to breathe—tries to carry us through this.

Swallowing around the lump in my throat, I look at a spot in the room—a corner where the bottom of the curtain meets the dresser—and focus on it. I focus only on the singular point and force my mouth to move again.

“One day, the lights turned on.” I barely utter the words before the shaking starts again, and Julian holds me tighter, but it’s worse this time. “It was a small room. There was a table full of bloody tools and four rogues in surgical suits stained with my blood. It was worse than the dark. It was …” I shake my head, trying to bury the image. The dresser. The curtain.

“They were in the middle of cutting me when it happened, and they just stood there like they realised they were doing something horrible. Then the door opened, and a man walked in. He wasn’t in the same kit, just some jeans and a T-shirt. He looked normal.” I scoff. “Normal. He told them to leave, and they did. No one asked a thing. They just left, and then it was just me and him. He said his name was Reon. He …”

His steps echo in my ears, and even now I can picture him perfectly. I see the way he approaches me as if he weren’t a threat, as if he was a neighbour popping in to say hi.

All too quickly, memories flood one after the other, and I remember it all. The terror that raced down my spine when he stopped beside me at the table and just stared at me. The low cry that I’d pitched when his gaze had settled on my healing stomach. The way I’d flinched away from his touch when he’d raised his hand. Only it wasn’t some new form of torture, he was unbuckling my muzzle.

“He asked if I knew why I was there,” I mumble as the words echo in my head.

I clear my throat, trying to stop myself from bleeding into the memory, but I can’t resist the current that drags me down.

“Do you know why we’re doing what we’re doing to you?”

It was weird hearing voices after so long. Voices that weren’t my own. Voice. One voice. He only had one voice.

Was this another weird dream? One of the ones with the other boy next door, only there was no boy and now there was a man.

I stare at him, wondering when he’d fade away, but he doesn’t. He stands there, watching and waiting, and then, when he gets tired of waiting, he pushes his finger into my open stomach. The screaming begins again.

“‘I asked you a question,’ he sounded so calm,” I tell Julian in a hushed whisper. “Like he did when he told me his name, like I wasn’t screaming at all. Then he asked again,‘Do you know why you’re here?’”

“N-No,” I stutter, wheezing around his finger until he pulls it out.

Whimpering, I try to get away again, but there’s nowhere to go. The straps were still as strong as the first day.

“It’s because we need something from you. We’re not doing it for fun, we’re doing it because we have to,” the man says while he slides his hands over the table and peers down at me. “You see, we rogues don’t enjoy being ‘savages’ or ‘beasts’. We don’t like acting without reasoning. It’s not something we choose. It’s a fate we’re forced to suffer just because we’re no longer in our packs. That’s not fair, is it?”

“If you didn’t want to be like that, then why did you leave your pack or misbehave to be kicked out?”

“I didn’t see the hand coming, only his black eyes bleeding into red before his hand was across my face. You’d think he’d know that it wouldn’t hurt, that there was no point to it after what they’d done to me.”

My tongue darts out, searching for the blood that had slid down from my lips.

Closing his eyes, Reon took a deep breath before he opened them again and looked at me with his black eyes, faking calm. “Speak when spoken to.”

“You asked me a question,” I growl before he slaps me again. I barely felt it.