Page 35 of Protector (Alpha Ties)
THIRTY-FIVE
JACOB
Nothing’s ever deflated his knot as swiftly as his mate dissolving into tears beneath him.
“What’s wrong?” he croaks, shock and horror rushing up his spine to replace the divine echoes of pleasure from her snug pussy still wrapped around him. Did he hurt her?
He felt nothing but pleasure from her end of the bond, his thumb on her clit ensuring she was coming too hard to panic over the thick insertion when his body tied with hers, but the absolute agony in their bond now speaks a different story.
The second he can do so without harming her further, he pulls his cock from her clutching sheath, grimacing to hold back a groan of pleasure at the slick, velvet caress.
His retreat is followed by a flood of semen and pussy cream, but to his relief, there’s no tinge of pink to it. Her opening is flushed bright red, however, and he presses a hand to her swollen flesh in an instinctive need to soothe whatever damage he’s done.
His mate jerks at his touch and cries harder.
“Adelaide,” he rumbles, panic sinking deeper. He kneels up to cup her cheek, make her look at him, but she curls up on her side, knees drawing into her chest as she hides her face in her hands.
“Shit. C’mon, talk to me. Where does it hurt?”
One trembling hand leaves her face to press against her breast, and relief shudders through his chest when he finally understands. Whatever pain she’s feeling, it isn’t physical. The mind-rendering pleasure he found wasn’t carved from her agony.
But her tears still spill over the sheets, her sobs tearing at his heart, and no matter how grateful he feels that he hasn’t injured her, it’s still not at all what he was hoping for after sex so grotesquely reality-bending he’s pretty sure a part of his soul left his body.
“Adelaide,” he says again, one hand finding her shoulder. When she only curls in tighter on herself, he slips his arms under her knees and back and scoops her onto his lap, holding tight.
She melts into his embrace, clings to him as if he’s a life raft in a storm, buries her face against his neck—and keeps crying.
“Shh, mate,” he murmurs against her ear, rocking her trembling body on instinct. “I’m right here. Whatever it is, I’ll fix it.”
She only presses herself harder against him, and he huffs a sigh into her hair, resigning himself to the agony of his mate’s despair until she is capable of telling him who or what he needs to break into pieces.
It takes a long while before her sobs quiet to deep, shaky breaths.
Gently he presses a kiss to her jaw, and she shudders in response.
“I’m right here,” he repeats, low and tender. “Just tell me.”
She hiccups something between a laugh and another sob. “I’m so… stupid.”
Jacob arches an eyebrow. Whatever he expected the cause of her breakdown to be, it wasn’t doubt of her own intelligence. “Come again?”
“I thought—I thought you were all like that. I hurt you because I thought... if I didn’t, I couldn’t—” She breaks off on a gasped inhale.
“Shh. Stay with me.” He holds her out from his body to give her space to breathe, one hand finding her chest to calm her. “Breathe. Just breathe.”
She gulps in several shallow breaths, but his hand has the intended effect. Slowly her breathing calms, and she sags in front of him, hands coming up to hide her face once more.
This time, he doesn’t pressure. He simply keeps his hand still and waits for her to find the words.
When they finally come, it’s on a whisper.
“That colonel at the party today? General Smith’s son?”
“Your ex?” he asks, doing his best to ignore the hot stab of jealousy at thinking about her ever being with someone else.
She chokes what could have been a laugh, but it’s deprived of mirth. “He’s not my ex. We went on one date, because his dad asked mine. General Smith was Dad’s superior at the time, so I wasn’t given a choice. Anyway, it went… about as well as could be expected. He was nineteen—the definition of a teenage alphahole. All hands and dumb jokes about women, blowjobs, and sandwiches.
“After the movie, I thought he was driving me home, but he took me to his parents’ house. Parked no more than thirty yards from their front door.” She breathes in deep, her hands clenching against his chest—and he knows, fucking knows what’s coming, but it doesn’t prepare him for the acidic rush of fury when she, in a voice devoid of emotion, says, “And then he raped me.”
The son of a bitch is dead. That knowledge is the only thing that keeps his body still as their bond twists like barbed wire in his chest despite his mate’s attempt at detachment. Once they’re done here, once she’s asleep, he’s going to hunt the man down, and then he’s going to shred him apart.
“I bled,” she continues, the faintest tremor making its way through her voice. “It was my first time, but it was… a lot. Enough that he went and got his dad. For a moment there, I thought he might actually have some remorse, but he was just worried that accidentally killing me would land him in prison.
“His dad sent him to his room, said he’d take care of ‘it,’ and the way he was looking at me…” She swallows thickly. “Suffice to say, if he hadn’t been able to patch me up in the bathroom, I don’t think I’d have been found. So when he told me he’d make sure my dad was demoted and shipped to an active war zone if I ever so much as suggested it had been anything but consensual, I believed him.
“I never said anything to my parents, and they never asked, but… My dad saw me come in that night. I panicked, thinking he must be able to tell… I was limping and my face was red from crying. But he just told me to go to bed. The next morning, my mom gave me some painkillers and a Plan B, and brought me soup in bed.” She chuffs through her nose. “As if I had the flu. Then asked if I was going to see him again.
“That was when it clicked. She’d seen the bloody gauze in my bathroom bin. If my own mother could think I’d want to be with a man who hurt me like that, then it had to be… normal, you know? My dad got the promotion he’d been after a few weeks later, and I guess to them, that meant it was worth it.”
Jacob’s pulse throbs hard in his temple as he sits frozen underneath her, arms still wrapped around her naked body. Breathing… hurts. Thinking hurts. Violence roils under his skin, and it takes everything he’s got to remain still. But somehow, he does. For her.
A grimace pulls on her soft mouth, her eyelashes fanning her cheeks as she looks down. “That’s when I realized that if I didn’t want to be used by alphas with ulterior motives for the rest of my life, I had to become strong enough, smart enough to never be considered easy prey again. And so… that’s what I did.”
“Addie,” he whispers, reaching for her cheek at the absolute devastation shivering through their bond, but she flinches away from him.
“I think I treated you… so awfully, because… I didn’t want to see you as human. Any of you. Showing alphas any weakness means they’ll see you as prey, and I had to make you submit or the whole program would be a bust, and I’d lose my power. I wouldn’t have enough value to make any alpha reconsider using me, if that was what he wanted.” She forces a deep breath through her chest and looks up at him, and there is so much regret in her shimmering, gray eyes, his breath sticks in his throat. “And then there was you. From the first time you opened your eyes, the way you looked at me… You were so… alpha. Resisting my control because you believed I was your… your Fated, I guess.
“I hated you for seeing me as someone weak, and still… sometimes, at night, I would touch myself thinking about you. Even though I knew how painful submitting to you would be. I hated you even more for that. I punished you. I hurt you, worse than any of the others, because I thought that what you wanted when you fought me for control and your body responded to my presence was to hurt me. To take pleasure from holding me down and making me wish for death.”
She clenches her eyes shut and dips her head to press her forehead against his chest. “I didn’t know it could feel like this. I didn’t know that all this time, what you wanted… That it was to worship me, even when I deserve nothing but your hatred.”
Breathing slowly, he brushes a hand down the length of her hair before resting his cheek at the crown of her head. She feels so solid in his arms, but the bond between them is raw and frayed with uncertainty. Pain.
His pulse still pounds in his temples with the effort of keeping the rage throbbing through his body in check, but through it, sorrow gnaws at his heart. His broken little monster.
“I never saw you as weak,” he says once he’s finally managed to push the fury down far enough that he can do so without risk of causing her more fear. “I hated you for the pain, but my yearning for you wasn’t your weakness. It wasn’t even mine, though I thought it to be. We are Fated, Adelaide. It’s not something I believe—it’s fact , written into my DNA far more deeply than anything you ever managed to do to me in your lab.
“What was done to you…” He sucks in a slow breath to keep his voice calm; even. “You had to harden to survive it. I understand. But you’re not alone anymore, mate. You are not weak, or small. You are not prey, Adelaide. You are not someone to be used. And no one will treat you like it again. No one. You are mine.”
She gasps softly against his chest at his words, and he holds her tighter as she shivers.
“We’re Fated,” he repeats. “Nothing will break that. Not what was done to you; not what you did to me as a result. What matters is what comes next.”
“It’ can’t be that simple,” she breathes. “It can’t. What I’ve done… There is no undoing that. There’s no forgiving it.”
Gently he reaches for her chin, tugging her face up to capture her red-rimmed eyes. “There is no forgiving what was done to you. You can atone for the rest however you wish, but I am telling you—it doesn’t matter. Not anymore.”
She shakes her head, opens her mouth to deny the undeniable, but before she can voice her protest, a small noise from her living room draws the entirety of his focus.
Someone’s in the apartment with them.