“You were good, like all the bullshit stories I’d been fed. There was this massive heart beating inside a body made for pounding people into the ground, and instead…” Marcus shook his head. “You did, administering smackdowns when you needed to, but not beyond that, not for the sheer pleasure of it, and that restraint freaked people out. So few of us had that in the camp. You defended what was yours, postured enough to make sure no one fucked with you or yours… That.” A sharp nod of Marcus’ head. “That smashed into me so damn hard, it took my breath away. You surprised me, Rhys, and that’s always been my catnip. I seek novelty with everything I have, anything that takes me out of my fucking head and lets me feel. I knew then I had to get closer, if only to understand.”
Rhys shuffled at this, seeming to find it difficult to meet people’s eyes, but when he did, I saw exactly what Marcus saw. Orion might have been the prince, but Rhys? I c
ould imagine him as a knight of old, clad in armour and ready to run off and save a fair maiden at a moment’s notice.
“The closer I got, the more you pulled me in, letting me see the fragile relationships you were building in a place designed to be hell. Like flowers growing through the cracks of concrete, you created this place of love.” Marcus’ eyes dropped away, his mouth pursing, his hands moving restlessly. “Such a fucking cliché, I kicked my own arse over it, but it didn’t matter. You gave me a taste for something I’ve never been able to get past, and I never want to. I dunno where I’d be if I hadn’t met the lot of you. Probably working for someone like Benson, orchestrating his sadistic little extracurriculars and making sure he didn’t get hurt.”
His fingers traced a crack in the car’s paint.
“But I had something different now. Everything I could do, think, achieve, it all shifted to focus on that one thing. I had to protect the three of you, and then when I joined you, I had to protect us with everything I had. You won’t like my high-handed bullshit, will resent all the games I’ve been playing, but you don’t know.”
Marcus’ eyes darted from one to the other of us.
“What you discovered about your dad? That’s just scratching the surface. There are so many predators out there, wanting to take a bite, but no one was going to bite what was mine. I steered us past danger and around dodgy fuckers who wanted to use us, building our capital, making shit safe. No one and nobody was going to take us down, but that was just the external threats.”
Marcus reached for me, tugging me close and then burying his nose in my hair.
“That scent, when Rhys caught a whiff of it, when he went searching, it made me realise that we had vulnerabilities within as well. Initially, I wanted to sideline Cyn, keep her from the pack, keep all omegas from the pack, but as I dug deeper, looking at studies of what made successful poly relationships, particularly with alphas, one thing came up over and over—we needed an omega. But the finding of one tended to be an…imprecise process. Reactions like Rhys’, based on just a scent, a chance encounter, were so common in fiction as well as real people’s stories, so I set out to find the girl, the omega that turned my mate’s head.”
“And you found me,” I said, wrapped up in him, trying to get my head around all this and failing. He’d known that too, which was why he hadn’t told us before. His mindset, his brain, it was so fucking alien, it was like he wasn’t human. We were mated to a strange fae creature from the forest, and I didn’t know how I felt about that.
“I found you, scoped out your mother and her situation, saw how fragile you were. Academies eat girls like you alive. You’d have been pushed, pressured, coerced into the arms of some fuck, when I knew you were ours, but being just another figure in your life, making you choose us, would’ve been just as bad. So I spoke to Miranda, saw the breadth of her ideas and how they could change people’s lives, especially yours. I got her the money we had squirrelled away, and some more I got from less legitimate means, and we built a company together. She just couldn’t let anyone know my role. I…I didn’t want to be another powerful fuck, pressuring you into something.”
“Would she have gotten it off the ground without you?” I asked, afraid of the answer.
“Who was going to invest in a beta driven start-up? One that flies completely in the face of alpha interests? Small companies do, ones that follow alpha directives, but something like this, that would transform the energy industry?”
Something that would fuck with Ratcliffe Industries.
My eyes slid to Orion, seeing the moment he saw the same thing as me.
“You wanted to bring Dad down. You always intended for his business to fail.”
“The first time I really saw Cyn was at the Omega Ball when she was eighteen. Your father led her into a room, using his alpha command, with the intent to rape her. Omega breaking, I found out he called it later. I was hovering around, trying to collect evidence against him, and… I was going to step forward, before things got too far, but…” Marcus shook his head slowly. “I hesitated because I needed evidence of intent, was too slow to act. I stood there, staring, unable to believe what I was seeing.”
His eyes dropped down to his hands, watching them clench and loosen. “He was going to stop, right. He wouldn’t actually do this. You were the daughter of someone significant. I’d protected you from the predations of someone like this. It was bad, real bad, I could hear your whimpers of pain, but if I got the evidence, if I nailed the bastard, it’d be OK, right? I’d be able to put him away forever. For us.”
He shook his head slowly. “I thought I knew.” He looked up at me. “Men always think they understand sexual assault, but then I saw what it did to you afterwards.”
He turned to me, placed his hands on my shoulders.
“I’m so fucking sorry, Cyn. I should’ve come out of the shadows earlier. I should have kidney punched the fuck, indulged in a little Balmain folk dancing, kicking him in the ribs, crushing him, but I didn’t. I was just about to reveal myself, the sounds and what he was doing too fucking much, and then George came blundering in.”
Marcus withdrew his hands, like he couldn’t bear to touch me any longer, like he didn’t have the right, but he packed that away all too quickly, continuing on.
“Before I wanted him to back off, leave our pack alone, but after that night, my focus changed. Orion, your father is what I would have become without you, but he had a helluva lot less brains and a metric fuck ton of privilege and sadistic impulses. I know there’s something wrong with me, that to the rest of the population, there’s some kind of glitch in my brain that sets me apart, but them?” Marcus’ eyes narrowed, those hazel depths becoming diamond hard. “Unfettered power and the means to do whatever they want with it. Society backs their plays, they can command those weaker than them if they disagree, they have money to cover everything up and no fucking compassion at all to temper them.”
“Them?” Orion asked.
“When you bit me, took me as yours, I couldn’t leave that alone, O. I saw your father beginning to flex his muscles, thinking he could separate what was an unbreakable bond, just because he wanted to. He was going to take you from us. Break us.”
Every time the mask dropped, we saw a whole other side of Marcus, one I wasn’t sure we’d ever seen. Had anyone? There was a fervency there that started to edge towards scary, but then his eyes fixed on Orion, stilling, going molten with a love and need I recognised absolutely, because I felt exactly the same. Orion’s hand shot out, clasping Marcus and gripping him tight.
“We were a bunch of kids terrified by this fucking idiot, someone I could run circles around, but people listened to him. He was going to break us, which would break all of us. What would Rhys become if you were stolen away? What would Bren?” Marcus’ voice grew quieter. “What would I become? You were ours. We were building something.” He shook his head, and as I watched his shoulders hunch over, I slid an arm around him, holding him tight. “You were mine, and no one was going to take you away from me. No one. I’m not fucking stupid. I know that’s not the way love’s supposed to be, but that’s the way it is for me.”
“Oh, I dunno,” Bren drawled. “Seems pretty bog standard alpha bullshit, doesn’t it? Bossy, controlling, dominant, competitive.” He looked at all four of us. “All us alphas have been like that at times. Like, I get you’re the chosen one and shit, Marcus, but fuck… I dunno if I woulda said no to your master plan, knowing what I know now.”
“So why didn’t you tell us?” Rhys asked. “I knew you were hiding shit, that things just kept miraculously falling into place, but… Didn’t you think we’d understand? We were one hundred percent in on this as well.”