“He needs help,” I said.
“I’ll do it.” Bren moved in, pressing a quick kiss to my lips and then pulling away. He jerked that fucking jersey up and over his head, then hooked down his rugby shorts, looking back at me with a sly look when he stepped out of them. I pushed myself away from the doorway as he got into the cubicle, returning to the bedroom to clean shit up.
Tidying up your estranged mate’s misery bedroom was a weird experience, let me tell you. The omega wanted to transform this into a little den, complete for the three of us, full of soft fabrics and sweet smells. Anything other than this. And Cyn? She was forced to tally the impact running out on my mate had on Rhys.
The congealed food, the dirty glasses, bloody tissues, and other junk were shoved indiscriminately into a garbage bag found at the bottom of an empty bin and then dumped outside the door. So were the stinky sheets and other bed linen, though my fingers cramped around a pillowcase. The cotton was nearly threadbare from use, the scent of him harsh and intense, and if I pocketed it, it’d fill my bedroom with his scent. Defiantly, I shoved it with everything else and then threw that in the hallway as well, for staff to deal with. I then sprayed some body spray around, filling the room with the smell of Old Spice rather than pain.
I’d done it, eradicated all the things that stabbed at me, leaving a sparse but clean room behind, making me feel much more in control, right up until I returned to the bathroom. Because there was Rhys, standing with his arm against the wall, his hair in his face as the water poured over him, his ribs shaking in a very familiar way as Bren worked hard to get him clean.
Fuck.
I didn’t want this. I didn’t want his pain or Bren’s or mine, and I was angry I had to put up with that, but it was a different anger now. Before, I’d wanted to scorch them all to the ground, a nuclear bomb kind of heat. Now, I was a ballistic missile, arrowing in on its target, ready to expose all the fucking bullshit this place ran on.
Right after my mate stopped crying.
He pulled himself together not long afterwards, towelling himself dry and taking the ibuprofen that I handed him, along with a
bottle of water. He swallowed them down, wrapping a dry towel around his waist before staggering out into the bedroom.
“You didn’t have to clean up.” Rhys surveyed the revised room and then nodded. “But thanks.”
“That’s OK. You’re gonna do something for me in return.” That got his attention, those pale blue eyes showing every shift of mood, the ticking of his brain palpable. “Brendan, is there a comb or brush in here?”
The other man went digging through the drawers and then pulled out a comb missing a few teeth, putting it in my hand.
“Get on the bed and put your head on my lap,” I ordered.
“What?” Some heat crept back into Rhys’ voice. “You haven’t spoken to me, haven’t been able to even look at me for fucking days, and now what? You’re going to comb out my hair? Give that here.”
A big hand asked for the comb, but I just shook my head.
“No.”
“Gimme the fucking comb, Cyn. You don’t want to do this, don’t want to touch me, be in the same room as me, be anywhere near me. Bren, in his misguided attempts to make it all better, no doubt told you a sob story. Fuck the story, fuck the comb, fuck all of it. You don’t want me.”
“Get on the bed, Rhys, and do as you’re told.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“No!”
His alpha command filled the whole damn room, rumbling like a thundercloud, ready to rain bloody hell down on the lot of us, but I stood firm. I’d seen my way past more than this, I could face down Rhys.
“Yes. Or tell me why not.”
“Because…” His voice started to break, making me reconsider what I was doing. “Because…” His chin jerked up, his teeth clamping down as he looked at me through a mat of wet, knotty hair. “Because you’ll touch me, when that’s all I’ve fucking dreamed of since the day you left. Since the day you walked in here. Since the first time I scented you in that damn forest. Then you’ll walk out again, back to your house, your life, your support network, and away from me, as you should. You didn’t need to come back. You shouldn’t have, love.”
He shook his head hard, both of us feeling the droplets of water from that.
“You should run as far as you can, because there’s only so long I can hold him back. I go downstairs to the fights they hold in the basement and let strangers punch me into unconsciousness until someone picks me up here and then drops me on the bed, then I do it all over again. That’s what it takes to keep the alpha from breaking down your door, scooping you up and out of your bed, and running with you as far as I can until no one can find us. Until you love me again.”
You could tell he’d been fighting a lot, not due to the mess of bruises all over his body or the swollen, split knuckles, but because of this. He had a devastating right hook and he managed to lay me out flat, but I was done getting thrown off balance by these alphas.
“Alpha.” I said the word with all of the pain, the anger, the frustration, and yeah, the need that boiled up inside me. “Your omega requests that you lie down on the bed and let me comb that fucking mop of hair until it’s smooth again. Then you’ll tell me all of the things you should’ve told me from the start, before you made me yours.”
Chapter 31