Her eyes met mine, and she shot me an impish smile.
“We built this place together. They wouldn’t scrimp on any detail, prepared to pay for every single thing I wanted.” She stepped closer, forced to look up at me as she did, but somehow being taller, bigger, didn’t feel like an advantage. “They wanted me to have the perfect home, the perfect life, and I admit, I’m dying to get back to my nest.”
“Nest?” My voice was a ghost of its former growl.
“The room with that massive bed they had custom made for me. I’ve been staying with friends for the last few months, but there’s nothing like being home in your own bed, right?”
She was going to continue, to deliver another punch, then another, without even lifting her perfectly manicured hand, but then I heard Max’s voice from upstairs.
“Sage? Where you at, love?”
Chloe’s response was a perfect illustration of her personality—so vile, I couldn’t see how Beau and Tobias had ever been sucked in by her. Her head snapped up, her eyes narrowing as she searched for a sign of Max with all of the violence of a trained killer. Her lips peeled back from her small fangs, her eyes going from blue to silver in just seconds.
“I thought Miranda got rid of him with that silly bitch she employed?”
That, I needed to pay attention to it, but as Chloe tipped back her head, she revealed something far more pressing.
Something I never wanted to see.
Max kept calling out for me, going from room to room, I was sure, but I couldn’t call out, couldn’t reply. I was frozen to the spot as I saw Chloe’s collar slide back, and on her neck was a mating mark.
She felt my attention. She would have. She was well used to feeling people stare at her, I was sure, and right now, I could see him doing just that as he stepped closer to her in my mind. She smiled, her eyes bleeding back to blue, looking pretty as a picture as her hand coyly went to the bite mark.
“Tobias gave that to me one night,” she said, her voice all soft and breathy, while mine turned to a savage growl. “He was unhinged, furious at something Lucien had told him, and then…he was just wild. He forced me down onto my knees, told me just how it was going to be, made me promise I would change, and then…”
She looked like she was divulging a delicious secret to a friend, her enjoyment bubbling over, ready to infect others.
It infected me, all right, just not with joy.
If her words, and Mum’s, were like punches to my ribs, these were the short, sharp stabs of a knife into my side.
“When I begged his forgiveness, when tears streamed out of my eyes and I swore I’d change, that’s when he lifted me up.”
This was the point where her glittery mask slipped, replaced instead with something I could understand much more easily. Her eyes went wide, a sense of wonder, of need, of pain filling them—of longing, sweet, sweet, vicious longing. It suffused her face and made her look more radiant than any filter could.
“He made me feel more pain, more pleasure than any man had a right to. He broke me open like an egg, and then when I sat there in pieces at his feet, he made me his.”
Her fingers traced the mark on her neck, a familiar shiver going through her before she plucked at the silver collar around her neck.
“He collared me that night, claiming me on every level. That’s what this is.” She stared at me, willing me to see it. “They call it an eternity collar. It’s stainless steel, so it’s almost impossible to get off without the key, and he’s the only one who has it. He made sure when I went out into the world, everyone knew I was his.”
All of the bitchiness seemed to have bled away, instead leaving a naked and vulnerable omega standing before me, confessing to the bond she shared with her true mate.
“Sage?”
My head jerked up, and so did Chloe’s, as Max came downstairs. He wasn’t wearing his glasses, so he didn’t see her, not until he sucked in a breath. His frown cut through me, another knife blade, but my debasement wasn’t over.
The lock on the front door beeped, just as my phone starting ringing again, the two sounds loud and getting louder in my head. She turned then, her cheeks flushing as the door opened to reveal…
This was the thing about being a survivor of abuse, verbal, physical, or sexual—it created fault lines inside you, leaving you living in a potential earthquake zone, while the adult children of healthy families lived in quake free areas. You might get a whole lot better at weathering the tremors, time, healing, help, strategies helping you to not be devastated each time, but there were some things that would still slam into you, creating a seismic shift that tore what you thought was solid ground out from under you, swallowing you whole.
A conscious part of my mind knew what I needed to do. I had to stick around, ask questions, push the issue until every damn detail was exposed, and then work out what I needed to do.
That wasn’t what happened.
A low growl from me had Chloe’s gaze snapping back to me, making Max run down the stairs now as he realised what was going on. My claws raked across those beautiful benches, leaving great rents behind, but that wasn’t all. Fur prickled across my skin as I heard shouts and cries, but I couldn’t pay any attention to any of them, not while my body burned. Every muscle was torn, every bone broken, as she came.
Then there I was, panting, standing on four paws, not two feet, and all that adrenalin pumping through me? It shrieked its siren song at me, telling me torun, run, run.