Page 31 of Rejected Plus-Size Mate

My voice fails. I stare at the wall so hard, it looks like a black portal.

Swallow me. Get me the fuck out of here.

“What, Kyle?”

I keep looking at the wall. I can’t look at her.

“I beat both of them half to death. I swaggered out of that place with blood on my knuckles and a big grin on my face.”

Now I do look at her. I can tell she’s shocked, maybe even scared.

“My pockets were full of cash, and with the attendant down, we cleaned the place out. Anything we could load into our trucks. We even stole as much fuel as we could.”

“Fuck.”

I shrug. “This is how they operate. But I want you to know I had no choice. Even if I wanted to pull out of the mission at that point, I couldn’t. They would have hunted me down if I didn’t complete the test.”

“What happens if you don’t complete the test?”

I look away again. I can’t tell this part of the story while I’m looking at her.

“A young guy came in just before me. He said he was tough, that he wanted in. They took him to a bar late at night to test him. There were a few patrons there. Our guys wanted some liquor, they were ready to hit it. At the last moment, he chickened out.”

I pause for a breath.

“Apparently… there was a family in there. He refused to hurt them—to hurt anyone, really.”

“What happened to him?” Leslie asks. I can tell by her voice that she already has a pretty good idea.

I close my eyes briefly, trying to get the sounds out of my mind. I can’t. I can hear the growls, the excited barking… and the screaming. So much screaming.

“After they hit the bar and slaughtered everyone, anyway, they dragged him back to camp. They put him in a ring of wolves. One by one, they went in to fight him. They just kept going. Everyone was shifting back and forth, laughing and joking. Everyone was drunk or high or both. Eventually, the young guy was so injured, he couldn’t maintain his wolf shape.”

I look up at Leslie, and my eyes are burning with tears I thought I’d never shed.

“They tore him apart, Leslie. Every wolf in the pack pounced at once, and they tore him to fucking pieces.”

“Oh, Kyle,” she gasps, lurching forward to wrap her arms around me.

The comfort, the release, is so extreme that a wave of emotion floods through me, so intense that it hurts. Tears pourdown my cheeks, and I just let Leslie hold me, keeping my arms wrapped around her soft waist as I bury my head in her hair.

“It’s okay now,” she says, leaning back to look into my eyes and stroke my cheek. “You’re safe. They can’t hurt you anymore.”

I nod slowly, determined not to tell her anymore. That wasn’t even the worst or most violent thing I saw while I was there. That ugliness can stay buried for eternity. There’s something else inside me that’s begging to get out, though.

“The thing is, Leslie, not all of them are bad. Some of them, yeah, evil to the marrow. They enjoy pain. Those are true monsters that have burned out their own emotions and only get relief from causing others harm. But some of them…”

“Go on, honey,” she says, rubbing my shoulders. “Keep going.”

“Some of them are just lost,” I say, my voice catching in my throat.

No one knows what it means to be lost like I do. I identified with those people. Most of them are exactly like me. So violated by darkness, at such a young age, it’s almost impossible to keep hope alive. Nothing to live for, nothing to fight for, just following the path of least pain every day.

But I had Leslie. It was the only thing that kept me sane.

“It must have been so hard for you,” she says softly. “I can’t imagine. One thing I don’t understand, though… why would Bailey put one of his own pack members in this situation? Why would he willingly traumatize you like that?”

I blink hard, shaking my head. A great, deep cavern is opening at my feet. I didn’t intend to strip down this hard. I never wanted to tell her everything.

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