Page 96 of Rut Bar

Anthony shrugs. “Like I said, I’m not really involved, but I have a lot of uncles and cousins. I saw how hard it was on my mom for my father to be in the family business. The long out-of-town trips. The two a.m. phone calls. Coming home bleeding. The drinking to deal with it all. The prison stints some of my uncles and cousins have done. That wasn’t the sort of life I wanted.”

I tug the too-long sleeves down to cover my hands and wrap my arms around my legs, then lean against his side. He’s tense for a minute until he shifts and his arm comes around my shoulders, hugging me closer. The fire snaps and pops from a log breaking. Smoke and embers fly up with a whoosh.

“We’re not responsible for what our families do,” I say, thinking about my own family. The bottle slowly makes its way back around and I drain the last of it, running my thumbnail along the edge where the label is peeling off the glass. “You’re not your dad.”

“Thanks, baby.” He sighs, his fingers squeezing me as if he’s scared I’ll get up and walk away although that’s the furthest thing from my mind right now. There’s nowhere I’d rather be.

“It’s hard to talk about him, you know?” Anthony says. “I loved him and I miss him, but… I’m also glad he’s gone. He put my mom through hell. Sometimes I’d hear them fighting in the night. My mom started drinking a lot when she found out about his mistress. That’s how it is for them, you know? Live hard and party harder because you never know when there’s a bullet with your name on it.”

I dig my nail into the adhesive label and scratch, lost in thoughts I’ve never been able to outrun. “It’s not easy. You never stop loving them, no matter how shitty they are.”

“Sounds like you know that from experience,” Anthony says. It’s a statement, not a question. But the question is there. He wants to know more, but he’s not pushing. He respects the boundary I set when we were playing truth or dare.

We sit like that, nobody saying anything, for a while. Only the sound of the waves breaking on the surf and the bonfire surrounding us. Here, on this empty, dark beach, it’s easy to pretend that we’re the only ones in the world right now.

A lump of emotion and swallowed words lodge in my throat and I almost stop there, but the words want to be said. I’m tired of carrying so much emotional baggage with me all the time. If these men want me, really want me and not just the omega side of me, then they need to know me. They can’t do that if I keep them at arm's reach.

Speaking up is scary, though. It takes me a moment to gather the courage and find the words. I stop and start three times, but none of them rush me. Instead, they wait.

“When I was a kid, my mom got sick. Ovarian cancer. It was so fast… It’s not like she was sick for long before they finally figured it out. A few weeks of abdominal pain and no appetite and a general sense that something was very wrong. The doctors kept telling her she was fine. It was anxiety. She was in her late forties and fit and healthy. Then she started having issues with her cycle. She was bleeding, and we had to buy the pads and special underwear that betas use. They said it could be the start of early menopause, because she only had one kid and she had me later in life. Omegas have a higher risk for cancer if they don’t have a lot of kids or if they wait too long, did you know that? It’s fucked up is what it is. As if we’re only good for breeding and if we don’t do that, then we get sick like it’s some sort of cosmic punishment.”

I scoff and take a minute before continuing. “When she finally got diagnosed, it had already spread. She had surgery and did chemo, but within a year she was gone. I was eight. My dad couldn’t handle losing her. He tried, but… he didn’t know how to be an alpha without his omega and they’d never found any other packmates, I guess. If he’d had more support, he’d still be here. He hanged himself. A social worker picked me up from school and then my grandparents came down from their place in the mountains and took me home with them the next day.”

Talking about my grandparents brings up bittersweet memories. I was angry and confused, but they were patient. Things settled, and then it was good for a while, though my whole life had been turned upside down. New guardians, new school, new house, new friends. But my grandpa taught me how to gut worms on the fishing hook and my grandma taught me how to make pie crust from scratch. They fed me, clothed me, loved me, and made everything seem like it was going to be okay.

And it was. Until it wasn’t.

“They were old,” I continue. “My grandparents were betas, and they didn’t think they could have kids until they had my dad by accident and he’d had me later in life. My grandma got Alzheimer’s and had to go live in a special home, so then it was me and grandpa for a bit. She got pneumonia that winter and passed. He died a month after her, same as my parents. His body just… gave out without her to keep him there. I was fourteen by then.” The strangeness of being orphaned not only once, but twice, isn’t lost on me.

“What happened after they died?” Jamie asks, his voice soft.

“My parent’s life insurance had been put into a trust for me. My mom’s brother took me in for a while. He lives in LA with his partner. But they went away a lot on business trips. I told them I was old enough to stay home alone as long as they left me money for pizza and food. I went wild with no adults around to supervise me. I was fourteen and angry. I started getting into trouble. Partying with older kids. Not doing homework. Failing tests. Skipping school and getting into fights.”

“I bet you were a spitfire,” Anthony says, chuckling. “I wish I’d known you then. We could have been bad together. I used to skip my afternoon classes to smoke behind the dumpsters or hang out with the other kids. We liked to ditch after lunch to hang out in the woods behind the school. Took them forever to put up a fence, not that it stopped us from hopping it.”

The image of a young, less tattooed Anthony hopping a fence to smoke and shoot the shit in the woods behind his high school makes me smile. If I’d known him when we were teenagers, we would have absolutely gotten into the worst kind of trouble together.

“There was this asshole named Kurt who sat behind me in my homeroom class,” I tell them. “He’d tease me every single day. The sort of elementary school bullshit that a ninth grader should have left behind a long time ago. I don’t remember what it was he said, but one day I’d had enough. I was walking to first period, and he was behind me and bothering me again. In the middle of the crowded hallway, I turned around and backhanded him. You should have seen his face. He was so shocked. Like he’d thought he could do whatever he wanted to me and because I was a girl and an omega, I’d take it.”

I draw shapes in the sand as I think of the day that changed everything. “I wish I’d waited until we were alone and there weren’t any witnesses because somebody told on me. When the office yanked me out of second period and called my uncle, they couldn’t get a hold of him. He was in Tokyo closing some big merger. I’d been alone for two weeks at that point. That’s when they put me in foster care.”

My bittersweet reminiscence fades, leaving me feeling nothing at all. There was nothing sweet about foster care. The overcrowded three-bedroom house, the couple who treated us like breathing paychecks and got annoyed whenever we were too loud or hungry or needed anything at all. Having to throw all of your clothes in a trash bag when it was time to move. They don’t give you a suitcase. Only a thin, white plastic trash bag that you can’t stuff too full or it’ll break and spill all of your clothes in the dirty street. We were the kids who didn’t fit anywhere. The ones nobody wanted.

“Foster care was horrible.” There are no words to adequately describe it. If I wasn’t dodging the leers and wandering hands of my foster mother’s current boyfriend of the month, I was avoiding the other kids. Nobody adopts teenagers. Unless your parent gets out of prison or sobers up and comes to get you, you’re aging out of the program.

“Being a teenage girl in foster care was hard enough, but being an omega too? Being an omega in foster care was hell. Alphas think you’re fair game.” More than one alpha thought he could get me alone and take whatever he wanted. Pin me down. Make me too scared to scream. They quickly learned that my elbows are sharp and I’m not afraid to knee them in the groin and run. I’m small but fast.

“Names,” Anthony growls.

“Hmm?” I ask, distracted by all of my dark memories and bitter thoughts.

“Give me a list of names. I have connections, remember? I want the names of everyone who ever hurt you.”

I twist my neck to look up at him, my chin perched on his shoulder. He’s deadly serious. Anthony scowls at the fire as if it’s personally offended him. The sight makes me smile. “Are you going to kill my enemies for me?”

The idea shouldn’t amuse me. Shouldn’t make me smile. Make my stomach flutter. But it does. And I decide at that moment that I refuse to feel guilty for it. Stretching, I press a kiss to his cheek and enjoy the way he squeezes me tighter to keep me from pulling away.

“The next alpha who hurts you is going to get a lot more than a broken face,” he promises darkly.

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