Page 24 of Brutal Alpha

“You shouldn’t have done it.”

“What, save your life?” I was clinging to the last scrap of my teasing smile. “Someone got up on the wrong side of the chair this morning.”

“You shouldn’t have stormed off in the middle of the fucking night, alone,” he said. His hands were balled into fists at his sides as he loomed over me, stormy and demanding.

“Ah, that.”

“Did you even think for a second how stupid that was?” he continued. “We all knew Arbor was rounding up stray females.”

I had no response for him. I had no defense for what I’d done, besides that I’d simply had no other option. I hated how much I had to crane my neck to meet his eye from my sickbed. It had taken him all of two minutes since waking up to make me feel small and weak and awful: it must be a new record.

“Tell me what the hell else I was supposed to do,” I said, hating that my voice came out breathy and trembling. If he noticed I was upset, he didn’t show it, merely continued lecturing me as though I was an unruly child who had stayed up past her bedtime.

“You were supposed to come back to the house and let me take you home in the morning.”

“After you knotted me and left me alone in the dark?” I shot back. Anger was beginning to course through my veins, and I was so grateful for it. “I was just supposed to come down to breakfast and joke around with the guys and let you drive me home?”

“Yes,” he said, stone-faced. I couldn’t stand that he was trying to answer with just one word to escape this situation, butif he wasn’t going to speak, then he was going to get a piece of my mind.

“I’m not one of your flings, Ethan. You can’t make me feel stupid and small and like I don’t deserve basic fucking decency,” I continued, and that must have struck a nerve.

“You don’t know anything about—”

“About how you treat the women you fuck? I think I do.”

We could have been back beneath the old oak, half-naked and awkward in the dark. He could hardly look at me then, and he could hardly look at me now.

“That’s not—that was different, and you know it,” he said, and I was so done with him telling me what I did and didn’t know.

“How so?” I needled. “Please, wise Alpha, enlighten me.”

“None of those women ever expected anything from me. They were adult enough to know when sex is just sex. None of them ever claimed we were mates.”

I never wanted to hear the word mate again. Every time it came out of his mouth it was to deny the bond I could feel like another limb. Sure, it wasn’t a limb I wanted, but it was there all the same, and every fresh rejection was a fresh hurt.

“Trust me,” I said. “I regret bringing that up.”

“That’s what you regret?” he repeated, incredulous. “I regret this whole fucking mess.”

“Why did you even come after me, then?” I cried. I wanted this to be over, I wanted to stick the knife in and twist until it hurt too much for either of us to continue. “You clearly don’t want me, and it would’ve surely saved you a whole lot of hassle.”

“You know why I came after you,” Ethan insisted, and I could have screamed. I didn’t know anything about the way his mind worked; nothing about the sad, unbending metal clockwork of his mind was even close to comprehensible to me.

“Wouldn’t it be easier for you if I disappeared off to the mainland to live in a nice cage and never bothered you again?” I asked, just to see him flinch. “Wouldn’t it be easier than having to acknowledge you were ever weak?”

“Don’t joke about that,” he growled through gritted teeth.

“Oh, I am not joking.”

“You really think I want that?”

“Nothing you’ve said has ever indicated otherwise.”

Ethan lurched forward, his hands landing heavily on the bed on either side of my body, his face close to mine and his voice thick with Alpha authority.

“I risked my life, the safety of my whole Pack, to save you from your own stupid fucking decisions,” he hissed. For all our disagreements over the years, he’d never tried to use his authority to shut me down, but he was trying now. He wanted me to shut up, but I’d never done what he wanted me to. It was hard to keep my head up, to not bow and submit, but he wasn’t my Alpha, he was my mate, and that made us equal.

“You just told me you regretted it,” I pointed out, and something that might have been remorse flickered across his expression. When he next spoke, the authority was gone, and he only sounded tired.

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