Page 31 of Brutal Alpha Bully

“You should be grateful Xeran didn’t hear that, Winward. If I were you, I’d take stock of Seraphina’s friends and make sure you don’t get on their bad side. You got that?”

My mother’s mouth drops open, and she looks between Soren and me, clearly trying to understand this situation. I hardly understand it myself. After all, Soren happily played along with bullying me in high school, laughing at all the jokes and cutting his eyes to me gleefully to see my embarrassment.

And now here he is, defending me in the middle of the grocery store.

Did Xerantellhim to keep an eye out for me? What did Xeran say to make Soren behave like this? My heart skips in my chest when I think about that conversation, about how the guys have been training up at the house.

They know I’m there. Lachlan and Felix, too. What has Xeran been telling them?

“Understood,” my mother says, lowering her eyes and nodding once before pushing the cart away quickly. My heart squeezes like it always does, wanting to apologize, to reach out to her and make her feel better.

Another sign of how it was so often me taking care of her, instead of the other way around.

“Come on,” I mutter, only thinking of Nora at home now and feeling silly for ever wanting to leave the house, leave her there. “Let’s go.”

“You got everything you needed?” Soren asks, his gaze flitting between the cart and me.

I only nod, and we head for the front where I make quick work at the self-checkout and zip to the car.

“Here,” I say, tossing him the keys, suddenly feeling sorry for what I put him through on the way down here. “You can drive.”

I hear him mutter something that may or may not sound like, “Thank the gods.”

***

“Where the fuck were you?”

Xeran is there the second I walk through the door, the rage on his face quickly turning to confusion when he sees Soren walk in after me, shouldering all the shopping bags.

After that interaction with my mother, I feel empty. Hollow.

“She wanted to go to the store,” Soren says. “Asked me to come with her since you weren’t here.”

Xeran’s shoulders relax. “Oh. Well, next time, I’ll come with you.”

“Okay,” I say, bending down to empty the bags, not meeting his eyes. The room goes silent, and I can only imagine the two men exchanging a look.

“I’ll see you later,” Soren says, and a moment later, I hear the door close.

I’m putting a container of oatmeal in the cabinet when I feel Xeran’s presence behind me. Closing my eyes, I resist the urge to rest my heated forehead against the cool wood of the cupboard door. My entire body pulls toward him, yearns for his touch, and at this point, it’s starting to be overwhelming.

“Seraphina, what’s going on?”

There’s not a part of me that actually thinks I’m going to tell him the truth, but then I do, the words falling out of me like dominoes. I turn around and face him, hands bracing on the counter behind me, and when I meet his eyes, I’m horrified to discover there are tears welling in mine.

I tell him about my mother calling me a whore in the grocery store. About the novel experience of not being mocked, followed, or harassed while getting my groceries. I tell him about my brother being the one to drag me from the house, and my mother doing nothing to stop it.

For the next half hour, I tell him about what it was like to live on that street with Nora, to know that everyone treated her differently because ofme. How living with that made me feel like absolute scum. How the only thing I’ve ever wanted for her was to live free of the weight of her family.

And finally, when all the words are out of me, I’m left heaving, my chest rising and falling as he and I stare at each other in the kitchen.

Then Xeran does something I don’t expect.

He steps forward, wraps his arms around me, and pulls me into a hug.

The moment he touches me, the sadness inside me rises to the surface, and I cry into his shirt, my body shaking as he holds me against him. I realize I’veneverbeen held like this before. Not when I was a kid, and certainly not after I became a single mother.

And that realization only makes me cry harder.

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