Page 105 of Defiant Beta

He nods and turns to examine the bed.

After a moment, I refocus on the stained sheets, biting my lip as a sudden urge sneaks up on me. Not to kiss him or engage inany intimate behavior. My gaze shifts to his neck and the tattoos hiding a pain I wouldn’t have known if he hadn’t told me.

“Have you ever had a thought that…” I swallow my words as I ask myself what I’m doing.

“A thought that what?” Levi’s voice is quiet but serious.

I dart a rapid glance at him, wanting to confirm if I’m making a monumental fuck-up of a decision by saying something I shouldn’t. He doesn’t seem like the type to laugh in someone's face.

I hope.

“It stays between us,” he adds. “Anything you say. I won’t tell anyone.”

“You, Xavier, and Vincent are a pack, though.”

“We are,” he confirms.

I slowly nod. “Who shares secrets after sex?”

“We’re pack and we’re close, but we don’t sleep together. Any whispering of secrets happens when we’ve gotten shitfaced and someone has fallen over or walked into a wall.”

“You’re joking.”

“Not about the sleeping together or walking into a wall while shitfaced. Ask Xavier about it.”

“Have you had a thought that doesn’t feel like you?”

I’m still not sure if I want to tell him what drove me to sleep behind a couch like a madwoman. I’m afraid that insidious thought is still in my mind, waiting to sneak up on me.

“Once. A long time ago.” He gives me a long, searching look.

“Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Trying to decide how much to tell you.”

Same.

“About?”

“Me.”

When he refocuses on the disgusting bed, I figure the answer is nothing.

“I was living in Michigan with my parents when they died on a boat trip when I was thirteen. I had an uncle in some distant city I’d never met, and social workers decided that was where they’d send me.”

From his reluctance to tell me this at all, I gauge one thing. “I’m going to assume things didn’t work out well.”

From the belt marks on his back and the scars on his body, things turned out fucking terribly.

His lip curls in a smile, but his eyes are flat. “My uncle was a piece of shit who drank all the money the state handed him to raise me. Once he was through beating the shit out of me and using me as a human ashtray, he took off one night, and pretty much left me to starve in his filthy house. My parents likely cut him out of all our lives for good reason.”

Those small, round burns suddenly make sense. “What a fuckhead.”

A hint of a smile filters across his gaze, and he raises an eyebrow. “Fuckhead?”

I shrug. “It works. What’d you do?”

“Didn’t tell anyone he’d left. I was still underage and could only get a weekend job, so I worked as much as I could. Went to school. Raised myself.”

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