Page 11 of Running on Empty

“Fuck off!” His roar should’ve terrified me, but it didn’t, not even as he turned his head, fangs bared, towards his brother. “Get the fuck out, Ash!” He moved then, forming a barrier between me and the other alpha.

The blanket was getting heavier and heavier as the water saturated it, and the second-hand warmth was starting to erode the chill in my bones, but I knew that I needed more. I needed him, needed this, needed someone to stand between me and the world because… It hurt. Everything hurt. My eyes fell closed but that didn’t even help, because then visions of everything I’d done started rising, rising, until he turned around.

“I’ll get you clean.” Ronan’s voice was as gentle as his caress, just cupping my cheek in his hand. “I’ll make it so it's like they never touched you. You want that, don’t you, omega?”

I nodded sharply, not trusting myself to speak. Because if I did? I was terrified of what would come spilling out.

“I can look after you, make it all better. Just let me do that, please, Stevie.”

He couldn’t; I knew that. It’d been the harshest lesson I’d learned when I was a kid, because the Kelly household, for all it was a haven, was really just a place I escaped to. It wasn’t the reality I had to go back to, the one I lived in. But in that spirit, I could pretend.

My death grip on the blanket loosened and when I opened my eyes, he loomed over me, watching my face, not my body as it was revealed, and that’s where he tried to keep his focus. He grabbed the soap, staring at me as he lathered it up in his hands, his jeans, his shirt and his boots getting wet as he worked. But the first time he came to a bruise? I winced and his eyes dropped down as he stilled.

Ronan stared at the small mark on my skin like it personally offended him, his jaw muscle working as he just stood there. I wanted to pull away, to scuttle on out of the bathroom, because I was unable to decode what he was thinking. But when I went to move, he moved with me, seeming to know exactly where I was about.

“Careful now.”

This was the voice of the other side of Ronan.

Rather than the usual one full of mischief, this aspect of Ronan was as if all of the non-essential parts of his personality were stripped away. Thin, hard, sharp as a blade, it was full of warning. But of what? I squared my shoulders, ignoring the twinges when I did and went to push past him.

I decided I could shower at my place, cleanse myself of everything that had happened and then delve into my nest and forget about it all. Today was my day off and I didn’t— My train of thought was abruptly truncated as his hand slapped down on the tiles above my head, his body leaning into mine. I was shepherded back until the tiles hit my skin where I was treated to the sight of Ronan’s wolf.

“They hurt you,” he growled, low and dangerous.

“And are you going to do the same?” That flare of anger was a relief to feel, a fire that drove back everything else.

“Never,” he snapped. “Never, Stevie.” I frowned slightly, realising that he didn’t know he already had—that the three of them already had—so I just nodded. “I want to rip those cunts to pieces for doing this to you. I want to drag them in here, force them to their knees and slit their throats so you can watch their blood trickle down the drain, to make clear they won’t ever try again.” He surged closer. “I have a need to tear them apart, and then drop the pieces of them at your feet as tribute.”

I should have been terrified by what I was seeing, hearing, by the Ronan I thought I knew getting washed away by the second, and being replaced by this primal creature.

“I want that too.” Something hot and hard swelled in my chest at the thought of it. “I want everything you described. I want…” But my moment of bloodthirsty viciousness faded so quickly, other things, darker things rising up to replace it. “I want them to never be able to pull this kind of shit again.”

Because that was at the heart of the issue. I’d signed up for a night of debauchery. We could’ve had fun, the Spencers and I, teasing and testing out our limits before collapsing into a puppy pile of satisfaction.

But they couldn’t let me have that.

They didn’t want my real responses, my real needs, instead, they’d slipped whatever that drug was into my drink to manufacture what they wanted, making me into a version of myself that wouldn’t say no.

Ronan grabbed me then, yanking me into his arms and holding me tight, the water cascading down around us, so when tears leaked out of my eyes, I was the only one who knew they were there.

“They won’t, I can promise you that,” he told me, that vicious voice of his darkly reassuring. Because all that violence was directed against the men who’d hurt me and there was nothing I needed more.

Chapter7

"I’m going home,” I told Ronan after my shower. He’d cleaned me up with the clinical hands of a nurse, noting each bruise and scrape as if storing it away for later, but after I was dried off, he pushed me into his room, searching through his drawers as I held the towel around me. “I need my nest.”

He ignored me, producing an old t-shirt that was almost threadbare and pulling it over my head.

“How does that feel against your skin?” he asked, looking me over. The shirt was longer than some dresses I owned. And the cotton? It was perfectly soft and I told him that. He nodded at that, wrenching open his wardrobe and pulling a series of throw pillows out, tossing them onto the bed before scooping me up and laying me down on top of them. Water dripped from his hair as he worked to pull his covers up and tuck them around me.

“If you put on a movie and offer me popcorn…” I started to say, but he’d already grabbed a remote to turn on the flatscreen that dominated the wall at the foot of his bed, then tossed the remote to me. It was just as well he did that first, because what he did next rendered me incapable of any sort of response.

He pulled his wet shirt up and over his head and the fabric sucked at his skin, as though trying to stay put. I could appreciate that even an inanimate object might wish to hold on to, grab at, caress the body that was being revealed. He’d turned to give me his back and I saw the tattoos that spanned his shoulder blades. Long, perfectly executed wings had been drawn on his back, the tips of them brushing his perfectly formed arse, but these were no angel’s wings. The pain of getting them must’ve been intense, because they were black stippled bat’s wings, like those a devil might wear. But a moment later my appreciation of the tattooist’s fine work faded as he worked his boots and socks off, and pulled his jeans down. He towelled himself off roughly before pulling on a loose pair of basketball shorts and flopped down beside me.

“What do you want to watch?” Ronan asked me, leaning up on one elbow. I didn’t answer because my focus was all on him. I studied the finely shaped bone structure of his face: those sharp cheekbones and square jaw, those hazel eyes that seemed more green than brown right now. And it was as if I was looking at a complete stranger. “Action movie?”

“What?” I blinked, trying to clear my head.

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