Page 94 of Running on Empty

“For me?” she asked, nodding to Jack.

“Everything for you. I’ll make the whole world burn for you to warm your hands by, if that’s what you want.”

Her eyebrow cocked upwards at our gravelly voice because she knew. Ash hadn’t kept us apart just because I didn’t meet Mum’s neat little idea of what an appropriate mate was. I liked to play with my food, a lot if I was being honest.

And she was about to find out just how much.

“Stevie.” Our eyes jerked up to see Ash moving forward, ever the voice of reason. “You don’t have to do this. We can… eradicate Jack, make it so that no one else hurts you ever.”

But sometimes being rational doesn’t help you at all. We weren’t computers to be programmed. We were wolves that would no longer tolerate the incursions into our territory and we were about to deal with the most current threat.

“And where would be the fun in that?” Stevie replied, so I slapped my knife into her hand.

I’d cut any cunt that dared to come close to her, but the reason why she was perfect for every single one of us was because she had a dark side to her, just like her alphas, and right now she paced forward, that heart shaped arse swaying, as she approached her attacker.

Chapter55

In some ways this was an echo of the night I was raped. I was naked in a room full of alphas again, true, but as my hand tightened around the knife blade, I knew this felt entirely different. A dark stain appeared on Jack’s groin, growing bigger and bigger before piss spattered on the ground. The men, my men, all laughed at that. All except Ash. He moved then, knowing better than to get between me and my prey, but enough to try and draw my attention away.

“There’s no coming back from this. It’s not a hot, in the moment thing, like it was with the others. Jack is incapacitated, powerless. This is torture.”

He was trying hard to keep the judgement out of his voice and he almost succeeded, making me wonder how he was with Ronan.

“And what do you think, Jax?” I asked in a low purr of a voice.

“Ronan has the right of it,” he said, edging away from Ash. “It’s your choice, always. I’m done taking them away from you, but…” Something rose and coloured his gaze, and it wasn’t an entirely happy thing. “But doing this, it changes you. If you want Jack to die screaming, Ronan can do that. He’d love to. You could walk away, knowing it was done or…?”

Or I could do the job myself.

In some ways, Ash got what he wanted. I stopped where I was, knife hanging in my grip, my eyes dropping down to the floor, because it was here, now, that I finally let myself feel everything I’d stuffed down.

“I went to the club with the Spencers to drink, to get stoned and to get laid.” My voice sounded like ashes as I spoke, it feeling like they coated the floor, stifling all other sounds. “In a lot of ways I wanted everything that went on that night.”

My eyes flicked up, ignoring Jax’s or Ronan’s or Ash’s, just staring into Jack’s. Because somehow I needed him to understand.

“I wanted to get outside my own head, to just… let go of all the pain I felt the moment I was awake. When I was drunk, fucked up, I didn’t feel it, that fucking persistent ache. Like a tooth that needs pulling, but I could never bring myself to yank it out.”

I moved slowly, edging closer until I was within reaching distance of Jack, his hands straining against his bonds, as if he wanted to do just that.

“So if you just asked if I was up for taking Rush, maybe I would’ve said yes. Maybe everything that happened the moment you gave me that tequila laced with the drug, maybe it would’ve been just what I wanted.”

My hand shot out then, grabbing Jack around the throat, my claws pricking his skin.

“But you didn’t want anyone that was willing, not really.” He tried to respond, but my fingers dug deeper, choking off all and any replies. It wasn’t time for him to take. He’d had his chance, and now it was mine. “The degradation of forcing me to go into a kind of heat was what got you hard, I know that now.”

My alphas stepped closer, creating an intimate little circle around me as I spoke my truth.

“Because you laughed when I started to pull my clothes off, even as my wolf whined inside my head, making clear something was wrong. And you didn’t help me when I was stripped bare, wracked by sensations I had no business feeling. I even asked you too.”

The hilt of the knife felt like it was leaving an impression in my palm due to the tightness of my grip.

“Help me…” My voice now mimicked the pathetic tone I’d used then, but my knife moved as soon as I said the words, the edge of the blade leaving a shallow cut across Jack’s chest, forcing him to whine the same words. “I don’t know what’s going on.”

I focused on the blood welling up on Jack’s chest, not the man. He was broken down into compartments, just like he’d done to me. He’d focused on the holes he could fill, but I was on the ones I could create.

“I fucking begged you to tell me what the hell was going on, but you just laughed.” My heart felt like it beat too hard in my ears, thud, thud, thudding like a bass drum. “You pushed your thumb into my mouth, grinning when I sucked on it, then jerked it free, forcing me down onto my knees.”

Ash had called for clear heads, but at the sound of his growl and the others’, I don’t know if he possessed that himself anymore.

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