Page 106 of Scapegoat

“Raise your chin, just this once,” she told Dad.

“We’ve gotta go!” Jayden shouted. “We need to find him.”

“Too late…”

Atlas sounded like a ghost, because somehow he knew. Dad raised his chin up, his eyes finally turning silver, the wolf looking out at this fucking monster of a woman as well as the man. They knew they were beaten, but they wouldn’t be cowed by her, not in this last moment. I saw the man he had been, the one who’d taught me how to kick a footy and shave without cutting yourself and what to do if you did. I saw my father, right before Abigail’s claws struck out and ended him.

We jerked back from the phone, not able to watch our dad bleed out, but we heard the sounds. People die so slowly, it seemed, when their throats are ripped out. The spurts of blood, the strangled cries, then gurgles. The sorts of noises that stay with you, that haunt you at night when you close your eyes.

“Now you see what happens if people don’t do as I tell them,” Abigail said, but I barely saw her, my vision layered over with a thick red haze. “Kaia will reject you. She’ll have to, and then you will become my Anna’s mates.”

She hugged Anna closer, and so she didn’t get to see the fear in the girl’s eyes. It was one thing to be built up as something precious by her mother all the time, but it seemed like it was only now she really understood what her mother was like. Blood stained the girl’s top as Abigail wrapped her arm around her daughter. Anna looked down at the blood stains there, getting paler by the moment.

“Doesn’t fucking matter if she does,” I growled, fixing her with my stare. She might be able to sway everyone else around her, but not us. “We will come for Kai and we won’t stop until she’s safe.”

“Then come and find what’s left of her.” Abigail smirked. “She’s going through her first heat locked up in a cage and I don’t think it’ll take her long to break. She’ll reject you to escape the pain and then I’ll get rid of the little bitch, like I should’ve done when she was born.”

I stared at Anna, not Abigail, willing her, begging her mentally to see me, hear what her mother was saying and see the insanity in it.

“Whatever you do to our mate, we’ll do three-fold to you. You’ll die long after you’ve screamed that you want to.”

I ended the call then, not wanting to indulge the fucking bitch one more moment.

“I’m driving,” Jay said, snapping his fingers. “You guys are pussies.”

Chapter 60

I could only hide down in the dark for so long. This wasn’t like when I was a kid. I couldn’t crawl into my cupboard, away from my mother’s burning eyes, and avoid her wrath. She wasn’t standing over me, berating me for being a piece of shit now. No, she’d made sure there was no escape.

The guys had said I was close to being in heat, hence their over the top protectiveness, but the tide that was now swelling in my blood was unnaturally strong, because it had been forced to rise. It came in waves, of sweat saturating my skin, of slick seeping between my legs, my womb contracting so hard I went to scream, but no sound came out. The wolf growled, then jumped to her feet, howling.

To be let out, though what the hell she’d do in the cage, I didn’t know. To be free. To fight back, rend my mother’s flesh from my bones, my mind grabbed on that for a second, but quickly lost it. I couldn’t hold onto anger here. Lust sizzled in my blood, setting me alight more as every second passed. My nipples felt like they were being rubbed raw by my bra until I ripped it off, the lips of my cunt swollen and rubbing against each other.

But not enough.

I felt like I was teetering on the edge of orgasm, ready to jump off, but rather than being a perfect swan dive, I was being shoved towards the edge with sharp spears.

I didn’t want this.

This wasn’t the way it was supposed to go, but when it turned out this way, I wasn’t surprised. Mum had always tried to take every fucking thing from me, and even when I’d made myself small and docile and obedient, that wasn’t enough.

So why bother?

My eyes flicked open.

I couldn’t see the world, see the room or this cage, even as my hands wrapped around the bars and shook them. A terrible growl built up in my lungs, getting louder, bigger, right as Mum opened the door.

“What a mess you are, Kaia.”

When I was a little kid, I’d blithely moved around the world, moved by my own instincts, just enjoying the sights and the smells and sensations, like most kids. And Mum’s disgust would catch me off guard every time. The narrowing of her eyes when she saw a stain on my dress. The way her fingers would shrink back from hair made stringy by sweat as I played wild with the other kids. Her terse words would recast what was the innate sense I had of myself as something else, something repellent. I’d cry often, back then, and people would turn to see what the fuss was. That would make Mum even more angry, to be forced to put Anna down and make a show of comforting me, when she never wanted to do that.

And then at home she’d show me the error of my ways.

But, right now, I saw that same disgust, that same revulsion and while the learned responses she’d ingrained into me made me want to answer that with shame, I didn’t. The bars shook with my rage, not just the one she inspired now, but all of it that I had kept locked away. I snarled at her, the wolf coming closer and closer to the surface, the lock creaking as my animal lent me her strength.

But Mum didn’t look cowed for a second.

“Always making such a fuss, Kaia.” The way she looked at me made me feel like I was less than a pile of shit she’d accidentally stepped in. “Anna?”

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