Page 38 of Scapegoat

“They did.”

I croaked that out, all of it, everything I’d been keeping tamped down coming rushing up and choking me, because that’s what happened when I talked to Jamie. We’d trauma-bonded, that’s how she explained it, tied tight by links of a pain that never stopped hurting, especially now. It throbbed like an exposed nerve, every breath making me ache so damn fiercely, it was no wonder a tear, then another, then a whole lot more, started to stream down my face.

“Damn them…” I growled. “Damn them! I liked Billy’s. I had a good job there and he kept his hands to himself—”

“That’s not enough of a reason to stay if you don’t want to,” she told me. “Look, I’m about eight hours away. Stay inside, lock your doors and windows and sit tight. I’m coming, kid. I’m coming.”

That made me feel better for as long as it took for her to end the call. But once the phone went dead? It felt like I did too. I was empty and full, all at the same time, any pleasure I got from doing a job well, making food that people appreciated, shoved out of the way to make room for the reality to hit me again.

They’d chosen Anna. No matter what had happened between us, or what was going on before then, that day they’d chosen her. They were bound together in ways that could not be broken, that’s what my mother had insisted, Atlas’ mark on Anna overruling anything he’d done to me. They were my sister’s mates and she needed to call them back to her side.

So why did I slide down the wall of my cottage, sobbing into my arms the quiet, choked back kinds of sobs only kids with brutal mothers like mine learned? Why did I cry like my heart was fucking breaking? And why, amongst the sounds of the wind outside and the far-off bleat of sheep, why did the crystal clear song of one wolf, then of three, pierce the night?

Chapter 22

Xavier

She’d been just here.

Kai had just been fucking here but she’d slipped from my grip.

I flexed my fingers, still able to feel the warmth of her skin on the pads of my fingertips, because my hand had heated up until it was almost unbearable, because… I hadn’t wanted to listen to her. Everything in me, man and wolf demanded I haul her close, protect her from the whole damn world.

But.

That scent of roses that always hung around her, it’d grown sharp, sour, like the flowers were being charred slowly over an open fire when she’d heard me, when she’d seen me. The smell of her pain. It’d made it hard to take a full breath in and I… I was the one that caused it. I just stared at the empty road, her car having disappeared, gone to god knows where, and my brothers, they just stared after her too.

“Fuck…” Jay muttered and when he turned to me, his eyes blazed bright silver. “Fuck!” He paced back and forth, raking his hands through his hair. “We have to go after her. We have to—”

“Tell her.”

Atlas was never one for flapping his gums, but since that day? He’d dropped down, down, down into a strange kind of darkness, one that was still and silent as a stone. So when he said, did anything, we paid attention, and both Jay and I stared at him now.

“We have to tell her what happened. If she…” His voice broke and he dug around in his jacket pockets, both of us screwing up our noses when he pulled out a packet of cigarettes. He lit one of the stinking things, and I saw his hands shaking as he took a long drag, but he couldn’t look at us until he had. “If we tell her and she still doesn’t want us, well…”

And just like that, our brother stumbled onto the one thing none of us wanted to talk about. We only discussed how we’d get her back, not if.

I looked up and down the road, taking in what little there was of the town in one glance. The place was small, little more than a pub, a supermarket and a truck stop.

“She can’t live far from here if she works at the truck stop,” I said.

“And not in one of the houses,” Jay said. There were a few streets of residences on either side of the main road, but the three of us could sight each one of them with little effort. “I didn’t catch scent of her on the street, not until we walked into the truck stop.”

“That way.” Atlas stabbed a finger at the road in front of us in the direction Kai had left, the cigarette trailing smoke into the air. “This area is almost all farmland. She must be renting a place somewhere out there.”

“So, what, we find her and explain?” I said. The plan had seemed like a sound one, right up until I saw the horror on her face, the pain. And I fucking knew why. We carried around a burden of our own.

That day, two years ago, we’d been riding a high, having proved ourselves to the alphas, told we’d been accepted as their heirs. The whole town had been cheering us on, but it meant nothing without her.

Kai.

When Abigail had pushed her way forward, a scared looking Anna in her grip, I’d braced myself for a scene, for the woman to throw one of her daughters at us, when all we wanted was Kai. For her to scream something fucking insane about Anna being our fated mate, our omega.

I thought I knew what to do.

But then that scent.

Sweet as roses, my mouth watering, my body hard, coming to complete attention as I stared. Anna was just a fucking kid. The same annoying one who tried to push herself forward while she pushed her sister out of the way, the one that tried to demand our attention like it was her right.

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