Page 48 of Scapegoat

“Narcissistic parents, they don’t see kids as little tiny human beings, growing into whoever they’re gonna be. They don’t see anyone else as a fully-fledged human being, other than themselves. Other people exist to either reinforce the narcissist’s sense of self, or have to be obliterated because they don’t. The favoured one, the one the narcissist loves, becomes the golden child and the other?”

My fingers traced the seam of my jeans.

“They’re the one who complies or rebels or a combination of both, because nothing they do is right. Their best efforts are criticised, torn down, because subconsciously the narcissist is irritated by their non-preferred child succeeding at anything. And when the kid rebels? Well, that just confirms everything the narcissist has been pushing all along. That child becomes the scapegoat, the receptacle of all of the family’s sins. The dishes weren’t done? Her fault. They were done without even being asked to do them? Well, they weren’t put away, or they weren’t done well enough, or there’s more dirty dishes in the sink again, so why weren’t they done?”

I went rigid right then, my heart beating way too fast.

“I can’t claim to understand the workings of a wolf shifter’s mind,” Jamie said. “I’m just a truck driver.” I snorted at that, shooting her a sidelong look of derision. “But it seems to me that if your mum couldn’t install your sister as the alphas’ mate, fulfilling some weird script running in her head, well…”

Jamie’s eyes always contained a weird combination of compassion and patience, as if she’d seen everything before and, while she wasn’t surprised by it, she felt for you, she really did.

“Then she could make sure to destroy any chance you had at happiness, for having the temerity to fuck with her plans.”

If seeing the guys was a gut punch, this was a seismic shift. The whole world felt like it shifted and bucked underneath me, because that was the only way to explain this. My whole body shook and shivered, muscles twitching and for the first time in fucking years, I shifted without thought. I couldn’t hold it back, my wolf springing from my skin until I stood there on four paws, panting wildly. Jamie scrambled to her feet, shaking her head.

“I’ll never fucking get used to that.” But she looked me over closely. “So, wolf-Kai? What do you want?”

We yipped then, a wolfish acknowledgement that this woman was pack, even if she couldn’t take fur. She smiled, but we didn’t see that for long, taking off moments later, our paws digging into the grass. We liked the way the sheep scattered, something inside their deeply domesticated brains recognising me as a threat. But we didn’t stop to bother them, jumping over the fence and then trotting down the path, back to the main house, back to them.

The three Campbell brothers were standing on the paving near the front steps that led up to the wide veranda around the house, talking in low, heated tones; Atlas had his back to me, hands on his hips, shaking his head. Vicki looked up from where she was sitting on the veranda, deep in the Weekly Times, and frowned in confusion when she saw me. Her European heritage recognised what I was, even if her Australian brain rejected it.

“Is she yours?” she asked the guys, walking over to lean on the veranda post as I trotted up to them.

“Her?” Jayden’s dimples popped, just like they always did when he was doing something he shouldn’t. He dropped down into a squat, holding out a hand until I walked closer. The feel of his fingers in our fur, scratching at our ruff, had me sitting down, my eyes rolling back in pleasure. “Yeah, she belongs to us. She always has.”

Chapter 28

Jayden

“You fucked it up, didn’t you?” I said that the moment Atlas returned, his face like a fucking wet week. “You ballsed it up. You said the wrong fucking thing and—”

“Jesus, Jay.” Xavier frowned at me, throwing an arm up to stop me getting any closer to my other brother. I pushed against it, wanting to feel Xave struggle to hold me back. “Calm the fuck down.”

“So where is she?” I snapped at Atlas. “Where’s our fucking mate?”

“Halfway down the road by now,” he replied, without a single shift in tone. His voice was perfectly flat and so was his mood.

“What the f—!”

I lunged then, forcing Xavier to throw himself between us.

“Jay. Jay. Look at me.” But I didn’t fucking want to. I was gonna tear strips off Atlas, then I’d turn on myself. “Calm the fuck down.”

“Why?” I stared in Xavier’s eyes. “What’s the fucking point? Without her…” I was just saying what they’d both thought, because I knew. I fucking knew. The heart went out of us the moment we worked out where Kaia had gone, when she saw that fucking aberration with Anna. And we’d never really got it back. “Without Kaia, we’re nothing.”

“Kai.” It took me a second to realise Atlas was correcting me. “She doesn’t like Kaia. She prefers Kai.”

“Probably wanting to forget all about the girl she was,” Xavier said and Atlas just stared.

“More than that.”

He let out a sigh, then grabbed for his cigarettes, but I yanked them out of his hand and tossed them in the dirt and that’s when Atlas’ mask cracked. That mulish look, the set of his jaw. He was about to smack me into next week and I was fucking ready for it. Every cell in my body felt like it came alight when I’d seen Kai and then… When she shrank away, took off down the road? Pain, so much fucking pain. So my brother smashing my head in? That’d be a welcome thing, something physical to focus on rather than the psychological.

“We thought we knew how much she was hurting but…” His breaths came in slow and ragged, like every one hurt to make. “Abigail stitched us up perfectly. She had to know we’d never keep Anna around, that the truth would come out, so I’m not sure she actually expected that ploy to work.” He stared at me now, his eyes a flat grey rather than the usual blue. “But if it didn’t?”

He smiled then. No, it was a baring of his teeth, his fangs flashing in the morning light.

“Well, Abby made damn sure Kai would never come to us. We were supposed to protect her, to be a fucking wall between our mate and her psycho mother. We were supposed to be her safe place.” We’d said the same thing plenty of times before, but now it felt like a life sentence, a recognition of how we’d failed her, not an ambition of something we would aspire to. “But we… we…” Atlas shook his head. “All she thinks about when she sees us is pain.”

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