“Explain what?” He moved back, dragged over a stool that made a god-awful scraping noise on the linoleum floor.
“This whole situation.” I assessed the bandages wrapped around my hands, then the splints. Uncomfortable fuckers, but if they fixed my fingers, I’d allow it. “The Knights, the rescue, the sanctuary. Bringing me here, giving me medicine and—whatever else you did.Why?What do you get out of it?”
Because my initial fears, that blind terror that they’d used my unconscious body for their own vile desires struggled to hold itself in my chest when Giant was sitting here, smiling, his eyes soft as he regarded me. He was either an amazing actor, or he was genuine and I was missing something.
Plus, scents didn’t lie, and this room smelled clean, neutral except for my own acrid, damaged scent and Giant’s crackling woodfire. None of the vile scents from the barn. Not even the ordinary fluids from perfectly harmless missionary sex. It was like he’d left me untouched. So I was definitely missing something.
Giant sighed, like my question made him sad. “Everyone here, every Knight, and the people in the sanctuary, even the clubwomen who make themselves available for sex with my brothers—everyone’s lives have been touched by violence and abuse. Either we’ve experienced it first-hand, witnessed it, or lost someone.”
“Okay,” I said slowly, not sure how that related to me.
“It leaves a mark,” Giant sighed, rubbing his jaw. “Either you take that messed up stuff inside you, and become like the abuser you witnessed, or you spend your whole life abhorring it. Making sure it never happens to anyone else.”
“Huh.” I blinked at the clean, medical room, realisation dawning. “I’m your proxy. You couldn’t save whoever was important to you, so I’m the stand-in.”
“If that’s how you want to think of it,” he replied dubiously. “It goes against an alpha’s very nature, to see someone in a vulnerable position abused by someone in power. It—” Giantexhaled roughly, his hands flexing on his massive knees. Everything about this guy was massive; it was no mystery where his name had come from. “It makes my skin burn and something crawl down my spine and every instinct I havescream,like an untuned violin.”
“Very poetic.”
He wasn’t dissuaded by my commentary. “It isinstinctto protect those who can’t protect themselves. Not to take advantage of them while they’re wounded or weak or forced into a heat or—” His next sigh was a borderline growl.
“You’ve seen some shit then,” I deduced. “Like the barn where I was—held.” I skittered away from all the other words like a spooked horse.Heldwas as close as I could get right now.
“Nothing as bad as that,” he admitted, hunching over in the chair, dwarfing the thing. “But yeah. We all have. Years ago, we set out to make sure the shit that happened to our friends and family wouldneverhappen again.”
“Seems delusional.”
He shrugged. “It feels like that sometimes. But even if we can only kill one abuser a month, it’s worth it.”
My eyebrows shot up. “You kill them?”
Giant met my eyes, held contact. “Every single one we find. Their kind is a disease, and it’s been allowed to spread too far, infect too many people. Usually men. Usually alphas, but not always.”
I blinked, processing that, a little weight lifting from my chest. “Are they all dead? The handlers, traffickers, farmers, whatever the fuck they called themselves.”
“All but a handful,” he confirmed, reading something in me if the brightening of his eyes was anything to judge by. “And the ones left are… getting acquainted with my most unhinged brothers.”
A smile pulled at my mouth. “Good. I hope they die screaming.”
“Oh yeah, definitely,” Giant agreed, pushing his hands against his knees as he stood. “Tybalt’s a total psychopath. And Cobra has no line he won’t cross when it comes to punishing abusers.”
I vaguely remembered him. Eyes the colour of green venom. A face made of harsh angles. Ink practically everywhere. Him calling me asshole but without any heat or malice.
“So it’s a sense of justice and anger that drives you lot,” I mused. “You want revenge for the people you’ve seen hurt and killed.”
“What we want,” Giant said, crossing the room and riffling through a stack of plastic boxes, “is for no one else to suffer because of their designation, and for betas to not get caught in between.”
“The main selling point of the farm was omegas,” I guessed.
“And alphas,” he agreed. “But there were three barns with beta captives.”
“Evil will always settle for a beta when they get bored of omegas,” I said, carefully crossing my arms over my chest and feeling more like myself for the motion. “Even if we’re more breakable.”
Or because of it. He didn’t say it, and neither did I, but we were both thinking it.
“I’ll call Ndidi,” Giant offered, without apparent prompting. “She can talk you through everything that happened in your surgery.”
“Surgery?” I demanded, stiffening. I knew it was bad but notthatbad. “Who the fuck cut me open?”
