“You have always been the worst fucking liar in the world,” she rages. “You paste that stupid fake-ass smile on your face and clam up, or you dodge me because you know I have always been able to see right through you. What the fuck has been going on with you?”
“Derek would hit me,” I blurt out. “Less when you would visit me in Oregon, and always below my neck, but he would alwaysfind a reason to beat me up, and I didn’t want you to know, okay.” More tears slide down my cheeks. “That’s why I divorced him before he went to jail. I knew he was going to come after me when he got out, and he would hurt me and whoever I was with. I couldn’t let it be you, Trey, or the kids.”
She’s silent.
A soft thump and a wooden creak drift down the phone. I picture my beautiful, redheaded sister gripping her kitchen table and dropping heavily onto a dining chair.
Her breathing is shallow and fast.
“Missy?”
“And you couldn’t tell me this?” Her voice cracks on the last word. “My little sister went through literalhell, and I didn’t know.”
Knowing she’s pissed, I don’t know what compels me to say, “It technically wasn’t literal hell.”
“Don’t youdaredownplay this, Maisie Eloise Lucas. Don’t you fucking dare.”
Andthisis exactly why I didn’t tell her what was going on.
Missy is my big sister. Five years older, but you’d think it was ten. When our parents died, our grandma took over raising us, only to die not a year later; Missy became a mom to me. I’d have gone to stay with her in a heartbeat if she’d ever gotten the truth out of me, and her family would have paid the price for it.
Missywould have paid the price because she’d have gone to her husband’s garage, picked up his baseball bat, and tried to use it on Derek’s head for putting a hand on me.
The operative word beingtried.
Missy is four-eight, and Derek, nearly six-two, would have taken the bat from her and killed her with it.
I couldn’t let that happen.
“It was my mess, Missy,” I whisper. “Not yours. You have kids and a family?—”
“I have a little sister who is also part ofmyfamily.” Wood creaks. She breathes out, and she must be holding a hand over her face because her next words emerge slightly muffled. “MyGod.”
“Do you want me to hang up?”
“No, I don’t want you to hang up. I want to drive a tank over that piece of shit’s head, reverse, and do it all over again.No,I want to feed him dick first through a meat grinder.”
I smile with tears filling my eyes. “You were always the strong one in the family.”
I run or hide. My sister fights.
When an alpha and an omega have a child, no one ever knows whether the child will be an alpha or an omega, dominant or submissive. I was born an omega, and Missy surprised everyone by being a scentless beta with the dominance of an alpha.
She lets out a tired sigh. “No. I was just the loud one.Youwere the strong one.”
“I was not.”
“You grieved for Mom and Dad in a way I never did. You got up, and you started living again, and you didn’t let Grandma’s death shatter you the way it did me,” she tells me quietly. “I bottled everything up, tried to control everything around me, and when I couldn’t, I fell apart. There are different kinds of strength, Maisie. Yours is quiet, but itisthere.”
“Youfell apart?”
“Very messy. Lots of booze and screaming and stuff I hid from you. What happened? I thought everything was okay until he went to jail for killing someone with his car, then you said you were divorcing and traveling.”
Wyatt wanders out from his workshop, thankfully saving my hormones and ability to focus by wearing a t-shirt. He wipes hishands on a cloth and shuts the door behind him, then walks toward me.
He says nothing. Just pulls a clean cloth from his sweatpants pocket and hands it to me, then sits on the porch step beside me and wraps one arm around my shoulder, leaning his head against mine.
Missy was wrong. I’m not strong. Wyatt’s presence gives me the strength to tell my sister everything.
