“So he’s Rage. You know my name, what’s yours?”
“Ash,” he says.
“Great, we sound like a bunch of circus freaks who’re trying to act tough,” I say, nodding slowly.
He rolls his eyes, opening his mouth to shoot back some sort of retort, but both our heads jerk to the side when we hear someone stumbling towards the barn. The door opens, and Rowan comes stumblingin.
“What the fuck happened to you?” I ask, balking at him.
He’s practically a walking bruise. One of his eyes is swollen shut, his lip is busted, and he’s holding his ribs like something’s wrong. There’s dried blood crusted to the entire side of his face, staining the collar of his white t-shirt.
Someone beat the living shit out of him.
“Where’s Jett?” He grits out, stumbling into the door of my cell.
Well, I guess I know who that someone is now.
Fuck, he’s in rough shape. And I’ve been beaten in the ring plenty of times. But he’s a beta, and it’s well known that betas have slower recovery times than alphas.
God, it must be hell having a brother like Jett. My dad was a douchebag, but he never hit me. He was just too much of a coward to protect me or the rest of my family from taking the hits meant for him.
Which is why I’m here, locked up in this fucked-up place.
“You seen a doctor yet? Looks like he got you good, kid,” I say, trying to catalogue all the injuries I see on him. “How the hell’re you even walking right now?”
“I took a dose,” Rowan grunts, shaking his head as he starts to lean to the side like he’s dizzy just standing still.
“Of the drugs they give us?”
“Yeah, what about it,” he snarls. “Where is Jett?”
I narrow my eyes on the kid, watching him. He willingly takes the drugs they’ve been pumping into us alphas.
Well, to be fair, if I had a brother like Jett, I’d wanna take as many drugs as I could to try to give me an edge.
“You just missed him,” Ash sneers, glaring at Rowan. I guess Rowan was telling the truth when he mentioned he’d never taken part in this side of the family business before if one of the big fighters doesn’t seem to recognize him.
Rowan shoots him a glare so cold I didn’t know the kid had it in him.
“Where’s Mirabelle?” He asks me, his expression pleading.
“Oh, so you’re Rowan,” Ash huffs.
Rowan’s head jerks towards Ash and he makes a pained sound at the back of his throat as if the motion gave him whiplash.
“How’d you know that?”
“How the hell do you think? It’s cause she told me. Said you were a sweet pathetic loser who ‘takes care of her’.”
“She—she didn’t call me pathetic,” Rowan grits out. “She wouldn’t say that.”
“Yeah, I added that fucking in, genius. ‘Cause from where I’m standing, you are pathetic. You couldn’t keep her safe. It looks like your psychopath big brother decided he wanted to play with her, and it was easy as fuck to do so if all he had to get through was your scrawny ass.”
Rowan flinches at the harsh words as if he had just been hit.
“Where—where is she?” Rowan asks, his voice losing the earlier angry confidence it had.
“Probably dead. She survived me, but I don’t think she’s gonna fucking survive Rage.”
