“For good reason.” At his searing gaze, I shrug. If he wants the truth, I’m not going to sugarcoat it. “The director was a pimp. He invited his friends over for parties. For a fee, they could pick out an omega for the night.”
Wings groans into my hair, but Pitt squeezes his hands so tight, I can hear his knuckles pop. “They fucking touched you?”
“No.” I give him a pointed look. “I was trouble. The first one that tried to purchase me nearly lost an eye, and most of the others backed off after that.”
There were still a few who saw me as a challenge, a new omega who needed to be put in her place, but I made them limp away, too. Eventually they gave me a wide berth, since a challenge is only enticing to that kind of alpha if they know they’ll eventually come out on top. And that was definitely not guaranteed with me.
“The director punished me by skipping meals, stripping my room, making me kneel on rice. All the usual bullshit. When I didn’t give in, he tied me to a radiator and turned it on. I don’t know if he forgot I was there, or if he was just that sadistic, but a doctor was visiting one of the other girls and he heard my screams.”
Pitt curses, his face gray with shock, but Ark rears to his feet, striding forward to grip my shoulders. “Lasting Light. Director Narkle.”
“Yes, but…”
“He went missing,” Ark grinds out, turning to give Pitt a grim look. “Doesn’t mean he gets to stay that way.”
“We find him,” Pitt snarls, his mouth a vicious twist, “and we strip every inch of skin off the prick!”
“No. I mean, you can’t find him. Ever. I made sure of that.” They both stare at me and I frown. “You think I’m making it up?”
“You were seventeen, butterfly,” Pitt says slowly, like the fact pains him. “Are you sure…?”
“Not everyone needs a friendly mortician to take care of their problems.” I let that sink in and try not to react to the fact that Ark’s hands are still on my shoulders, his pheromones sizzling in my lungs. “I was out of it for a couple of weeks, but that justgave me plenty of time to plan. I needed a way to get the other omegas out and a way to trap him inside.” In the end, I’d kept it simple. Faulty wiring, an alarm in the middle of the night, and a cowardly director who ran off at the first hint of danger, leaving his precious charges to their own devices. Or so I told the authorities when they arrived on scene.
Ark grunts. “The fire.”
Of course, the same cowardly director had us living in a death trap, so the boardinghouse went up like a tinder box. When I told the authorities that I saw him fleeing into the night, no one looked too hard for his remains.
“After what he did to me, I thought it was fitting.” A heavy silence fills the air, Ark’s hands slowly releasing my shoulders. His face is shuttered, his scent scraping my throat, and I catch his arm before he can retreat. “Don’t tell me you’re pissed that I killed him!”
His jaw drops, smoke practically coming out of his ears. “I’m pissed abouteverything!” he roars. “I’m pissed I took you out of the club! I’m pissed you were hurt by the people who were supposed to care for you! I’m pissed you had to deal with that nightmare on your own! And I’m pissed that the motherfucker is dead, so I can’t incinerate him myself!”
I step back, but his rage is licking over me like a living flame. Except that I’ve witnessed what a real inferno can do, and I’ve felt the cruelty of an indifferent burn burrow into my skin. There is none of that in Ark, just a bone-deep regret that makes his face twist with remorse. “I would do anything to turn back time and protect you from that.”
He’s not touching me, but his words soothe something inside me. It’s a wound deeper than the scars on my back. A fledgling promise that hooked into my soul and festered when it was ripped away from me by his own hands.
“My father…” He stops short, grinding his teeth in frustration. I watch him as closely as he just watched me, the strain that ripples through his muscles and the tension that turns his mouth into a hard, bitter line. At first, I think that’s all the sharing I’m going to get, but then his body jolts and he spits his father’s name out like a curse. “Booker.He fucking stopped me. I tried to go after you, but he commanded me to stay. Made me stand in the corner of the bar, right where he could see me. Every night. All night. I tried to fight against it, but he’d been building up to this for years. Slurs and taunts edged in authority. Fatherly advice that was really just a cloaked command. I was a paper cup he’d been dripping his poison into for so long, my walls came apart like confetti. Patch eventually slipped me some sedatives to take the edge off, and when I started passing out in the middle of his orgies, Booker figured I’d lost the will to resist him.”
“But you hadn’t,” I murmur, staring into the swirling depths of his eyes. “You were using the time to make a plan.”
He gives a jerky nod. “Numbers. That’s what it came down to in the end. The good needed to outnumber the bad. I already had Wings and Patch on my side, helping me through the worst of it.” He reaches out and cups Wings’ shoulder, something passing between them that I both recognize and shy away from. I didn’t have an ally in the boardinghouse, but as soon as Wings popped back up in my life, I clung to him with everything I had. “I took a dangerous mission. Something Booker hoped I wouldn’t return from. Samson came with me, of course, and we joined up with Bluff. I thought we were unstoppable…”
I bite my lip at the flare of pain in his eyes. For so long, I’ve been angry that Samson never fought for me, but at least he had Ark’s back when it mattered. As for Bluff, my feelings for him are a tangle with no end. The man in the picture on Ark’s desk isn’t someone I recognize, and the fact that my brother knewhim better than I probably ever will leaves an ashen taste in my mouth.
“When I came home the last time,” Ark goes on, drawing my attention back to his face, “Booker tried to command me again, but he was already too sick to do much damage. Patch said it was an aggressive blood cancer, but I like to think it was corrosion, from all the poison he’d been feeding me for so many years.”
“A fitting end,” I murmur, a little in awe at the strange parallels of our lives. I’d pictured Ark growing up as the club’s cherished heir, when in fact, we’d both been at the mercy of monsters. We’d both found ourselves in impossible situations and fought with everything we had to escape them. And we’re both still standing, despite the fucked-up things that were done to us, and the scars that we will always carry. Wings might be my soulmate, and Pitt my protector, but I recognize myself in Ark.
Although, now that he’s laying himself bare in front of me, I have a question that needs answering. “I think it’s your turn to explain what’s onyourback.”
His eyes flash, but he turns slowly, hands on hips so I get the full effect of the tattoo. It’s easily the most beautiful artwork I’ve ever seen, a butterfly rising from a sea of flames in a swirl of red and gold defiance. It’s both fierce and fragile, and I can’t resist tracing a droplet of pool water with my finger. He jerks at my touch, and when I snatch my hand back, turns to face me with his dark brows raised. “What part is confusing, Abbie? I got it three years ago. Pretty much the same week I finally tracked you down.”
“Three years ago?” That had to be around the same time that I got mine, when I was so overjoyed to be reuniting with Wings, I wanted to give him a part of me that would last forever. But that doesn’t explain why Ark chose to get a nearly identical tattoo plastered all over his back. “Why?”
“Monarchs are survivors. They face impossible odds and thrive.”
“I know, but…”
He shakes his head, offering a smile that would be calledfondon any other man. “It’s always been about you, Abbie.”
