“Stop,” Boden snarls, attempting to yank his arm away again, but I only tighten my hold.
A violent twisting in my chest has me gritting my teeth, the beast within me sucking in a deep breath, pulling the violent energy straight out of Boden’s chest and into mine, bringing his wolf to heel. It spreads like a poison, but with every heartbeat spreading it throughout my body, my grip tightens, pulling him back and forcing him into his seat.
“No. If you’re going to act like a petulant child, I’ll treat you like one. We’re going home, and you’re going to pull yourself together. You can come back after you get some sleep.”
Cinjin pipes up from the back. “Easy for you to say. You’ve barely talked to the girl since that first night’s debacle. Of course you’d think it’d be so easy for us to go home and pretend that there’s nothing wrong; it’s the only thing you’re good at.”
The warning sound that escapes my throat has him involuntarily flinching. “Give me your hand, Cin.”
When he doesn’t move, I throw the car in park and whirl around in my seat, nails digging into the flesh of his knee through his jeans as I glare at my brother, thoroughly pissed off. I don’t scream at him like I want to, don’t go on a tangent to uselessly try to convince him otherwise. He’s hurting, lashing out in an attempt to feel anything other than numb, but I’m used to it.
The curse of being the head of the family. People claim to wish they had the power of an alpha, but they don’t understand that all we are are fucking leeches and everyone’s scapegoats. It’s the darkness we pull from our family in a bid to save them that gives us the strength they covet, but it’s barely enough to endure the burdens threatening to crush us. It’s a burst of energy that makes us a force to be reckoned with, weakens whoever we touch, but the power is as much of a curse as the wolf in my chest.
I feel it, all of it. Their misery and suffering; I physically absorb their pain as my own and weaponize it, shouldering their pain for them. No one fights harder than a desperate man that has people to protect, and it’s helped alphas gain a bloodthirsty reputation that keeps most of our kind in check. But what I take on never completely fades, and when my wolf finally passes out, I’m the one left struggling under the weight of what’s left, the images that haunt everyone else constantly playing in the back of my mind to drive me slowly insane. I spend every waking moment hating myself, the universe, and everything in between. And right now?
I take as much of Bo and Cinjin’s suffering as I can physically manage in a bid to take the edge off for them, Sabrina’s rejection a jagged knife to my heart. She hardly even knows that I exist, yet I want to sink to my knees and beg her to see that I’m worth not giving up on. That I’m barely a step above a monster, but someone worth saving. To make her understand that I need her to breathe some life back into me because I’m drowning, and not sure how much longer I can fight my way back to the surface.
Cin refuses to look at me, well aware of the onslaught that I siphoned from him. For all of his claims of not giving a shit about what other people think, when it comes to Sabrina? He’s absolutely terrified that she’s going to be like everyone else and decide that he’s not worth the effort it takes to love him when he’s such a mess.
“Fuck off, Slade,” he monotonously decrees, staring back out the window now that he’s managed to tear his leg free from my grasp. “I already know that she’s going to come around eventually, so save me the lecture. I’m allowed to acknowledge that this sucks without you taking that away from me, too.”
“One night, that’s all I’m asking. Sleep, before you do something reckless.”
“Like take a mate that can’t stand to look at me?” His voice is cold, staring at the dilapidated apartment building like she might walk out of the door at any second to stop him from leaving.
“Like to lose sense of what’s important.” I face forward with a sigh, beginning the agonizingly long drive home. “It’s not about you, either of you, as much as I wish it were.”
Bo ends up resting his head against his window too, defeated and exhausted now that I drained the last bit of fight from him that was keeping him going. “We’re no better than our fathers, are we? Acting like we know best, that what she wants doesn’t matter. No wonder she hates us.”
Taking the quickest route home, I force down the lamenting whine that threatens to tear from my throat at that thought. “She doesn’t hate us, and that line of thinking is exactly what I’m talking about; you’re exhausted and going to make shit worse if you keep spiraling. She’s a human that found out that she’s something else, and not only that, but a seemingly broken version. Add in being involuntarily married to not one, but two men? Realizing that people are going to be coming after her for the rest of her life now?”
Scoffing, I take another turn, getting us home as swiftly as possible. “She’s not even thinking about you as people yet, you’re a concept that she needs to wrap her mind around, so calm the fuck down already. She’s allowed to hate everything the same way you two are, but that doesn’t mean it’s personal. It means that the world is a son of a bitch with a sick sense of humor.”
Cin’s wary gaze meets mine in the rearview mirror. “What do you mean?”
Rubbing the heel of my hand over my chest with a grimace, I growl, “Sabrina Laroque is the answer to all of our problems, and the epitome of everything we could ever want in a mate. Of course the gods would make her the weakest fucking wolf in existence and dangle her in front of a dying pack that can barely keep themselves alive.”
I choke down a frustrated scream, their emotions raging through me and tainting my already paranoid thoughts. “She was either sent to save us, or be our ruin. All we can do is hope that whatever fate she decides, it finally puts an end to this agonizing existence, because I’m not sure how much more of it I can take.”
