Prey (Blackwater Pack Book 2)

by Hannah McBride

  That caused a wave of nausea that had me seeing spots as I struggled to breathe. I had never really considered a child I might one day have being forced into the same life or being turned into a monster itself.

  Then Zara spoke. She detailed the abuse she had suffered at her husband’s hands. She talked about the practices and law Linden and his council enforced. The sentences he had passed on other shifters. The humiliating punishments frequently meted out. The forced matings.

  I kept my eyes focused on the closed door as they both took time explaining, with almost clinical precision, what life in Long Mesa was like. Not just addressing the omegas, but the treatment of the pack, the squallor most pack members lived in, the daily cloud of fear that covered the compound.

  Their voices faded to background noise as I focused on breathing. Every time I had an urge to look at Remy for comfort or glare at Linden in anger, I studied the closed double doors.

  There was a scuff in the lower left corner of the door on the left. A thin scratch marred the shiny wood of the door on the right. The handles were a brushed pewter, the reflection of the screen behind me a distorted swirl of muted colors as my family told their stories.

  When Bella spoke, I had to close my eyes.

  The video skipped in several places, cutting past what was likely minutes or hours of sobs as she got her story out in more detail than she had ever shared with me.

  Linden was at a meeting with his Council when Cassian, Preston and Marc showed up. She thought Cassian was there to hang out. She had been sad since her mother had been taken away, charged with pack treason for aiding our escape.

  Cassian had ranted and raved about my leaving. Marc had complained about there being no more omegas since the house burned to the ground days earlier, the faulty wiring finally igniting a spark that set the shack ablaze. Maisie and Shane had been executed for treason weeks earlier, so no one had been there to stop the fire from consuming the entire building.

  Her voice hitched as she quietly explained that seemed to change the energy in the room.

  My hands curled around the seat of my chair when Cassian again mentioned how he had waited years to be with me and been denied.

  Bella had tried to laugh it off. Tried to remind Cassian that she was still here and in a few years they would be married. Mates.

  Then Preston casually mentioned if I was still there, he wouldn’t need to wait. Cassian would have been able to fuck me any time, any way, any place. It would take the edge off until Bella could be his wife.

  The cold look in Cassian’s eyes as he turned on her. One Markham is as good as the next.

  Preston held her arms, Marc held her legs. The tearing of fabric. Screaming, crying, begging, and pain. So much pain. Her voice shook, wrecked by the memories as she tried to explain what had happened to her.

  They took turns, slapping her when she cried too loud until Preston finally shoved her shredded underwear into her mouth like a gag.

  What she endured was what I would have endured. What I knew would have happened to me had I stayed, and I hated myself.

  I hated myself for being relieved I hadn’t stayed. That it hadn’t been me.

  With each whimper from Bella, I laid another brick around the wall of my heart.

  Every sob that passed her lips, I set another sandbag in front of the rising tide of my emotions.

  I locked my wolf back in the cage I had shoved her into years ago to keep her from rising up and killing the man responsible for all of this.

  Maybe, just maybe, I wouldn’t fall apart with the first actual question someone asked me.

  I had known today would suck beyond measure, but I wasn’t prepared to be emotionally flayed first by the stories of my family.

  I blinked when the dimmed lights came on, their bright fluorescence piercing and sharp. Bella’s final words echoed in the air, haunting the silence around us.

  Why, Daddy?

  Papers were shuffled as the Council members looked through photographs and medical reports on Mom, Zara, and Bella.

  My gaze dropped, stupidly, when a paper slid across to my side of the table.

  My brain saw the words “significant trauma and tearing” before it was snatched back by Tobias’s shaking hand. He was the only Council member, and an alternate at that, who would look at me with anything but stoic apathy.

  Vincent cleared his throat.

  I fixed my gaze back on the door, mentally already on the other side of it. Anywhere but in this room.

  I had spent years training my mind to float away when things were too much to handle, too much to process. I honed that skill with my face pressed in the dirt with a knee digging into my spine. I sharpened it on the days I would be casually and violently shoved into the rusty metal of a locker.

  It was the only way I had been able to survive day after day in that hell. It was the only resource I had to protect me now.

  I could feel Remy’s eyes on me, begging me to look at him. Rage was coming off of my mate in barely controlled waves, but I also knew the second my gaze collided with his, I would fall apart.

  I couldn’t afford to fall apart. Not yet. Maybe tonight when it was just us, locked in the quiet sanctum of our room, cradled in the strength of his arms, I could lose it. I would let him carry the burden with me.

  Linden’s glare burned into me, hot and unrelenting, also demanding I look at him. But the moment I would let my eyes see him, I knew I would shift. My wolf would rip free of the tedious cage I had tucked her into, and I would hurl myself across the room and rip his throat out the way I had Dane Loomis.

  The gravity of the hearing was lost on no one. Everyone had been ordered into silence before the first video began to play. Failure to comply would result in immediate termination of the hearing, with the side violating the silence order being removed.

  So, I stared at the door, seeing through Vincent and another Council member seated in front of it. And I waited for my turn to be flayed alive.

  “Skye,” Vincent began finally, a small thread of compassion hidden in the rasping tapestry of his voice. “May we begin?”

  I jerked my head. I wanted to look him in the eye. I needed to know if there was any humanity in those watery blue eyes, but I wasn’t an Alpha. I was nothing more than a female, and a former omega. Looking him in the eye would have been a challenge.

  My wolf huffed, annoyed and barely controlled.

  I looped another layer of barbed wire around her cage, nestled her deeper into the recesses of my soul, and prayed she could stay leashed until this was over.

  “Is there anything you would like to say?”

  I barely stifled a snort. I wanted to say nothing and everything.

  Where to begin?

  “If I may, Sir,” Tobias said hesitantly, leaning forward. “This may be more prudent if we ask Miss Markham direct questions so as not to overlap with the information in the recordings. In the essence of time.”

  I appreciated the Miss Markham. Tobias was trying to be polite and professional, but I didn’t need the reminder that I shared that name with my uncle.

  The Markham name was forever tied to the Long Mesa pack.

  Skye was better.

  “Very well,” Vincent huffed, clearly annoyed at the disruption. “Skye, do you feel the accounts we just heard provide an accurate depiction of the Long Mesa pack?”

  “Yes,” I replied without an ounce of hesitation.

  Inhale. Exhale.

  I could do this.

  “Did you, yourself, experience any ill treatment while you were a member of the Long Mesa pack?”

  “Daily.” I kept my tone clipped, brief.

  Inhale. Exhale.

  Huh. There was a small chip of wood missing half an inch below the handle on the right door. I had missed that in the shadows before.

  “Could you elaborate in a particular instance?”

  There were so many options, I struggled to grab onto one memory. They had all been dipped in oil, sliding thro
ugh my fingers as soon as I grabbed on.

  I zeroed my attention on the missing chip.

  It was almost the size of the scar on my calf.

  “There’s a scar on my leg from where Preston bit me.” The words didn’t sound right. My voice didn’t sound right. “I … I was the last one to shift for a pack run. Preston … bit me.”

  The small noise from Vincent was barely audible, but I heard it nonetheless.

  A tiny little grunt. Incredulity laced with … amusement.

  Because what I had just described could be dismissed as play between packmates. A small aggression by a beta to get me to hurry up and join the others before we were left.

  The memories were over-exposed pictures, too bright and hiding the shadows.

  “Skye.” Vincent was hiding a smile, clearly trying to indulge the overly emotional female in the room who probably misconstrued the first seventeen years of her life.

  Inhale.

  I closed my eyes and let the memories pull me under one last time.

  “My first kiss happened when I was ten. The man who kissed me was Preston’s father. He was thirty-five, and had just come out of another omega’s room. I was playing on the front steps, and he picked me up by the front of my shirt. I could smell the blood and sweat sticking to him. He told me he couldn’t wait until I was older. That I looked just like my mother. Then he pressed his mouth on mine before he dropped me.”

  Exhale.

  “I had my first concussion when I was twelve. I smiled when a girl told Marc he was stupid. He grabbed my ponytail and swung my head into a metal pole.”

  Inhale.

  “I’ve had food poisoning more times than I can count from spoiled, rotting food. It was all we were given to eat, and after not eating for four days, you get kind of desperate.”

  Exhale.

  “I learned how to sew when my mom needed stitches. One of Linden's friends from another pack visited her, and he had a thing for knives. She has a scar from her left breast to her right hip. I was thirteen when that happened.” My jaw flicked to the file that had her name on it. “I think you saw the picture of that scar in there.”

  Inhale.

  “When I was fifteen, I got a note from our principal telling me to go home from school early. I was halfway home when Marc grabbed me. He cornered me, told me the toll I had to pay for using the road was my shirt. He finally ripped it off of me when I wouldn’t give it to him. A mile down the road, Preston was there. That toll was my shorts. You can use your imagination for what the last toll was when I ran into Cassian.”

  Exhale.

  I opened my eyes, locked my gaze on Vincent’s. I released the death drip on the bottom of my chair and rested my hands on top of the table.

  “Should I keep going? Do you want to know about the time Preston held my head underwater until I almost drowned because I was stupid enough to use the public lake when the pipes burst at our house and I needed to shower?”

  I leaned forward slightly, the numbness that had been insulating me burning away in a firestorm of caustic memories. “Or maybe tell you about every single time I was groped, grabbed, pinched, kissed, or touched against my will by Cassian, Preston and Marc? If you want that list, you may need to order in for food, because it adds up over the course of a decade and we’ll be here awhile. Plus, that’s not counting the number of adults that touched or made inappropriate comments to me while I was growing up. Most of them were part of Linden’s council.”

  I watched Vincent’s throat swallow, the sagging skin bobbing for a moment before his eyes dipped away for a heartbeat of a second. I couldn’t decipher the movement from submission or apology.

  Either way, my eyes were back on the door before he realized what he had done.

  I focused on my breath again, ignoring the sound of Remy—or maybe Gabe—grinding their teeth hard enough to crack and shatter enamel.

  “I think that is enough,” Vincent said, his voice more subdued. He coughed, and more papers rustled.

  “Elias?”

  My eyes jerked to the older man in the corner behind Tobias.

  “You have visited the Long Mesa pack,” Vincent went on. “Can you confirm or deny the accusations as they stand?”

  Elias sighed, shaking his head sadly. “I can confirm that, in the past, Long Mesa’s Alphas have been known for their harsh views on punishment as well as, what some would call, a gross neglect of their omegas. That being said, I have not personally visited the pack in well over two decades so I cannot attest firsthand to the accounts heard today. I cannot say, with complete honesty, that Miss Markham’s account is true or false.”

  Besides him, Daniel’s eyes closed. His face was a strange combination of horror and fury. When his eyes opened, the iridescent green of his eyes was filled with hate as he glared in the direction of Preston and Linden.

  “Alpha Gabriel,” Vincent said, turning his attention to Gabe.

  I started counting knots in the woodgrain of the doors as I heard Gabe stand.

  “Does your pack still wish to proceed with the original claims against Linden Markham?”

  “More than ever,” Gabe gritted out, his voice shaking with fury.

  Vincent sighed softly. “And you will provide sanctuary for the displaced wolves who have requested it?”

  “Yes.”

  Vincent craned his neck, sighing deeply when each member of the Council gave a short nod.

  “The Council will not order any shifter currently seeking sanctum from Long Mesa to return. Furthermore, we will be sending delegates to monitor and review Linden Markham’s claim to Long Mesa at the conclusion of the Summit.”

  “Wait a minute!” Linden exploded from his seat, green eyes full of fire. Preston looked stunned to see his Alpha on his feet, but he didn’t move to join him.

  “Alpha Linden—”

  “Am I not even allowed my own defense against these heinous accusations?” he snapped, ignoring Vincent’s attempt to silence him. He slapped an open palm on the table.

  “Do you have a defense?” another Council member asked slowly, turning to look incredulously at my uncle. “Even if you did not willfully participate in any wrong doings, you have failed to protect your pack.”

  Linden flushed. “These are all lies. Sick, disparaging lies—”

  “And the medical reports?” Tobias interrupted coolly, lifting a manilla folder of papers and pictures.

  “A fabrication,” he spat.

  “Is the scar on my leg a fabrication, too?” The question slipped out before I could censor myself. “Do you want me to show it to you?”

  His gaze snapped to me. “You lying bitch.”

  Linden took a step towards me, and Preston’s eyes narrowed into slits of hate.

  Before I could stand up to defend myself, Remy was between us, shoulders heaving as a warning growl vibrated deep in his chest. Every single muscle was locked and poised to attack Linden at any second.

  “Enough!” Vincent yelled, pushing to his feet. “Alphas, control yourselves.”

  I glanced around. Gabe had moved to stand on my other side. Surprisingly, Daniel was on his feet as well, hands clenched into massive fists as he glared at Linden and Preston.

  Linden’s gaze flickered to me again, but Remy adjusted his position so he couldn’t see me, shielding me.

  “Everyone sit down now,” Vincent thundered.

  The Council looked around. Some were concerned, one looked curious, others were leaning forward in case things took a violent turn.

  My wolf was in favor of violence.

  Inhale.

  Linden sat down first, throwing himself hard into his chair with a petulant growl. Elias nudged Daniel pointedly until he sat. Gabe’s fingers ghosted across my shoulder before he went back to his own seat.

  Remy pulled out the chair beside me and sat down, still between Linden and me, clearly no longer interested in sitting on the sidelines.

  The only indication Vincent cared about Remy’s new seat
choice was a slight tightening around his mouth, but he quickly masked it.

  “You will have a chance to prove your innocence when we observe your pack, Alpha Linden,” Vincent said calmly, like the last minute of testosterone fueled fury had never happened.

  Linden glowered, teeth flashing. “We welcome the Council to our pack any time.”

  Vincent grimaced. “This meeting is now adjourned.”

  Exhale.

  46

  The walk back to the cabin was made in total silence.

  Remy had reached for my hand, but Gabe pulled him back, saving me the trouble of pulling away from him myself.

  It wasn’t him, it was me. It was all me.

  My skin was stretched too tight over my bones. My wolf was on the verge of a full blown riot. Everything in me was raw and exposed. I was a bomb with fraying, tangled cords.

  I was going to detonate soon, and not in a pretty way.

  If Remy touched me, I would lose it in front of everyone. I needed to hold it in until I was behind the walls of our cabin, then I could fall apart. I could lose myself to the fear, the grief, and the pain before he could put me back together.

  All the barricades I had erected to keep my heart and emotions safe had been torn down piece by piece in that room. Brick by brick, memory by memory, I had sacrificed and bared chipped pieces of my soul until I was stripped bare. I had survived, but I was one small breeze away from shattering.

  I slowly started the ascent of the stairs to our cabin, opening the door and wandering inside. I stopped in the middle of the living area, not sure exactly what I wanted to do.

  When the door closed, I turned around. Surprise flashed through me when I realized Gabe was the only other person in the room, which meant Remy was still outside.

  Maybe because now he knew. He knew just how utterly, desperately damaged I was.

  My heart sank, wondering if he was rethinking being with me. If all the broken, damaged bits inside of me were finally enough to make him see how completely far out of my league he was.

  “I asked Remy to give us a minute,” Gabe said softly, moving to sit in one of the overstuffed armchairs. He motioned to the other chair. “Please sit?”