Defying The Alpha, Falling For His Stepfather

Chapter Eight: Bare-Chested Grim Reaper

Cecelia

I could feel Ellis’s poison burning through my veins like rattlesnake venom. My own blood refused to clot, and continued to ooze from between my fingers. It didn’t help that he had chewed on my shoulder like a beaver chipping down a log, leaving a messy, tattered hole instead of a neat set of teeth marks. Inside, my wolf was snarling, howling, and whimpering by turn, horrified and confused, and furious all at the same time.

This was a violation of tradition. A violation of my body and the beast within. You never, ever mark another wolf without explicit consent. The physical and spiritual bond that is created by sharing venom with another is too deep and too profound to be done with anything less than genuine respect. It is an act of honor and love. To brazenly mark another against their will is tantamount to rape.

Fine, I had agreed to this whole sham, but that didn’t mean he could take liberties with me whenever and however he wanted! Yes, I had expected that marking would happen eventually, but I thought I would have time to mentally prepare myself, and more importantly, prepare my wolf. I thought there would be a proper ceremony, and then we would do the deed. He would mark me, and I would mark him to forever bind not only our individual lives, but our packs.

But this! This was an outrage!

I was embarrassed and ashamed that he had gotten the drop on me. Had he not caught me unaware, I would have fought back, I would have stopped it. If my wolf had seen it coming, she would have knocked every last tooth out of his mouth. As it was, she was still thinking about it, still thinking about following that nauseating candy scent to whatever room he inhabited so that she could rip his mother-f.ucking head off.

Before I followed that impulse, though, I needed some first aid. I stomped my way to the bathroom and peeled away my hand to see for myself the mess he had made. A rabid dog could have made a better mark than that fool. I turned on the faucet and dug through the cupboard for the first aid kit I’d noticed there when I was putting my soap and shampoo away. Swear words flowed as freely as the blood as I yanked off my shirt and used it to try and mop away the blood. Under normal circumstances, it should have ceased to bleed moments after he inflicted the bite, but my blood was not clotting as normal. I kept applying pressure, pulling away the blood-soaked rag now and then to examine the wound. I dumped some peroxide in it and gritted my teeth as it bubbled and burned until the bleeding finally slowed. It was too ragged and messy to stitch the tattered skin closed, so the best I could do was tear off some medical tape with my teeth and butterfly it back together. I covered it with gauze and another layer of tape.

When I was finally patched up, I leaned my palms against the edges of the sink and took a few slow calming breaths. I looked at my face in the mirror and was a little shocked to see how pale I was. I hadn’t lost that much blood, so I could only attribute my pallor to the horror of the whole situation. My first f.ucking day at Dark Rising, and it had come to this. Although I prided myself on being strong and independent, I had already been violated by the man who was supposed to be my partner for life. My fingers gripped the edges of the sink until the knuckles were white. My bra was blood-soaked, and more smears of half-dried blood stained my chest and my abdomen. I could already see bruises forming around the gauze bandaging on my neck.

I let my shoulders sink forward and dropped my head, feeling at once an overwhelming sense of shame and despondency. What would my father say if he could see me now? Would he feel any remorse? Or would he still be lecturing me about my duty to the pack and to the family?

I sucked in a deep breath and straightened. I peeled off the rest of my clothes and found a clean washcloth to scrub away the blood across my chest. I dropped the soiled washcloth in the sink, next to my ruined shirt, and walked away, not bothering to clean the mess. I was suddenly too exhausted to care. I went to the dresser and pulled open the drawer where I had just recently folded away my pajamas. I dug through the assortment for something that wouldn’t rub too much on my wound and came up with a black satin cami with spaghetti straps that I could loosen and pull aside. I slipped on the top, and the matching shorts quickly brushed out my hair and braided it awkwardly, gritting my teeth against the pain of the action, knowing that it would be worthwhile keeping my hair away from the wound. Finally, I staggered to the four-poster bed and slipped beneath the sheets.

The pain had not lessened. If anything, it burned even hotter, tracing its way through my veins, spreading like slow lava toward my center and down my arm to the tips of my fingers. I felt it throb with every beat of my heart. I lay on my back with my head propped on a pillow and put my hand over the gauze, as though the pressure could give some comfort to the deep ache.

Marking was supposed to be beautiful and wonderful. What was this s.hit? Where were the rainbows and blasted purple unicorns? Where were the f.ucking orgasms and ecstatic fireworks? Were those just stupid fairy tales they told young she-wolves to make them accept this b.ullshit? Maybe it was supposed to be like childbirth, and all the pain was forgotten when you were in love and you were all awash in oxytocin?

Forget that I had no love hormones brewing for Ellis, now I had enough rage to blow the house down. I lay awake for a long time imagining all the ways I would eviscerate that little s.hit. I entertained my angry fantasies because they kept the tears and self-pity at bay long enough for me to succumb to mental exhaustion.

I sank into a fitful sleep, full of dark and uneasy dreams. Ellis’s leering face was everywhere, reflected in the mirrors and the dark windows as I wandered through the Dark Rising pack house, searching for something, something important, but I didn’t know what. Like I had earlier that afternoon, I moved down the hallway, trying all the doorknobs that I came across, but in the dream, they were all locked. I felt like I was being shoved toward the opposite wing, toward the door at the very end. I wanted to resist, I wanted to turn back, but I couldn’t retreat, it was as if an unseen hand was pushing me slowly toward that final door at the end of the long carpeted hallway. I was forced past the landing of the stairs, unable to break away and run down them until finally there was nothing before me but that door. I reached out to turn the handle, and it released, the door swinging inward, revealing yet another Ellis, grinning like a Halloween pumpkin.

“Hello...mate,” his voice was raspy, and one hand shot out, taking hold of my shoulder, right where his teeth had sunk into my flesh, squeezing it painfully. Before I could pull away from that painful grip, his other hand shot out and I barely saw the flash of a ceremonial knife before he plunged it into my lower stomach, straight into my womb.

I screamed, not only in the dream, but an actual scream ripped from my sleeping body as I grabbed my stomach, half expecting to find a bloody knife there. There was no knife, but the pain twisted inside of me, just as though someone was still working the blade back and forth. I barely registered that there was a banging at the door, not at the door to the hallway, but at the door that connected the luna’s bedroom to the alpha’s bedroom.

The door that I had locked earlier.

I cried out again and tried to get off the bed, but found myself so tangled in the blankets and sheets, and so utterly confused by the pain that I only succeeded in falling to the floor with a thump that was muffled by the carpet.

I kicked at the sheet that was still tangled around my foot and writhed in agony, clutching at my stomach, and wondered if I was actually dying. I pulled my knees up close to my chest and bit down hard on my lip to try and stifle my own screams.

There was a crash, and the door between the rooms flew open with surprising force, swinging on its hinges and banging back into the wall so hard that the door handle left a circular dent. I rolled my head so that I could see what new calamity was about to befall me. In my muddled brain, I half expected to see Ellis standing over me with a knife.

But it wasn’t Ellis. It was the former alpha, vaguely illuminated in the moonlight, looking like some kind of bare-chested grim reaper, his ribs protruding, and his face looking almost skull-like in the shadows. His feet were planted, his knees were bent, and his arms were raised like he was ready to fight. He looked around the room frantically like he was looking for an enemy before his eyes moved downward and found me curled up on the floor.

I opened my mouth to speak, but whatever words I intended to say were choked out by another scream.