Page 39 of Ruined Wolf

“Maverick, stop!” I ran over and grabbed his arm. “It wasn’t him! He’s just a beta. I remembered his face on the boat. He never touched me.”

Maverick looked down at me, his face like thunder. “Except when he held you down on the boat for his friend to rape you. Except when he held a knife to your throat. And how many times did he stand by and watch them beat you? Force you?”

I dropped my gaze to the floor. “It’s not... He couldn’t have stopped them.”

Lucas laughed. “Of course he could have. Betas rising up against alphas isn’t normal, but it’s not unheard of. He’s just a coward, aren’t you, mate? It’s why he’s not talking. He’s scared of big bad Alpha Caleb.” Lucas sauntered past us to the beta who was looking rather pale at this point and, in a flash of movement, brought a knife down into the man’s thigh.

The man screamed as Lucas began to slowly twist the knife in the wound.

“Ah, now, don’t be like that. I didn’t hit an artery or anything. You won’t die from a little flesh wound.”

The man made a whimpering sound.

Lucas smiled. “Now, I suggest you start talking. Maverick’s a good guy. He has a bit of a temper occasionally, but you did threaten his mate and try and steal her away. But me...” He grabbed the guy’s face and leaned in, staring into his good eye. “I’m not a good guy. I’m a very bad wolf, and your alpha has nothing on me.”

“I’m not saying anything,” the man said and spat in Lucas’s face.

I gasped and started forward, but Maverick held me back.

Lucas wiped the spittle away with his hand and looked at it on his fingers. He shook his head then reached out and wiped it on the man’s face, his eyes fixed on that one bloodshot eye. The man recoiled in his chair. Whatever he saw in Lucas’s eyes was definitely unnerving him. He began to struggle in the chair, and Lucas smiled coldly. The look on his face sent chills down my spine.

“Do you know how many scars she has?” he asked the man.

The guy shook his head.

Lucas sighed. “Neither do I. I tried to count them a few times when she was asleep, but I could never see them all. I got up to about a hundred and thirty on her back alone.”

I stared at him. “What the fuck, Lucas?” I whispered. Maverick put his arm around my shoulders and pulled me close, but I was rigid and cold.

Lucas looked at me, his dark eyes boring into mine. “I can’t believe it took me so long to see it, but it’s there behind the sunshine. It’s why we are fated, Nova. You have it too.”

“Have what?” I whispered, a chill snaking over my skin.

“That darkness, that cloying, all-encompassing infection of trauma and damage that rots away in your core. It’s why I wasn’t afraid to show you my darkness, because you meet it head-on with your own. That makes you so beautiful to me, Nova, the most beautiful being in the world, and I love each scar they gave you, but at the same time...” He swung back around to the man in the chair. “How dare you?”

He whispered it, but the words rang clear in the empty room.

“How could you have even dared to touch her? How could you have stood by while they did that to her? She was a child.”

The man in the chair straightened up and glared at me. “She was broken, defective. What good is an omega if she can’t shift? Fucking was all she was good for. I’m only sorry it was only the alphas who got to play. I’d have ripped open that whore’s pussy over and over—”

I felt his words like a knife in my heart, giving life to the whispers in my mind that had plagued me since I was young—worthless, ruined, broken. I was nothing.

Lucas looked up at me, his eyes bright, then turned and hit him across the face with the knife in his hand, so the handle connected with the guy’s cheekbone. I heard the crack and saw droplets of blood hit the floor.

“What did you call her?”

The man spat blood into Lucas’s face.

“She’s a fucking little whore, you fucking psycho,” the man sneered, though his voice shook.

Lucas leaned in close. “She’s my mate too,” he whispered.

I saw the blood drain from the man’s face.

Maverick tightened his grip around my shoulders and eased me backwards. “Time to go, Nova.”

“What?” I asked, looking up at him. His lips were pressed tightly together.