Page 44 of Rabid
His brown eyes level with me. “Oh, really?” He waves a hand in front of my face. “Then why do you flinch every time I look you in the eye?”
My breath catches in my throat, stunned that he noticed something I hadn’t even realized I was doing. “Everyone looks at me and sees this,” I reply, pointing to my broken iris, the pale blue warring with the gleaming violet of my wolf. “Twin Rivers fucked me up.Ifucked me up. And now Rabid is all I see.”
“So what if you’re rabid?” Tyran demands without a hint of sympathy. “You’re a fuckingwolf. Stop thinking like a human. Someone wronged you and your wolf spirit? Then get revenge. Don’t walk around battered and bitter. Show them who they should have never fucked with, and be proud of that savage spirit inside of you. Fuck your old pack.”
“Oh, like it’s so easy to get revenge?” I challenge, my voice irate and yet dripping with desperation.
“You’re a wolf, aren’t you?” he counters as though that’s all there is to it.
“I wasonewolf,” I shout, slamming a fist against my chest, my features bathed in vehemence, my soul drenched in pain. “I could barely stop my alpha from trying to rape me in the middle of my Flux. I couldn’t stop him from drugging me and tossing me here to die. I couldn’t stop him from murdering my mom or setting up my dad to be killed in the pack war,” I seethe at him, voice cracking. “How do I get revenge when I don’t even know how to fix myself?” I demand, wishing I knew the answer to that question with every fiber of my being.
“You don’t need to be fixed!” Tyran shouts back at me, his eyes livid and his muscles taut with anger. “Accept what you are and use it to strengthen you. The transformation with your wolf is done, it’s ancient history. Now change how you’re looking at it!” he snarls in my face, his breath hot and his words leaving no space for excuses.
I’m so lost, but I can feel the map in what he’s saying.
“How?” I ask, despising myself for the weakness spilling out of my mouth.
Tyran presses in against me, my pebbled nipples compressing against the heat of his skin. His body is hard against mine, as unforgiving and rigid as his words, and even though I don’t want to admit it, there’s a comfort to his presence.
“Stop fighting what you are,” he tells me more quietly this time, his deep voice vibrating through me as though it’s settling the pieces of myself that I haven’t been able to put together. “Stop denying the truth of what you are.” Fathomless brown eyes soak me in, hard, honest, reading me as though my story is one he could dive into over and over again. “You are claimed, Vicious.”
I open my mouth to argue, but the flint in his eyes shuts me down.
“You participated in the claiming hunt. You might not have had it all spelled out for you, but if you’d listened to your wolf, you’d have known. We’re instinctual, and your wolf chose me for a reason.”
My face flames with the heated denial, but he doesn’t give me room for argument, doesn’t give me a moment to turn it around back on him.
“You hate Ruin Falls, when you don’t even fuckingknowmy pack. You’re pissed off at your circumstances, wanting to pretend that you had no choice, but what’s your plan when you reject everything that’s being offered to you?”
“I’ll fuckingleave,that’s my plan,” I retort, but the outrage is hollow. Just a mask for the uncertainty I feel, while he shoves reality at me hard enough that I barely feel like I’m hanging on.
“And then what?”
My mouth opens and shuts, mind racing, though I’m unable to form words because…
“You have no idea, do you?” He shakes his head, brown hair mussed in the wind, shoulders bunched with tension. “You were going to just go out and be a lone shifter in some piece of shit town, with your wolf half-rabid and you without any kin or resources? You’d have gone crazy within a year trying to pass as human, and probably killed some innocent in the process. All because you’d rather run away than face things and be something better than this moping, spoiled little shit you’re acting like.”
My entire body bristles. “I’m not accepting this claim. I hate you.” The venom spat from my mouth doesn’t even make him flinch. Instead, my own stomach writhes, because he’s right.
He’s fuckingright.
“No, you don’t. Who you really hate is yourself, and yeah, your old pack wronged you, but look around. You ever consider thatthispack might be exactly what you need? All of this could anchor you. My claimcould anchor you, if you’d just let it.”
All I can do is gape at him because...no. I didn’t consider that.
Is he right?
Tyran shakes his head, like he can’t contain his disappointment for my own shortcomings.
“You have so much right at your fingertips if you’d just take it. You don’t know how to get revenge? You just got fucking claimed by the most ruthless alpha on this continent. Do you think that was by chance? My wolf hasn’t ever wanted to claim a female. No one was savage enough for him, untilyou.” His eyes bore into me. “Use it.”
My breath catches as he suddenly digs his fingers into the bite in my shoulder, pressing right over the punctures. Pain and pleasure shoot down from the marks, and like a dam breaking, my eyes well up with the tears I’ve been suppressing for far too long.
I can’t breathe, can’t move as he grounds me in his dominant presence. “My wolf and I saw something in your spirits last night. But we don’t wantthis,” he says, his arms gesturing to the cliff’s edge we’re both standing on. “We don’t want the shame and the doubt. We don’t want your insecure, pitying weakness.” The growl in his voice grows rougher with each acidic word. “Welikeyour rabid. Weneedit. I want all of what you are and could be if you’d just embrace the broken parts of you and use them to cut down everything that stands in your way. But if you can’t do that, if you can’tbethat, then you’re right, you’re not claimed...because you’re not the wolf I thought you were.”
Twin streams of anguish fall from the lower lashes of my eyes, but Tyran doesn’t soften, doesn’t relent. His words storm at me, all vicious lightning and deafening thunder, too potent and powerful to ever be denied.
His hands drop, leaving my claiming marks pulsing with the echoes of loss. “Decide what the fuck you want and who you want to be, and then come find me...or go run away with that tail tucked between your legs. I won’t stop you.”
