Page 27 of Prodigy & Tybalt
“Actually, I was thinking about cutting out their tongues for all the vile things I know they must have said about you, and then shoving those tongues down their throats until they choke on their own words.”
I stunned Tybalt into a moment of silence, and then his purr returned, as deep and loud as a motorcycle. “Damn, warrior. That’s the hottest thing I’ve ever heard.”
I tilted my head back to look at him, and my heart skipped at the hungry gleam of need in his eyes. I licked my lips, my mouth suddenly pooling with saliva, and his scent was so thick in the air that I could taste it, could imagine how it would be to tastehim.
“Do you have a torture room?” I asked, my voice a low sultry thing that betrayed how badly I wanted him.
“I—yeah. It’s a basement, but yeah. Why?”
“Is my buyer strung up in that basement?”
He paused for a moment, then seemed to read the expression on my face, saw the dark pleasure in my eyes. “For obvious reasons, I’m a little sensitive to people being sold.” His thumbstroked circles on my back, and I wished I could magically dissolve the cotton shirt to feel his hand on my bare skin. “I hoped he’d die after I beat the shit out of him, but when he survived, well… he hurt you. I’ve seen the bruises all over your body, warrior.”
When… oh, the first night, when Giant checked me over. “I told you not to look, asshole.”
“I turned away, but there was an unfortunately placed mirror. I saw your back. I saw a fucking bootprint.”
“I’m fine.” I wasn’t. The burning decay in my soul had overshadowed my physical injuries, but they were all there, screaming, punching deep into my ribs. My ankle still throbbed if I put too much weight on it.
“He deserves to suffer foryearsfor what he did to you. For having the fucking audacity to think he couldbuyyou, and then harming you when he should have treasured you.”
My purr deepened, sweetened. “Years seems like a long time to spend on a piece of shit like him.”
Tybalt shrugged. “I’m committed. I’ll make time.”
He was psychotic, but that only made my smile deeper. At least until I processed his words, his past. “I’m sorry the same thing happened to you.”
He shook his head, a few strands tumbling from the loose knot of his hair. “I wasn’t beaten. My buyer was a different sort of monster. She never hit me. Treated me like a prized pet.”
A deep, aching spike went through my heart, sitting alongside my rejection and shattered bond. “Tyb,” I breathed, feeling bad for asking.
“She had her own traumas, a fucked up mess inside her head, so when she heard about a family selling off their alpha son, she snapped me up for a great deal.”
I wiggled an arm free from between us and wrapped it around his back, clutching tight. “How old—”
“Eighteen. All fully legal and above board, except for the fact I was fucking sold.”
There was so much rage in him, so much hurt that it ate at him even now. To be betrayed by the people he should have trusted most… I couldn’t even imagine it. Even with my shitty uncles, and the cousins who talked shit about omegas and their place, they’d neversellme.
“She needed a purr, you see,” he laughed, a bitter, jagged sound that sliced deep into me. “To ease her nightmares, to shut up the voices in her head. A purr, and a growl, and a knot. It didn’t matter who they came from. I’m fine,” he said when a growl pumped from my chest. “That was eighteen years ago. I’m a grown ass man now, and the family I have now are a thousand times the people my biological assholes were.”
“Was she—the woman who…” I had to swallow the growl to speak. “Bought you. Was she your mate?”
“No.” Tybalt let out a soft laugh, almost self-deprecating. “I found my mate a year later. Ran into her in the street when mymistresssent me to do her fucking shopping.”
I reached up and pulled the tie from his hair, running my fingers through the damp strands, needing to comfort him. The omega in me was screaming, hissing, absolutely livid at the hurt that had been done to our alpha.
“I’d tried to run away a dozen fucking times by that point, all failed attempts. It’s hard to disobey an alpha’s bark, even when you’re an alpha yourself.”
“You were so young.”
“Yeah, that’s why it controlled me so well. That, and the fact I was already fucked up by my mum and dad. But that day, the rejection was so blistering and hot, so goddamn painful, that I could ignore the commands she’d used to cage me. I ran the fuck away.”
He’d skipped over the actual rejection part, and not spoken about his mate, but I had no right to press him on it. My own rejection was agonising enough; I didn’t want to put him through this, too.
I didn’t know what to say, so I just pressed tight to his body, running my hands through his hair, and purred.
“I had her scent all over me. Mymistress’s,”he spat, the word like poison. “It was like a contagion, like an illness that infected every pore in my body.”
