Page 56 of My Unhinged Alphas
Then he brings the strap down across his own back.
I stop breathing. My stomach turns so hard I nearly gag. A chill rushes over me, but at the same time my face burns. It feels too intimate, too disturbing, like I’ve walked in on something I was never meant to see. Something private and ugly and full of pain. My skin crawls. My mind tries to reject it, to tell me I’m seeing it wrong, but there’s no other way to understand it.
He’s doing this to himself.
Why?
The question hits me and makes everything worse.
Because I don’t want to know the answer. Because no answer is going to make this place feel less twisted. Because every single thing I learn here just proves I’m deeper in something rotten than I realized.
I take a step back, ready to get out before he notices me, but my sock catches slightly on the floor. The smallest sound.
Vale stills. The strap hangs at his side. Slowly, he turns.
The moment he sees me, something changes in his face. He looks stunned for a second, like he can’t believe I’m there, and then it gives way to something heavier. Shame, maybe. Regret. I can’t tell. I don’t want to. I grip the doorknob so tightly my fingers ache.
He drops the strap. “I’m sorry,” he says. His voice is rough, low, like he hasn’t spoken in a while. “For before. I’m sorry.”
I can’t answer. I’m too busy trying to make sense of the marks on his back, the look on his face, the fact that this man, who always seems so composed, so controlled, was standing here hurting himself in the dark like some kind of punishment would fix whatever he’s done.
He takes a step toward me, and I flinch hard before I can stop it.
He freezes at once. “I’m not going to hurt you,” he says.
That should help.
It doesn’t.
Because nothing about this is helping. Nothing about this is normal. I don’t know what kind of apology this is, or what he thinks it changes, or why it feels like I’ve just walked into the middle of a wound I don’t understand.
“That’s what everyone keeps telling me.”
I hate that part of me reacts to the apology at all. Hate that he sounds sincere. Hate that he looks like he means it.
“I need to go,” I whisper.
His gaze moves to the doorway behind me, then back to my face. He seems to be thinking fast, measuring something. “You shouldn’t be here alone.”
A disbelieving laugh escapes me.
Of all the things to say.
His face tightens. “That came out wrong.”
Everything here is wrong.
He comes a little closer, slow enough that I know he’s trying not to frighten me, but it doesn’t matter. Every instinct in my body is screaming now. I don’t know if I’m more afraid because of what I saw, or because some part of me can see that whatever is happening in his head right now is real.
“I was trying to keep my distance,” he says quietly. “That was a mistake.”
Before I can respond, before I can decide whether to run past him or shut the door in his face, footsteps sound in the hall.
Then the door opens wider, and Havoc appears. He looks from me to Vale in a single sweep, taking in everything. Me standing frozen by the door. Vale half-dressed. The strap on the floor. The silence in the room.
His mouth curves slowly. “Well,” he says, “this is interesting.”
I turn the second Havoc appears. No thinking. No planning. Just instinct.
