Page 129 of My Unhinged Alphas
I don’t know why I care so much that he hears me. I probably shouldn’t. But I do.
Maybe because he sounds like someone who’s been reducing himself to his worst acts for so long he’s forgotten there’s any other language available. Maybe because I know something about that too. Not the violence. The shrinking. The decision to make yourself smaller and uglier in your own head so nobody else can do worse.
I say, “I’ve spent most of my life feeling like a placeholder. Like the world just kept setting me down somewhere temporary and forgetting to come back.”
He turns his head toward me again.
I keep going before I lose my nerve. “So when you talk like that, like you’re only the worst thing you’ve ever done… I get it. More than I want to.”
He says my name once. Quietly. “Lena.”
I hate how much fits inside one word when he says it like that.
“What?” I whisper.
“You shouldn’t.”
“Shouldn’t what?”
“Understand me.”
I stare at him in the dark. “That’s not really something I can help.”
“No,” he says. “I know.”
The room goes quiet after that. Not empty. Just full in a different way. The kind of quiet that feels like it’s waiting to see which of us is going to break first.
I lie there with the blanket pulled up to my chest, staring into the dark where his face should be. I can only make out pieces of him. The line of his shoulder. The shape of his head on the pillow. That scar catching the weakest bit of light from outside.
He’s the one who speaks first.
“My father was a hard man,” he says. His voice is flatter than before. Less careful. Like once he starts, he has to put some distance between himself and the words or they won’t come out at all.
I don’t interrupt.
“He believed pain made people useful. That softness got them killed. That fear was something you beat out early, before it turned into weakness.”
My throat tightens a little.
He says it like it’s old weather. Like it was just the climate he grew up in.
“He wasn’t violent, not how you would expect an abusive father to look like. Mostly he was controlled. Cold. The kind of man who could ruin your day with one look and make you feel grateful he stopped there.”
I stare into the dark and try to picture him younger. Smaller. Trying to be good in front of a man like that.
“Was he military too?” I ask.
“No.” The answer comes immediately. “He just liked obedience.”
There’s something in the way he says it that makes my chest ache.
I turn onto my side a little more, facing him fully now even if I can’t see much. “And your mother?”
A pause.
“Gone early.”
I wait, but that turns out to be all I’m getting on that.
