“He was a sick, twisted psychopath. He said he loved my mother, but he was obsessed. He couldn’t let her go, not even when she tried to run. And she did run, Chloe. She ran again and again. She took me and my brother and fled with us. But he kept coming after her.” He paused. “It’s not easy to escape a werewolf, especially when you’re a human and the alpha wolf has your scent.”
She reached out to him. “Connor, I’m sorry.” Her fingers curled around his arm. His muscles were rock hard beneath her touch.
“The last time he found us…she put me and my brother in a closet. She was trying to hide us, and she was terrified. I can remember seeing the tears on her face. She wanted us to stay quiet. My mom…she said if we stayed quiet, we’d stay safe.”
She didn’t want to hear the rest of this story.
“I was so young, so damn little, and I didn’t like the dark.” His voice had gone hollow, all of the emotion bleeding away. “I ran out. I-I screamed. He found me. He found me and mom, and then he killed her right there.”
She didn’t just hold onto his arm then. She threw her body against his and held tight. His voice was so emotionless, but Chloe could feel his pain. “I’m so sorry, Connor.”
“It was my fault. If I’d just kept my mouth shut. If I’d stayed in the dark…”
“No!” She was adamant. “You were a child. Anything that happened…that was on your father. You didn’t cause her death! You didn’t!” She tilted her head back so she could stare into his eyes. “Connor, you’re a good person. You’ve helped me all along. Put yourself at risk and—”
“David Vincent was right about me.”
“Stop it,” Chloe whispered. She didn’t let him go.
“I spent my life in my father’s pack. That Keegan bastard has nothing on my old man. I saw things…” He shook his head. “I’ll never be able to forget them. And my father couldn’t abide a weak son. He was determined to make me stronger, no matter what.” He backed away from her. “Ian McGuire didn’t raise the weak. He killed the weak.”
She wanted to reach out to him again.
“When I got away from that bastard, I changed my last name. Went back to using my mom’s name, Marrok. Because I wanted nothing of his. But I couldn’t escape him. Not really. I’ve always carried his mark on me.” Connor lifted his shirt. He stripped it over his head and threw it to the floor. The light hit him then, falling right on his powerful chest. The muscles rippled. The muscles, the golden skin, and the scars…
So many scars.
“Werewolves can heal, so can vampires, but my father marked me when I was still a child, long before my first shift.”
She had to blink away tears.
“Every time I didn’t fall in line, every time I fought, every time I tried to get away, he’d use his claws.”
There were so many scars on him. Too many to count.
“When I stopped fighting him, when I acted like the f**king psychotic wolf he wanted me to be, he stopped peeling my flesh away.”
“Stop,” she whispered.
He didn’t. “When I was his wolf, I did things I never want to think about.” He swallowed. “But one day, one f**king day, I got away. I left him. I was alpha on my own, and I wasn’t ever going to bow down to anyone again.”
“What happened to him?”
“Don’t you know?”
She waited, wanting him to tell her.
“From what we can tell, he was in on the plot with your father. Senator Quick was rounding up as many werewolf allies as he could get. Purgatory was originally a set-up. Quick wanted the most powerful paranormals brought together because he planned to use them all. My sick old man was another of Quick’s pawns.” His lips curved in a grim smile. “But my father didn’t make it out of Purgatory. He died there, and I got to see it all go down.”
She shivered.
“That’s who I am, Chloe. I’m not some safe guy that you can fool around with. Me, jealous? That’s not what you want. That’s not what anyone wants. Hell, I know I’m dangerous. Because I’m more like that bastard than I want to admit. What if I snap one day? What if something pushes me over the edge?” Now emotion was breaking through his voice. “I already do want you more than I should, but, baby, I am my father’s son.”
She stared at all of those scars. So many scars, all on the outside, easy to see.
“My scars aren’t on the outside,” Chloe confessed.
“Chloe?”
“He never left scars on the outside. Reporters might have seen them, and my father was far too smart to make a mistake like that.”
He’d shared his past. And hadn’t Connor said before…if one shared, the other would, too? Such an exchange of past pain only seemed fair.
“Donald Quick was charming. He was handsome. He always knew just the right thing to say to the right people. You looked at him, and you wanted to believe every single thing he said.” Even though his words had been lies. “But who he was in public, that man wasn’t anything like the guy I saw in private.” A man given to screaming rages. A man consumed by the idea of power—power that would come from being a werewolf.
“My mother ran away when I was a child. She fell in love with someone else, and she just…left. But she didn’t get far. For years, I believed that she’d been the victim of a hit and run, but, on my eighteenth birthday, he told me the truth. He’d killed her. Because she wanted to leave him. If I tried to leave—because then, I was so sick of his rages and the constant tests he was doing on me—he said he’d do the same thing to me. You see, no one could be allowed to humiliate the senator. No one.”
And right then, Chloe made a decision. She’d already been thinking about what she would do to save Harris. And now she knew what she had to do to save herself. To keep that little bit of soul that she still had.
Everyone deserved some happiness, even if that happiness was fleeting.
Keeping her gaze on Connor, Chloe stripped off her shirt. She shed her jeans. Then she stood before him in just her bra and panties. There were no scars for him to see on her body. After his hell, the wounds to her emotions would seem like nothing.
But…
“I think you and I are more alike than you realize,” she told him. “We’re alike, but we are nothing like our fathers.” Because she had made that vow to herself. To do anything necessary in order not to wind up being as twisted as her father had been, especially in the end. “Can I tell you a secret?”