I stand up, stretching enough to crack my back and then jerk my head toward the living room. “Come sit with me,” I tell her.
She only hesitates for a second before nodding, following me to the couch.
Harper takes one end, fitting herself against the arm of the couch and turning so she’s facing where I sit in the middle. One leg gets tucked under her, and she holds her cup carefully, lips pursed as she blows across the hot surface before she can take a sip.
Something hot stirs inside me to see that. I swallow hard and look anywhere but at her mouth.
My eyes instead drop to the expanse of her neck and shoulder that are on display, and the bite marks that mar her otherwise beautiful skin. Any Alpha can tell what they mean, and I know Harper has her own hangups about them, but we’ve never really discussed it before. It’s always seemed kind of fucking rude to bring it up, but sitting in the quiet of the living room with her, I finally broach the subject.
“Do they hurt?”
She looks at me, and I nod to her neck.
“Not—not physically,” she murmurs after a bit. “It’s like I could almost forget they’re there if it wasn’t for the rest of it. The emotional pain, I guess.”
“What happened?” It’s a bold question. A big question. She’d be within her rights to tell me to fuck off and mind my own business, but that doesn’t stop me from wanting to know.
She turns her cup in her hands, pressing her palms against the hot porcelain before sighing. “I thought they were going to be it for me. I thought… I don’t know. They were a pack of three, and for a while, they seemed like the best things that ever happened to me. But that all changed, and it caught me off guard so bad. They rejected me, and that hurt more than anything else. Because I’d been so sure they wouldn’t. So sure they’d be on my side, and they’d accept me and Cora and all that came with it, because that’s what you do, right? When you’re bound to someone and you want to keep them safe.”
“They didn’t protect you,” I say.
Harper shakes her head, staring down at the cup. “No. Instead they told me to leave. Our bond was never completed, and I was left… like this.”
Just hearing her talk about it makes my blood boil. There’s an inherent power dynamic that comes along with Alphas and the Omegas who put their trust in them. To be an Alpha means protecting your Omega. Making sure no one hurts them and putting the fear of you into anyone who tries. That’s part of the whole fucking deal. But there are Alphas out there who just relish the power. Who let it all go to their heads and decide that they can do anything they want because who could stop them, right?
I grit my teeth, anger and fierce protectiveness warring inside me. I bite back the urge to demand the names of thesebastards who left Harper and her four year old niece alone in the world. That won’t help, and I don’t want to force her to go through bad memories any more than I already have.
“Those are the worst kind of Alphas,” I tell her instead. “The ones that only see the power and not the responsibility.”
“Like your father,” she murmurs, and it’s only half a question.
I nod. “Yeah. Some Alphas are not fucking cut out for the power and they get corrupted by it. Some of them were corrupt from the get go and just let the power make them worse. It’s disgusting, and it shouldn’t happen. That shouldn’t have happened to you.”
Harper swallows and nods. “Thanks.”
It doesn’t seem like enough to say that, and the urge to drag someone to a jail cell is still there, but I breathe through it and look for something else to talk about.
“What was your sister like?”
Surprise flashes in Harper’s eyes, followed quickly by something that looks like grief. But a smile touches her lips a second later.
“She was the best,” she says. “We looked a lot alike, same hair, same eyes, and our parents always said we got the same sly smile when we were doing something we knew we shouldn’t be doing. She was smaller than me, but she took up so much space in the best way, you know? When she laughed, you could hear it from anywhere in the house, but no one minded. Everyone was happy when she was happy.”
She takes another sip of tea, staring off into the middle distance. “There was this time when our dad dropped us off at the mall, so we could play at the arcade they had there. We just had a few dollars in quarters between us, and we burned through that pretty quick. I started getting upset because we hadanother two hours to kill and no money, and Jade decided to take matters into her own hands.”
“How?” I ask.
Harper smiles. “She found this group of boys who were probably a bit older than us, playing Skee Ball, I think? Anyway, she bet them that she could get a higher score than whoever they put up against her, and if she won, they had to give her the rest of their quarters. And they looked at this girl who wasn’t even five feet tall at the time and figured that was a safe bet, right? But she wiped the fucking floor with them. They weren’t going to make good on the bet, but I guess one of their moms was there and had been watching, and she gave them a lecture about not making bets you’re not prepared to follow through on and made them give it to us.”
I laugh at that, imagining a tiny, younger version of Harper and her sister at an arcade. “Sounds like she was fierce,” I say.
“She was. She made me brave a lot of the time. Brought me out of my shell because I was trying to keep up with her.” Something dims in her eyes. “So it was pretty obvious when the Alpha she was with started making her small. It was impossible to ignore it.”
“What?” I frown.
Harper blinks, looking like she didn’t mean to say that. “It’s—let’s just say that he was even worse than the ones I was with, and leave it at that.”
There’s something hunted about the way she looks now, and I can put two and two together well enough to fill in some gaps.