Chapter Thirty-Five

Havermouth, Five Years Before

Aislen felt the buzz of the alcohol and drugs pass through her, the intoxication replaced by icy dread. She was shaking her head, even as Rhett and Cameron reached forward for her. Her coordination was not up to resistance, but she fought.

Her shrieks did not cut through the overloud music or conversation. No one seemed to even notice the Triquetra drag her through the party. If someone looked, they looked quickly away again.

“Don’t,” she pleaded, bracing her heels against the small step out of the house. “Please, no…”

Heath’s bared his teeth as he, Cameron, and Rhett tugged her over the edge onto the porch and out into the shadows of the front garden.

They threw her down in unison, so that the heels of her hands dug into the earth and grass. For a moment, with clarity, she thought that she had the chance to flee from whatever they intended to do, but then her hands were jerked forward so that she face-planted into the ground, the impact enough that she tasted dirt and grass… and blood. She explored her teeth automatically with her tongue.

She screamed into the ground, and someone’s hand closed over her mouth. Rhett held her wrists, and she saw the tangle of Cameron’s russet curls on the edge of her vision, so she knew it was Heath who dragged her underwear down her legs.

She sucked in air through Cameron’s fingers, her eyes wide meeting Rhett’s. Her intoxicated thoughts were awash with the chaos of theirs, nothing coherent, as nothing she’d absorbed through her telepathy had been coherent since that first inhalation of smoke.

She panted out through her teeth and closed her eyes as Heath thrusted into her.

Cameron’s hand released off her mouth as he was distracted by what Heath was doing to her. She felt Heath come and release her, and she rolled onto her back as the Triquetra released her, gasping up at the star-filled sky, its peacefulness failing to soothe.

Cameron took Heath’s position between her thighs. Over his shoulder, she could see the outline of people on the porch – there were onlookers. Rage rose within her. Those people would watch the Triquetra rape her, and no one would do a thing, because it was the Triquetra, part of the pack, protected, just as she had been warned they were… Not a single person would speak out on her behalf, no one would report it…

And yet, in the morning, the same people who had watched her shriek and fight it would call her a slut, a whore, who, somehow, obviously deserved it. Good girls wouldn’t be treated that way, after all. Good girls had immunity from male violence… until they didn’t. Until a male decided to strip that immunity away from them. And if a man did, it was her fault… her behaviour that had incited the violence, the assault… Her skirt had been too short, her smile too bright, her neckline too low. She had walked home too late in the night, down the wrong street, taken the wrong bus, gone to the wrong party, drunk too much…

Aislen’s fingers clawed into the grass as Cameron thrusted into her. “Your mother will die,” she snarled at him. “She will die, miserably, alone, with no one to hear her screams. She will drown, slowly, on her own spit and vomit, whilst you eat pizza and your father checks fences.

“You will go to bed, and not know that she is still gasping out her last breaths, frothing down her chin,” she saw Cameron’s expression change as her words sank in past his desire, his confused self-doubt as he wondered what to do.

His hips thrusted one last time and then stilled, but his face grimaced into orgasm, his body too close to release to stop the spill.

“As you sigh your way into sleep, she will die. There would have been time to save her, she would have begged in her mind, in the last moments of her life, for you or your father to save her, and she will die, knowing that you had not,” she said as he sagged over her. “That you had failed her when she needed it the most.”

“You really are a fucking bitch,” Rhett said, nearer her head. “What will you say to me, I wonder?”

She was weeping as she shook her head. “Please…”

There was a whirl of red and blue lights that washed over the front garden, and Rhett and Cameron between them dragged her over the grass, and then across the gravel of the driveway, scraping up the side of her thigh, and Rhett clasped a hand over her mouth as they crouched behind a car parked in the street.

As the police made their way leisurely up the pathway and onto the suddenly empty porch to knock on the front door, Rhett and Cameron hustled her out onto the pavement and in a frantic rush down several properties, until they reached the train tracks. She saw, briefly, groups of teenagers scatter along the road around them, but Rhett and Cameron took her down the underpass

and Rhett pressed her up against the wall.

He pushed up her skirts and lifted her thigh. She felt his cock against her entrance. “Rhett,” she breathed out in a plea. His eyes were black as he ground up into her, making her take him into her, both of them grimacing as her body fought against the invasion. His breath was hot against the side of her throat as he pinned her to the wall and took her. His hand grasped her breast, but not in a way designed to illicit pleasure for either, more in an effort to impress upon her that he could…

She sobbed in a breath; this betrayal somehow worse than any which had come before.

He came, grunting, his breath wet against her skin. Over his shoulder, she saw the streetlight cast Heath in shades of silver and blue as he strolled down towards them.

“What a fucking mess,” Heath growled, his wolf shining in his eyes. “This is going to fuck everything up.”