3.1 | Animal Instinct ✓

13 | haunt

They broke him.

"Claudius locked you in," I whispered at last. "He locked you in and...your brother was there. And they didn't let you out, did they?"

Slowly, he shook his head. But it was absolutely impossible to miss the way a shiver wracked through him, a flicker of pain glimpsing his eyes before it was all gone in a flash. My breath caught in my throat and it felt like a different kind of heartbreak altogether, because he wasn't breaking my heart. No, it was more along the lines of feeling some inexplicable form of pain for him. For all the things he'd had to go through, alone, and he was just sixteen and couldn't do anything to stop it from happening.

"So that's why you killed him," I breathed. "That's why you wanted to take over Titan."

Jed nodded and lowered his head to write again.

I wanted to leave but couldn't, not when Titan was still in the hands of a sadistic man who raped and killed for fun. And I couldn't let Malthus continue with these twisted games either. To become an Alpha, the pack has to be handed to you or won from the previous Alpha. So in the years that followed, I taught myself how to fight. How to kill

He paused, his eyes flickering up to mine unsurely. I blinked. It almost seemed like he was waiting for me to veer away from him in repulsion once again, but the mere idea of that was ridiculous. Yes – killing was wrong. But killing monsters?

How could you possibly keep a perfect moral compass in the face of monsters?

When I didn't react, a fleeting look of surprise glimpsed his face for a moment before he looked back down and continued to write.

and how to numb myself to
when killing. When I was twenty, Malthus disappeared. We received word that one of the other packs, Aitne, had killed him. Everyone thought he was dead. Titan razed Aitne to the ground after that.

My goal in the following years seemed clearer then – the only monster I had to defeat was Claudius. I kept training, kept resisting, kept fighting – until I knew that I was stronger than him. I knew that I could kill him. It was so easy. But I was just so fucking terrified every time I came face to face with him.

Until one night, when he came into my room and tried to force himself on me again. And I was about to do the same thing I always did – fight him until he'd finally give up and realise that there were easier targets out there. But that night, he was sober. He looked me in the eyes and said, "You're never going to stop fighting me, are you? Just like your mother used to do until I finally won. Too bad she was dead by then and couldn't participate in my fucking victory."

Something in me just snapped and then I wasn't terrified anymore. I trailed him out into town and cornered him in an alley. Forced him to shift, all the while knowing that there wasn't a sliver of a chance he was coming out alive in that fight.

His revelation put a whole new light on the night we first met. He wasn't being a monster — he was riding the world of one. I watched as his grip tightened around the pen, knuckles white, as he continued to write.

I'm so sorry. I know that I'm broken. I've been damaged by Claudius and Malthus – more times than I can count, more times than I can remember. I'm the farthest thing from the kind of man you deserve and I would understand perfectly if you stepped out of that door right now and never wanted to

He stopped when I reached over and caught the tip of the pen, preventing him from writing another word. His jaw was clenched and when he darted his eyes up to meet mine, the hurt in them was almost physically painful. Shifting closer to him so that the table was no longer separating us, I gently pried to pen from his grasp and set it aside, before bringing his palm up so that it was resting against my cheek. I hadn't even realised that I'd been crying until he carefully brushed his thumb gently across my skin, his other hand reaching up to do the same to my other cheek.