I feel everyone around me grow tense. Lug Nut hisses between his teeth.
“And then?” Hugo asks.
My throat hurts from all the words I’m scraping out of it, but I swallow hard and keep going. “After that, he showed his true colors. He didn’t need to pretend anymore, because he had us, and he knew it,” I say bitterly. “We had nowhere to go. Our mischief can’t go up against any other shifter pack for a territory battle. We’d lose. So we had nowhere else to go, and he had too much control over us by then, anyway.
“We couldn’t leave the apartments without permission. We couldn’t get groceries or gas or anything without his go-ahead. And he also started to act like we were nothing, like we were second-rate to the mongooses, and so they treated us that way too. We were just there to earn him money and that was it. Everything belonged to him. Our paychecks, our time, our choices. Whatever he said was law.”
“Typical asshole alpha bullshit,” the bald man says with a glower.
I nod. “I wanted to leave. All of us did. But by then, it was too hard. He had us right under his thumb. Someone was always around watching us, keeping us busy doing their shit, making them money—money that we never saw a dime of—and the few times that some of us did try to leave, he killed them.”
My throat clogs at the memory. Three of my mischief, dead and hanging from his animal’s mouth. “He was vicious in his mongoose form. He liked to toy with us.”
“So what happened?” Addie asks.
I meet her eyes. “I saw something I shouldn’t have.”
8
Reese
It doesn’t take long to tell them about the day my humanity was stolen from me.
It’s almost funny. The story that I’ve kept locked inside of me, it’s always felt too big for my mind. Like it was always spilling over like an overfilled cup.
It took over my entire life. It made me lose my sleep, my appetite, my life. And yet, it only takes a few scattered sentences to explain what happened. A minute’s worth of words, and it’s out. It seems so inconsequential. So small compared to the enormous impact it made on me.
I clear my throat and stare at the lug nut, turning it over in my fingers. “I came home early from my shift at the gas station where I worked—it was slow, so the owner let me leave. No one was around in the complex when I got there though, because everyone in the pack was still working. Except Sid.”
Later, I realized he planned that. He knew all of us would be working during that time. He used that window to his advantage.
I turn the lug nut around and around. I synchronize the turning with my breathing. It keeps me focused. Grounded. Reminds me that I’m here, not there. That I’m human, not a rat.
“I saw Sid meeting with a male shifter that I didn’t recognize. They were in the parking lot, and he had…” My eyes burn at the memory. “Sid had Karina, a young female mongoose who’d just come of age.”
“Fifteen years old?” Addie asks, and I note the angry flash in her blue eyes and the way her jaw tenses.
“Yeah. Except, there was something wrong with her. She wasn’t coherent, and her head was lolling around like she’d been drugged.”
Lug Nut curses under his breath.
“Sid sold her to that male. Like she was a piece of furniture at a yard sale. I saw the money exchange,” I recall angrily, my heart hurting for Karina, hating that I couldn’t stop it from happening. “I heard Sid say that he planned on telling the pack that she ran away with her human boyfriend. Sid hated that she’d been caught hanging out with a human. In the end, I guess he figured he’d punish her by selling her off. And I...”
The alpha continues to watch me, taking in every word. “You got caught.” Not a question, but I nod anyway.
“Yeah.” I blow out a breath. “When I saw her being put into the back of the car, I lost it. I ran forward, yelling, but Sid grabbed me and dragged me inside. Karina was taken away, and I was a mess. I threatened to tell the entire pack what he’d done. Even his loyal mongooses wouldn’t have stood for that. And it made me realize that others in the pack who’d gone missing had probably been sold off too. If the rest of the pack found out...there would’ve been a challenge. Sid needed to shut me up. He didn’t want me to rat him out,” I explain, echoing his previous words to me.
“He forced me to shift and stuffed me in an old paint bucket with a hole drilled through the lid. He said if I was going to act like a rat, I might as well be shifted into one.” Hate and regret burns my throat almost as much as the years of disuse. “I tried all night, but I couldn’t shift back. Sid gave me to Rick the next day. I’d never seen him before, but he had an agreement with Sid. I’ve been with him ever since, trapped in my rat form. I knew that one day, Sid would come back for me and kill me. Once he thought I’d been punished long enough, he’d end me. Sid believes in long-term suffering.”
“And Rick? Was he the man who brought you into the pet shop?” Addie inquires.
I shake my head. “I’ve never scented that man before, and he was human. Rick was a shifter—a bat. He would go on binges a lot where he wouldn’t come home for days at a time, but this...this was the longest he’s ever been gone.”
The truth of what I don’t say hangs in the air—of how close I’d come to starving to death. Now in my human form, I can see just how thin I am. The curves I used to have are gone, replaced with jutting bones and thinned limbs.
I look at Alpha Hugo. “Sid will know that my alpha bond broke. He’ll come looking for me.”
Instead of seeming worried or irritated by that fact, Hugo simply nods, like he expected nothing less. “Then you have a decision that you’ll need to make sooner rather than later.”
“What decision?”
“Whether you want to stay and be a part of our pack or if you want to leave.”
My eyebrows shoot up in surprise. “You’d...you’d actually let me stay? After everything I just told you?”
I can’t believe this. No alpha would let an unknown shifter come in and bring that kind of trouble to his pack. He has no loyalty to me, so why would he even offer such a thing?
“Remember the thing we told you about baggage?” Addie says to me. “Our pack is kind of a haven for shifters like us who find themselves out on their own. We all have stories like you. But you have to decide if you want to stay and be a part of the family or not. There’s no half-assing it. If you’re in, you’re all in with us,” she tells me seriously. I can practically feel her fierce loyalty like the lick of a flame. “But in return, we’ll be all in with you.”
Overwhelming gratitude fills my chest. “That’s...amazing.”
This pack, these people, they’re nothing like my old pack. Not even before Sid, when it was just me and the other rats.
“What kind of challenge would I have to face if I stayed? Does every pack member get to challenge me?” It’s a valid concern. I’m not a predator animal, and I don’t have any experience fighting in my human form. Plus, I’m weak right now.
In my old mischief, I used to have to hold my own whenever there were challenges thrown around for pack hierarchy. But those fights were against other pack rats, and even so, I was never good at it. I lost. A lot.