Overzealous Alphas

by Elizabeth Knox

  In this very moment all I can think about is my family, of what I can remember of them. My mom and dad, my cousin Ash who I never really liked all that much, but she was the only girl my age, so we kind of became sisters in a sense. She didn’t have any, and I didn’t either.

  With each pill I swallow from that small bag, I try to remember something good of my life before – before it turned into what it is today.

  If I am going to meet my Reaper, I am going to do it on my own terms, thinking of everyone that I loved.

  ***

  DAMON

  Amara was right, fuck. She was always right, though. I hated admitting that shit, but I couldn’t help it. At the end of the day, the last thing I should have done was go see her today. It was careless and stupid, ultimately, it could have ruined what I was here to do. Everything that I’ve worked so hard for could have blown up in my fucking face.

  As I pull back into the gravel lot of the club, I just have to be thankful that it didn’t. Rage had a pretty important meeting tonight, one that I wasn’t privy to join in on. I thought that the brothers would be here, but from the looks of it, they took their meeting elsewhere.

  It’s just past ten, still very early in the night for most of us. Usually we’re up until well past two in the morning drinking, but tonight, things are quiet. That doesn’t settle easily for me. Do they know where I was?

  “Hey there, Tiger,” I hear Verna talk to me the second I open the doors to the club. She’s one of the oldest clubwhores that Rage has. I hear he keeps her around, but I don’t know why. She has to be just a few years younger than he is.

  “Where’s everyone at?” I ask her, cutting to the chase. I don’t care about her advances, or whatever the fuck she wants. She can bother someone else.

  “They went out…mmm…about an hour ago. Kinda shocked Rage didn’t give you an invite, even the lil prospects went. You do something to piss him off, kiddo?” Damn, I went from Tiger to Kiddo real quick. That’s just Verna, she’ll use her brain to get whatever she wants, and I just cut the shit, meaning she did too. I can think of one thing I did that might’ve pissed him off.

  Kitten.

  I eye fucked the shit out of her. How could I not, though? She’s a fucking vision, even with Rage giving her drug after drug. The woman is flawlessly beautiful, olive skin, those dark brown locks that look black when the light hits her in just the right way, and don’t even get me started on those eyes. She’s been through shit, plain as day, I can see it. Everything about the woman is strong, yet something in those eyes of her call me to her. Flashing like a beacon. She wants help, even if she won’t verbalize it for me.

  I see what he does to her. Day after day I have to watch it, and I just can’t help it anymore. I don’t want to watch it, to see what he does to her. She deserves far better than him, I just hope that she realizes that.

  “Who doesn’t?” I retort back, making my way up the stairwell, down the hallway until I almost reach my room.

  I say almost because the door to Rage’s room is open, even though I try my hardest not to peek in, there’s just this force pulling at me. The next thing I know, I’m in the doorway, watching Kitten’s breathing. She’s on the bed, arm under her pillow and shaking. Immediately I want to drag the blanket on the end of the bed up and over her, so I do, walking in the room, grabbing the quilted blanket and pulling it up over her body. It’s just as I reach her shoulders that I see the baggy. It’s the same baggy that I gave Rage a few days ago, it had to have had at least twenty to thirty pills in it.

  I glance around, looking on the floor, looking for anything that could help me determine what I don’t want to believe she did.

  She takes drugs, but she doesn’t take that much…. she’d know better. With as much as Rage gives her she’d know better than to…

  Fuck. She did know better!

  She.

  Fuck. This is not part of the plan. I’m here to work, not to save the chick I dig from killing herself.

  I scoop her up in my arms, blanket in tow and dart down the stairwell. Verna is waiting at the bottom, arms crossed, looking me up and down with Kitten unconscious in my arms.

  “Well, well. What do we have here…looks like you’ve got something that doesn’t belong to you.” That’s it. I’ve had enough. There is no more Mr. Nice Guy coming from me.

  “I fucking dare you, try. You won’t even make it far enough to reach the phone you old bitch.”

  She laughs, cocking her head back. “Her being dead will do all of us a favor, you should really just let her die. It’s what she wanted after all.”

  I’m taken aback. How would Verna know what Kitten wants.

  “I’ll do a lot of shit, but let’s make one thing clear, letting her die isn’t going to be one of them.”

  I walk past her, opening the door to the front of the club, the last thing I hear as I leave is “Good luck. You’re going to need it.” Don’t I know it. This was never part of the plan. Shit.

  I put her in the passenger seat of my SUV, buckle her up, and then we’re on the way to the hospital.

  No way in hell am I letting her die.

  It will never be perfect. Make it work.

  -Life

  DAMON

  I hate hospitals, for as long as I could remember, I have hated their smell. The sterilized, clean smell of nothingness. It doesn’t smell like anything, besides one thing – death.

  If it wasn’t for her, you wouldn’t catch me dead in a hospital. Whenever I’m sick, I wait it out, or have some underqualified brother patch me up back at the club. Of course, the only time I’ve ever been in hospitals is when someone was dying. Even as a child I was never in one, not even when my mother had my brothers and sisters. I guess, in a way, that has to do with why I don’t like being here, they make me fucking nervous. Always have and always will.

  I stand next to Kitten’s bedside as the doctor comes in, demanding to know what she took. I know exactly what’s going to happen, shit, we’ve found our own ways of making sure no one overdoses. “What was it?” He’s privileged, I assume he even thinks we’re the lowest of the low, and he’s not far from being wrong.

  “Kitten,” I speak to her, at this point she’s awake. She begged me not to bring her in when I parked the car out in the lot. She said she was nauseous and tired, two of the exact things that’ll happen when you take an opiate. I know what she did, even if she won’t admit it. There were so many damn pills in that bag. She can sit here and try to fool me as much as she wants. At the end of the day, we both know what she did.

  She won’t look at me or even the doctor.

  “Vicodin. It was Vicodin,” I tell him, and he takes one look at Kitten and leaves the room. I imagine at this point he’s thinking of his game plan, how they’ll stop the damage from spreading.

  “How long has it been since you’ve taken them?” I ask her, settling myself onto the old chair next to her side.

  She turns to look at me, rolling her eyes and takes in a deep breath before she speaks. “I don’t know. A couple of hours, maybe.”

  A couple of hours. She was lucky I found her when I did, that it wasn’t late the next morning. I saved her life, and she’s acting like an ungrateful little bitch. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

  “Excuse me?” she hisses, glaring at me like I’m her worst enemy.

  “I asked what the fuck is wrong with you. Why would you try to kill yourself?”

  I watch as she takes in a deep breath, as she lets the air pass her lips, she finally answers me “What is the point in living?”

  “You have a lot to live for, Kitten. You just don’t open your fucking eyes and see what’s right in front of you. There are endless opportunities to get out of there, you just don’t take them.” Opportunities with me, that is what I should have said. I would do a lot for this girl. I don’t understand it, why I just want to swoop in and save her, but I do. If it came down to it, my job or her life, I know what I’d chose. And it wouldn’t b
e in the benefit of my father or my family.

  “Then where would I go? Hmm? He found me once, he’s bound to find me again and bring me back to this, to all of it. There is no safe place. Don’t you understand? I am trapped here. He…He took everything.” I listen to her closely, finding out more about her in this one conversation then I have the entire time we’re here.

  Rage took her. But from where? From who? Her comments rise so many questions in my mind. I will have my answers, they may not come today; but they will.

  “I can find a place for you,” I tell her, now putting myself out there a little more than I should. “My family can protect you.”

  “My own family couldn’t even protect me, Trig. I doubt yours has the capabilities to do so.” Internally I squirm at her calling me Trig, it’s not my name. It’s what I told them to call me. Trig is my fucking cover story. I just wish that I could tell her my real name.

  From the corner of my eye I can see the doctor heading towards us, he swoops in the room quickly and looks directly at Kitten. “I’m pretty sure you can tell that you’re not going to die today, and certainly not in my ER. So, here’s your options. You can either A, drink all of this yourself or B, I can have your friend help me hold you down as I shove a tube down your throat and force it into your stomach. Which is it, Missy?” He holds up the cup with the straw and with another hand raises a tube.

  Kitten looks over to me, “You couldn’t just let me die in peace, could you?”

  “She’ll take the cup. I’ll let you know if we need the tube,” I tell the doctor, and he hands her the Styrofoam cup, and she begins drinking the black liquid through the straw. He’s giving her activated charcoal, it helps the stop the toxins from harming her body any further. I only know this because my mother works with addicts. She’s told me a lot of shit.

  He nods, watching her for a moment and then leaves the room quickly.

  She grumbles something lowly.

  “What was that?” I ask her.

  She takes the straw from her mouth, scowls at me and speaks. “I fucking hate you.”

  “You’ll get over it. I saved your life, and I’m about to give you one.”

  “What in the hell are you even talking about?”

  “You said he took you. Well, Kitten, I’m about to take you back to wherever the bastard took you from. You’re welcome.” I add a smirk on at the end of what I’m telling her. She looks utterly shocked, as if she can’t believe what I’m telling her.

  I watch for a few minutes as she finishes drinking the black liquid, it’s then, and only then that she speaks.

  “I just wanted to die. That’s all I wanted, and you just had to swoop in and save me when I never asked for it.” A tear slides from her eye, slowly rolling down her cheek. I wipe it away with my thumb, bringing myself closer to her until our faces are inches away from one another.

  “How in the hell could I just let a precious little thing like you go?”

  “You can’t, because I’m still fucking here, asshole.”

  “Glad we’re on the same page. You’d better rest up, we’re not going back to the clubhouse.”

  My plan has gone completely sideways. There isn’t even anything left of a plan anymore. She needs me, even if she doesn’t admit it.

  She fucking needs me.

  I’ll be damned if I’m not here for her.

  I made a promise, and I don’t plan on breaking it.

  Sometimes when I say “I’m okay.” I want someone to look me in the eyes, hug me tight and say “I know you’re not.”

  -Curiano.com

  KAT

  I thought he was kidding. It turns out the man is just as much stubborn as he is stupid. He waited until the doctor gave him the all clear that I was good to go. Part of me thought that he was joking, that he wasn’t actually going to take me somewhere else, but oh, how I was wrong. He drove us past the clubhouse and out onto the interstate. We headed North, and I knew that Trig didn’t know where I was from. How could he?

  “He’s going to kill you,” I tell him.

  “Not if I kill him first.” He says it so calmly, as if nothing else matters. He’s not acting like a brother in the club. Instead, he’s being nothing but a selfish bastard right now. It was selfish of him to save me, to entrap me in a life that I wanted to be over. It’s selfish that I’m in this car with him driving North up into the unknown.

  “You talk a big game. We both know he’ll snap you into bits. He’s got people everywhere, all over the states. In that empty head of yours you know that there is nowhere you can hide me.”

  “You know, you might be right, but you’re forgetting one thing, Kitten.”

  “Don’t call me that,” I whisper, glancing out the window and looking onto the flat landscape we’re driving through. The farmers have recently cut their crop, before we know it, they’ll be planting seeds and doing it all over again.

  “What should I call you?”

  It takes me a moment, maybe even a shred of time longer to answer him. In reality, it shouldn’t take this long at all. I just haven’t said my name out loud for years. Honestly, I’m surprised that I hadn’t forgotten it. “Kathryn. My name is Kathryn.”

  Years. So many years have gone by without anyone calling me by that name, by my name. In a sense, I guess I assumed a new identity…but what happens now? I’m obviously not going back to the club and out of everything that I could have ever anticipated, it was never leaving the club alive. I always assumed I would leave in a body bag.

  So, I ask again, what happens now? Do I go back to being Kathryn…. Would I even remember how to be anyone besides Rage’s little Kitten.

  I’m not sure, but I guess it’s time to find out.

  “Where are we headed?” I ask, quickly looking over to him. I’m hoping, maybe even praying, that he won’t take me back to Montana.

  Trig has his poker face on really good right now, his eyes dart in my direction for a split second and then back to the road in front of us.

  “Home.” One word. He says one word and instantly I have red flags going off inside of me.

  “I don’t have a home anymore.”

  “Wrong. You had a home before he ripped you from it. That’s what you said, he took you. The answer couldn’t be clearer, I’m going to take you home, back to where you belong, because I’m pretty damn sure your family misses you as much as you miss them.”

  “I don’t miss them.” It’s true. I don’t. If I think really hard on it, I haven’t missed them in years. Missing them meant being disappointed in the fact that they never came to save me, to pull me from the prison I was condemned to. So, I stopped missing them. I stopped caring. Hell. I stopped thinking about them.

  “That’s bullshit, and you know it. You miss them. Damn, I miss my own family, even though all they are is a pain in my ass.”

  “Why are you even doing this?” I stammer out, refusing to look away from him. I don’t have a care in the world about all this other shit. I want to know exactly why he is doing this, helping me; if that’s what I want to call it.

  “Does it even matter? The point is that I am, whether you like it or not. Now, are you going to tell me where the hell I’m supposed to be driving, or are you just going to sit there the entire time and make me guess? If you think I won’t drive around all fifty states, you’re sadly mistaken.”

  “Forty-eight,” I correct him.

  “What?”

  “You said fifty. You can’t drive through Hawaii or Alaska, you’d have to fly. So, it’s forty-eight.”

  There’s a split second where I flinch, expecting him to reach his hand from the steering wheel and slap the shit out of me. I have to remind myself that I’m not in the car with Rage. I’m with Trig, and those two couldn’t be more different.

  Rage was an enigma. Even after years by his side I could never quite figure him out. When I was taken, he had assumed I was his flesh and blood, that I was his daughter and my mother was the devil for taking me away from
him. That had gone on for a few months until he had the idea to conduct a DNA test.

  That right there was the beginning of my demise, of my hell.

  Before that DNA test, he was different. In no way, shape, or form was Rage kind to me, but he was not the monstrosity that I came to know so well.

  There were times in the beginning, right after he discovered I wasn’t his daughter, where I was in denial. Everything that was happening, I didn’t want to believe that I was enduring it. The first time I was ever slapped, hit, bitten; Rage did all of those things.

  He took everything that he could from me, because he couldn’t take it from my mother.

  I was paying for not only her mistakes, but her sins.

  The first time I had sex, Rage fucked me.

  I say fuck, but I mean rape.

  He enjoyed it, every agonizing second he was snickering. I can almost remember the smell of whiskey on his breath, the awful things he had whispered in my ear.

  The funny thing about memories is how quickly the happy ones fade, and yet how you can never forget the horrendous ones. No matter how much you try, you will never forget them.

  Right now, I think this is the moment where I realize my life of confinement is over. After all, I’m on the interstate with a man who for some unknown reason wants to save me. For so long I’ve been past the point of being saved, and as I look at the scars on my wrists, slowly going up my arms, I wonder if that’s true. How could I be past that point if I’ve gotten to this one? There has to be a reason for me being in this SUV with Trig. I don’t know what it is, but I plan on finding out.