If Adam had been closer to my shop when I used my birthday on the keypad to call for help, if he'd killed Tim…I hadn't even considered the risks. I'd just known that Adam would come and save me from my own stupidity. Again.
Adam came out of the bathroom dressed in clean jeans and nothing else, rubbing his short-cropped hair with a towel. He dropped it on the floor and knelt beside the bed. Ben slipped off and went to stand by the window.
Adam's face was drawn with worry and weariness.
"I'm sorry," he said tiredly. "I'm so sorry that I forced you. I told you I'd try not to do that and I broke my word."
He reached out to touch me and I couldn't bear it. Couldn't bear that he'd apologize to me when I'd endangered him. When I'd betrayed him.
I slid out from under his hand before he could touch me and cowered on the far side of the bed. His face was very still as he let his hand drop to his side.
"I see," he said. "I'm sorry, Ben, you'll have to stay here a few more minutes. I'll find Warren and send him up."
"Don't be stupid, Adam."
Adam came to his feet and took two long strides to the door. "She's afraid of me. I'll send someone else up."
He shut the door very quietly behind him.
Ben stood in the middle of the room and used all the words he'd left out when he'd been speaking to me earlier. With a jerky motion, he pulled his cell phone out of the front pocket of his jeans and hit a button.
"Warren," he said, his voice tight, "would you tell our lord and master to get his arse back up here? I have a few things to tell him."
He closed his phone without waiting for an answer and began to pace restlessly back and forth muttering swearwords to himself. He'd begun to sweat and it smelled of anxiety and anger.
The door swung open and Adam loomed in the open doorway. He was so angry I came to my feet.
"Come in and shut the door," Ben said harshly, in a voice he really shouldn't have used to his Alpha.
Without glancing in my direction, Adam came in and shut the door with awful precision that was a strong indication of how close he was to losing control—if the way the brass doorknob deformed in his hand hadn't already been a clue.
As Adam walked to the middle of the room, I sank on the bed, not so much lying down as gathering my feet underneath me in preparation for running.
Ben didn't seem to notice how much trouble he was in. Or maybe he didn't care. "How much do you want her?" Unable to meet Adam's hot glare, he turned and stared out the window. "Do you want her enough to put aside your worries and hurt?"
There was something in Ben's voice…Adam heard it, too. He didn't exactly cool down, but he was paying attention. A different Alpha, one less sure of himself, would have already put Ben in his place.
Ben hadn't paused as he continued to talk in a quick, nervous voice. "If you handle this right, tomorrow, next week…she's probably going to be all pissy by then about how you forced her to drink that fairy shit. She'll take off a door from that old car out there—that old car that makes sure you always think about her even when you're cursing at her for spoiling your view." He looked at me and I dropped my ears. Adam's eyes weren't the only ones that had gone wolf. Before I could back away from him, Ben turned his attention to Adam.
As if they were equals, Ben took two steps forward and I saw that he was actually taller than Adam. "An hour and a half ago she was still puking that fairy shit that you and Mr. Wonderful poured down her throat. You heard Nemane. She said it would be a while before the effects wore off completely. And you are still holding her responsible for what she does."
Adam growled, but I could tell he was trying to hold on to his control and listen. After a moment he asked, "What do you mean?" in a fairly civilized voice.
"You're treating her like a rational being and she's still off in Fairyland." Ben was breathing hard and that stink of fear was growing—making it more difficult for Adam to control himself. But that didn't slow Ben down. "Do you love her?"
"Yes." There was no hesitation in his voice. None at all. And yet he'd seen…he must not have seen, must not have realized…
"Then put aside your goddamned self-loathing and look at her."
Golden eyes settled on me, and unable to meet Adam's gaze, I turned my own eyes to the wall as my stomach twisted uneasily.
"She's afraid of me."
"That stupid bitch has never had the brains to be afraid of you, me, or anyone else," Ben snapped with more force than truth. "Forget yourself and take another fucking look. You're supposed to be able to read body posture."
I didn't see it, but I heard Adam quit breathing for a moment.
"Damn," he said in an arrested voice.
"She crawled," Ben said. There were tears in his voice. That was wrong. Ben barely even tolerated me on the best of days. "She crawled to the bathroom to clean herself again. If it weren't for the two subs in the pack, I'd be on the bottom. And she wouldn't stand up in my presence for guilt."
Unable to take the scrutiny anymore, I slunk off the bed entirely and hid between the wall and the mattress.
"No, wait. Leave her alone for a minute and listen to me. She's safe enough there."
"I'm listening." All that anger had been swallowed until the only emotion I could smell in the room was Ben's.
"A rape victim…a rape victim who fights…They've been violated, made helpless and afraid. It breaks their confidence in the safety of their little world. It makes them afraid." Terror and anger and something else pushed Ben until he paced all the way to the bathroom and then back to the bed in quick, frantic steps.
"All right," agreed Adam in a gentle voice, as if he understood something I'd missed. Not surprising. After Ben pointed it out, I realized that I wasn't exactly firing on all four cylinders.
"If—if you don't fight. If the rapist is someone you're supposed to obey so you can't fight or don't think you can fight or they've drugged you so you…" Ben stuttered to a halt and then swore. "I'm making a muddle of this."
"I understand." Adam's voice was a caress.
"Fine then." Ben stopped pacing. "Fine. If you don't fight, it's not quite the same. If they make you help, make you cooperate, then it's not clear to you anymore. Is it rape? You feel dirty, violated, and guilty. Most of all guilty because you should have fought. Especially if you're Mercy and you fight everything." Ben's breathing was rough, his voice pleading. "You've got to see it from her point of view."
I crawled all the way under the bed until, still hidden in a fall of blankets, I could see their faces.
"Tell me."
"Samuel told you…told us that she'd flirted with that one. She hadn't meant to, but you don't always see it until it happens. Right?"
"Right," Adam agreed.
"Samuel said he told her that she better not do that in front of you."
He waited for Adam's nod to continue. "But she needs to help her friend and that means going to this man's house. It's all right, though, because there will be a lot of other people and she won't flirt because she knows that it's a danger. And she doesn't flirt. She behaves just like an interested guest—which is going to piss him off at her."
"How do you know she didn't flirt?" Adam asked, then in response to something I hadn't caught, he moved a hand in a negating manner. "No, I don't doubt you. But how do you know?"
"It's Mercy," Ben said simply. "She wouldn't know how to betray someone she cared about. Once she noticed, she'd stop and not start again."
He kept his gaze on Adam's face, but his head was canted so he was looking up into the Alpha's eyes rather than challenging him. "But she knows that she's skirting the line. She knows that you wouldn't like it that she went to his house…not that she's done anything wrong…but it feels that way." He started pacing again, but he'd calmed down. Now that he was talking about me. "I don't know why she went back again. Maybe he tells her that he knows who killed Zee, or that he knows something about O'Donnell or the stuff that was stolen. He would know, wouldn't he? He lured her to his house because he thought she posed a danger to him—or maybe just because he knew she had that damned walking stick that followed her around and he wanted it. Or maybe he just wanted to get even with her for rejecting him."