Blood and Mud

POV: James

James headed for the training grounds, hands shoved in his pockets, jaw still tight from the kitchen. Jack fell into step beside him a few seconds later, already running his mouth about something one of the younger warriors had said at breakfast.

"You should've seen his face when Marcus told him the bacon was gone." Jack grinned ear to ear like it was the funniest thing he'd seen all week. "Man looked like someone kicked his dog."

"Should've woken up earlier." James wasn't really listening. His head hadn't left the kitchen at all.

He kept replaying the way Trash's head had dropped the second he walked in. Quick. Automatic. Like a reflex she didn't even have to think about anymore. Years of training had done that to her. He tried not to think too hard about who'd done the training. He remembered the way she'd flinched when he said something about her smell, how her shoulders had curled in like she was bracing for a hit that never came.

Not that it was true. He almost smiled at that. She'd smelled like rainwater and woodsmoke, not filth, but she didn't need to know that. Some things worked better as leverage. Cruelty came easier when you didn't look at it too closely.

Christ. Get out of your damn head.

He was the one who'd given her that name in the first place. Trash. He remembered it clear as day. The two of them barely old enough to walk straight, him teasing her for the hundredth time about something stupid, her shoving him hard enough to send him face first into a mud puddle in front of half the pack's cubs. He could still hear the laughter that followed, sharp and delighted, and how fast it curdled into something else.

Worth it, though. Watching her face when she realized what she'd done. For one heartbeat, before everything went to hell, she'd looked triumphant. He'd almost admired her for it. That flash of fire in her eyes before it got snuffed out.

The other kids ran straight to their parents. Word got back to his father inside an hour, carried on frightened whispers and stories that grew teeth the closer they got to an Alpha's ears.

Alpha Bruce came storming out to the training yard. James remembered the exact look on his father's face when he saw his son crying in the mud, because Bruce hadn't asked a single question. No room for questions in that face. Just cold, immediate fury, the kind that made even the older warriors take a step back. He grabbed the girl by her hair and beat her in front of everyone, hard enough and long enough that she stopped making sound halfway through. James stood frozen, mud still dripping off his chin, unable to look away and unable to look at his father either.

Then, like she was nothing, his father threw her small body onto the compost heap behind the kitchens and walked off, wiping his hands on his trousers like she'd dirtied them just by existing.

I should feel something about that. I don't know what I feel about that. He'd asked himself that question more times than he could count over the years. Still didn't have an answer worth keeping.

James followed close enough to hear his father's order to the pack. No one touches her. She crawls out on her own, or she doesn't get help at all. The words settled into him like stones, heavy and permanent, though at eight years old he hadn't understood why they scared him more than the beating had.

He remembered watching from his bedroom window that night, unable to sleep, unable to stop staring at the still shape on the compost heap. The moon was thin, barely enough light to make out her outline, but he didn't dare look away. Like his watching could undo what his silence had let happen. Somewhere close to midnight, she finally moved. Crawled out inch by inch until an old Omega woman scooped her up and carried her inside to tend her wounds in secret, quick and furtive, the way people moved when they were breaking a rule they knew mattered.

He wanted to apologize the next day. He'd even practiced the words in his head, turning them over until they felt right. But when he found her, the look she gave him killed every one of them in his throat. Nothing childlike in that stare. Nothing that belonged on the face of someone his age.

It wasn't just the glare. It was the growl underneath it, low and rough, the kind that belonged to a shifted wolf, not an eight year old girl with no wolf yet to speak of. The sound crawled under his skin and stayed there. He remembered stepping back before he caught himself.

That's not supposed to happen. Wolves don't come until sixteen. Everybody knows that. He told himself that over and over, trying to make sense of something that made no sense at all.

He never told anyone what he heard that day. He wasn't sure why. Something in him just knew it wasn't his secret to give away, though he'd never have admitted that reasoning out loud, not even to himself.

His father made her apologize to him a week later. She did, every word dripping with a hatred so raw it startled him even at that age. He remembered the way her voice shook, not from fear, but from the effort of holding something huge and furious inside a body too small to contain it. That was the moment he decided something about himself. If she hated him anyway, he might as well earn it. His father approved. Praised him, even, for finally acting like an Alpha's son should, clapping him on the shoulder with a warmth James had craved for as long as he could remember. And every time Bruce's approval landed on his shoulders, James found a new way to be crueler to the girl who'd once pushed him into a puddle for being an ass. Chasing that same warmth again and again. Never catching enough of it to feel full.

Look what you built, old man. Look what I turned into. The thought came unbidden, bitter and familiar, an old wound he'd stopped bothering to bandage.

The Gamma's whistle cut through the memory and yanked him back into his own body, standing on the training grounds with the sun barely up and fifty laps waiting to be run.