Chapter 15 – Theo
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THEO
“Get in.”
Arin’s office smells like fresh honey and mint leaves.
He looks rested for once, his eyes cutting me as he leans against his desk.
And then he just… stares .
I fucking hate when he does this. The anger helps clear the haze in my brain from the mix of their perfumes, the scents that make me want to charge back out and make her scream at me until I can remember why I hate her so much on principle alone.
“Go ahead, yell at me.” I glare at my prime, crossing my arms.
“No.” He pushes his hands into his pockets, his gaze narrowing. “You need to explain yourself to me, using complete sentences.”
I’m barely in the room, but it doesn’t help or abate the overwhelming swirl in my brain, two sides of me fighting tooth and nail with each other. There’s the side that knows a bad idea when it sees one, and there’s the alpha side of me, my hindbrain reacting to biology and scents and fucking pheromones . And the alpha is clawing, it’s howling, whining, trying to get out .
I made her cry. More than that — I reduced her to panicked whines — twice.
“I don’t like her.” I bite out the words, gritting my teeth.
“Don’t lie to me.”
“I’m not ,” I snap at him, but it’s plaintive, and my face screws up as I try to breathe through my mouth, not my nose. The honey coats my tongue, seeping down my throat, sinking into my fucking blood .
“You are.” Arin glances at me, and I shift, hoping my loose gym shorts aren’t giving away my body’s confused reaction. “You do like her, you only don’t like that you, for once in your life, find yourself wanting something you’ve insisted you can’t have.” His eyes flicker down, over my front, lingering on my shorts before he looks back up. “Wanting an omega .”
I want to spit at him. I want to rip his soft, black curly hair from his head. I want to shove him into the desk and break it. I want to crash his head into mine. I want my lips on his. I want him to put me on my knees. I want her between us. I — fuck .
Arin holds up his hand. “Do not speak right now, Theodore. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll stand there and listen to your alpha.”
The snarling inside me dies as quickly as it came on. The weight of his stare makes me want to hang my head and look away, but instead I clench my jaw and refuse to back down.
“You want something you’ve sworn off of since birth, since becoming an alpha, and that pisses you off, the same way it upsets her that the life she knew, the life she was living is now gone.” Arin says the words plainly. “You’re both mourning something lost — freedom. But what you both don’t recognize is that you can give each other that freedom back. It’s not out of reach, the way it looks has only changed.”
My jaw works as I growl, “I don’t want her.”
“ Stop lying to me .” Arin snaps, the bark rocketing through me, my tongue loosening as he sighs and cards his hands through his hair. “Fuck, Theo.” He looks at me, put out and sad . “How many years have we known each other?”
I clear my throat, unable to lie. “Twenty years, give or take a few months.”
We met when we were both teenagers, I was fifteen, Arin was sixteen. I was there when he emerged as an alpha, more powerful than any other I’d ever been around, on a shared family vacation with his rag-tag siblings. Arin’s sisters were always happy, his parents are stupidly in love , meanwhile I grew up only knowing the way my fathers constantly barked at my mother, reducing her to tears multiple times a day.
“I would think that those two decades have given me the right to say this.” Arin’s voice softens and I look up at him. “In all your attempts to get rid of her, you’ve turned into the very men you were trying to avoid becoming. You’ve become your fathers — terrorizing a woman who did nothing to you but exist. You might not have bonded her against her will and abused her, but you’re making her just as miserable as your fathers do to your own mother. And I’m incredibly disappointed in you.”
My stomach drops out of my body, nausea gripping me as Arin pushes away from the desk.
He rests a hand on my shoulder, turning his head. With the movement, his mint scent fills my senses, scorching the honey from my brain as he mutters, “But there is still time to fix this, if you’ll let yourself. Don’t fall prey to the same cycle you’ve spent your entire life outrunning.”
Arin walks around me, leaving me in the office alone as my eyes fall to the blankets on the couch. I walk over to them in a daze, picking up the one that normally lays on the back and folding it mechanically, filling my nose with the smell of honey and mint with each wave through the air. The second blanket smells the same as the first, with a hint of fudge, and I bring it to my nose, closing my eyes and inhaling deeply.
It’s the second time I’ve found her scent lingering on fabric — the laundry room has been saturated in it for two days, but I dutifully washed every single piece of clothing Seth brought down. I don’t have business this time in London — just Arin — but we all travel here to the townhouse when he does. We function as a pack — but now I’m terrified it’s going to fracture in my very hands.
Her perfume smells like our pack house in Rochester, like early mornings when the dew covers the grass and I can open the doors from the living room out to the pool deck. It smells like Bennett cooking breakfast for all of us, Seth lingering in the doorway and making fun of me, calling out random numbers instead of actually counting my laps in the pool. It smells like Arin pushing a mug into my hands, telling me to get out before I catch a cold from the crisp air. It’s the smell of all of us sitting in the living room, laughing over bad movies.
It’s the smell of my mother and I hiding in the back bedroom of my childhood home, watching old British murder mysteries. The only times I could see the true vibrancy of her personality was when my fathers weren’t there.
When I emerged as an alpha, Peter and George had looked at her and said, “ As useless to us that you are now, at least you gave us an alpha. We’ll make sure he knows his place. ”
And I’d sworn from that point that I’d never bond an omega — because growing up to be like them is a fate worse than death.