Our Deceptive Heat (When it Raines Omegaverse #3)

9. Ryn

Chapter nine

Ryn

I find when you’re around, I can’t see the world anymore, all I can do is look at you- Ryn Raines

The second to last place I want to be is stuck on an airplane with Pack Fate. The first is back in that hotel room.

I shift my weight uneasily and note that every movement I make is being cataloged, watched, assessed. I feel like I’m being hunted. It takes me a moment to figure out who it is. It’s always him. Envy might be the quietest of the pack, but he’s got this aura that takes up all, and this alpha sees everything.

He’s always watching me.

I never know what he’s thinking. Once, his eyes on me were like a lovely caress, one I was addicted to. Now I fear it. Those eyes know far too much. They know how to destroy me.

I don’t want to be destroyed.

I want to live.

So I keep my eyes down and make notes in my new notepad, and I hate every second of using this book because it feels wrong. I want my notepad back, but I will not use it. There is no way I’m giving him the satisfaction. I saw how intensely Tyr stared at me after he made that revelation. He thinks it means something, and it absolutely doesn’t.

“So, the main issue with their marketing is Tyr.”

I jerk my head back to Tony and study him. “What do you mean?” Okay, so that comes out a bit sharper than it should.

“Tyr’s sister got in trouble a couple of months back. The photos have just started circulating.”

I take his tablet and press play, watching the newsreels. It shows Tyr coming out of a well-known brothel with a teenage girl wrapped in a blanket, clinging to him. He’d been in there all night, some of the girls confirm, shut in with the girl they call Sita and another older man. She screamed a lot.

I want to roll my eyes at the obvious bullshit. Tyr would never, ever do that.

I turn it off, not needing to hear anymore.

“The other man was a doctor, and she was back on the drugs again, wasn’t she?”

“Yes. Sita is twenty years old. Not underage, like they are inferring. He never had sex with anyone in there. In fact, he was in the doctor's presence the whole time.” Tony shakes his head. “Stupid girl.”

“Where is Tyr’s sister now?”

“Rehab.”

“Good. Can I assume the reason this hasn’t been squashed is because Tyr is refusing to sully her image?”

“Yes,” Tony growls. The old beta glowers at Tyr, who ignores us as if we aren’t even here.

“I’m surprised my father is being so calm about this.”

“Who said anything about calm? He lit the roof on fire. He shouted until he went hoarse and threatened to bury Fate’s Choice if they didn’t do everything you told them to do.” Tony pauses. “He also has a message for you.”

I glower and take his tablet again. An email is on the screen. I read through it as he tells me I am to essentially keep this band on the straight and narrow. We cannot afford to have anymore scandals like the Derision one. If I fail to keep them out of the headlines, then I can kiss my freedom goodbye.

I lean back, frustrated, and thump my head against the headrest. I forward the email to myself and delete it from Tony’s email.

“You did not read that,” I hiss.

“Of course, not.” Tony takes the tablet and puts it away.

“So, the problem is the poor reputations they are getting for being party animals, which, ironically, isn’t at all true. I mean, in some cases, I would be lying through my teeth, but the band spends time alone. They never bring betas or omegas home. They don’t drink, smoke, or do drugs. Fate’s Choice are boring but squeaky clean.” I summarize the notes quickly.

“Where there is an absence of trouble, someone will create it.”

I hum in agreement .

“Look, I’ve known these kids since they were born. They’re good boys.”

I glance at them out of the corner of my eye. Digs is smiling even with that ridiculous eye cover over his eyes, but Mako winks, and Envy meets my gaze in silent judgment.

“Are they?”

“You know they are!” Tony bites out crossly.

I flinch. He’s right to have a go at me. I’m not being fair.

“I know, sorry. My father’s email was annoying.”

“They need their image cleaned up, not squeaky like Derisions was, but a more mature pack that is settled.”

I sigh, wondering how on Earth to do that. “Let me think about it.”

“Thanks, Ryn.” He pauses and then glances at me. “How’s your mother?”

I cut him a quelling glare. Tony was present during one of my parents’ rages. Luckily, I was able to sneak him out and swear him to secrecy before my father noticed. If he’d have seen, I don’t think anyone would have hired him for the next fifty years.

“My mother is the same,” I say curtly, frustrated with his nosiness.

“Did you talk-”

I whip around, smiling with teeth. “Tony, drop it. My mother is perfectly aware and accepting of the consequences of her decisions.”

He huffs, turns back, and reaches for the glass of amber liquid the hostess holds out to him. I take my water and sit back.

Escaping my parent’s suffocating pressure is becoming a full-time job.

The flight isn’t a long one, but any time I get to leave Blackburn, the city my parents and I are residing in, it feels like I can breathe better.

But not this time.

With those four alphas sitting so close to me, there is no breathing. In fact, what I do feel is a great deal of regret and shame. My chest is tight. I have the urge to get up and walk to the door, open it, and throw myself out.

Sadly, not an option.

I inhale and catch their combined scents. It momentarily sends my mind blank before memories slam into me with the force of a changing tide.

Tyr sitting beside me, singing the words I wrote, bringing them to life. Envy smiling as he creates the music, his pale eyes sparkling as his fingers dance over keyboards. Digs lifting me up and whirling me around when they get their first number one. Mako standing beside me, an arm over my shoulder as we watch the sunset over the city horizon, and I look up at him, my stomach full of butterflies. He leans down, and I lean up.

In my dreams, the kiss is our first. In reality, he pulled back and apologised, ripping my heart out and leaving it on the hotel floor .

I shake myself out of that memory and look at the glass in my hand. All of that is over. I ruined it. I thought…for a second, I thought we might have been more, but I was wrong.

“Let me know when we’re landing,” I mutter. I put my drink in its holder, pull out my laptop and my earbuds, and start playing Derision’s last album so loud I can’t hear anything they say. Maybe I can figure out what it was about these songs that made the public fall in love with them.

I give myself one more furtive glance at the pack.

And then I force myself to focus on the work.

I slip away from them when we get to the hotel, taking my key but going to the lounge. I order a coffee and sit there, taking five minutes to breathe air that isn’t potently infected with their scented temptation.

“Are you running away?”

I tense and force myself to relax. “Envy.”

I wait in silence.

He takes a seat beside me and requests a coffee, too. “So are you?”

“Of course, not. I am my father’s daughter, and there is nowhere I can run in order to escape him, even if Kelly said he’s got three hundred islands.” I say the last part under my breath.

“Three hundred islands sounds like fun.”

“It would be a nice holiday. I can work on my tan.”

Envy is silent, nodding his thanks to the waiter who slides his coffee across the bar.

“I’m sorry that you have to be here, where it’s so painful. I campaigned against Tyr dragging you back into it. For what it’s worth.”

Envy has a quiet voice and a calmness that I admire. He’s shy and a complete introvert in public, and right now, I miss the version I know. I don’t want this polite version of him pointing out how many miles of distance lies between us.

I sip my coffee, scalding my tongue.

“You guys all look well, though,” I say. My words come out a bit stilted, a bit emotional, but he ignores it.

He shrugs out of his jacket, leaving him in a baggy black singlet with huge armholes. I can see the ink that curls around his ribs.

“We are well.”

“Well, good.” I drink some more and glance at him out of the corner of my eye .

He’s watching me. As he does, he brushes those snow white strands of hair behind his ears which are now adorned with a line of studs. I have to force myself to look away. He is temptation itself, and I am weaker than I even guessed I would be.

“Envy, what are you doing here?”

“I’m checking to make sure you’re okay.”

I glance at him and raise my brow. “I’m always okay. Look at me, totally cool.”

Envy shakes his head. “It never ceases to astound me that anyone actually believes that.”

I pick up my coffee and angle my body away from him, but that just has me looking at his reflection in the mirror behind the bar.

You could fall in love with Envy’s looks, his incredible cheekbones, those intense, almost ‘out of this world’ eyes, his plump lips. He looks like some kind of angel. But it was his kindness, intelligence, and soul that captivated me.

Right now, it’s the familiarity that I ache for. The old days where I would have leaned into him, and we would have laughed at whatever new combination of foods we’d tried recently. Not as close as the other members of the band, but friends. We would already be walking together towards the hotel room, eager to see the others, completely oblivious to the rest of the world.

“Everyone believes it but you guys,” I mutter and stand up. “Maybe it’s time you started believing it, too.”

He stands up with me, reaching out, his fingers encircling my wrist and preventing me from stalking away.

“Wait a minute, Auryn.”

I freeze, I would have anyway. All it takes is a fingertip on my wrist and my willpower evaporates.

Why did I have to fall for them? How stupid can I get?

“What’s wrong?” I ask him gruffly.

“You’re going to try to help Tyr, aren’t you? He didn’t do anything wrong-”

I snatch my wrist out of his grip. “I’m going to do my job, Alpha Fate. The one I’m damned good at. I have already read the doctor’s testimony,” I lie. “And I’m not dumb enough to miss that the girl is clearly Sita. Tyr’s sister is unmistakable.”

Envy swallows hard. “I’m sorry, it’s just-”

“You love your pack. Yes. I know. But I love,” you, him, them, the pack, “my job. On that note, I need to prepare, so I’m going to head up to my room and get to work.”

Envy growls, but I ignore him.

It takes everything I have to keep moving. To slowly put one foot in front of the other .

In my memory, Envy laughs warm and wild and so very alive. He slaps a kiss to my temple that surprises me into stunned silence and then sings my song. We’re drunk, and I’ve never seen him like this, but he’s like starlight, and I can’t look away.

It’s the first time I’ve heard him sing, and if he looks like an angel, he sounds like temptation and pure sin itself. My skin breaks out in goosebumps as I watch him, but he doesn’t take his eyes from me. It’s like he’s singing to me.

That was when I knew how deeply I’d fallen. That was the beginning of my end.