40. Maddock
Maddock
“Look, you're killing me with this death glare. Can you just talk to me instead of staring a hole in my cheek?” Jaxx turns to me, glaring straight back.
I don’t want to shout at him in front of an audience, but I don’t think I can stay still when he’s just standing there like everything is normal when he has scent matched with my omega.
She's still out on the track, and she's done about twenty laps, but even watching her drive a hundred laps doesn't stop me from feeling on edge.
It isn’t as if he’s playing around with her like all those other omegas. The scent match basically cements him in her life. Unless she rejects him. But I saw the way they were looking at each other, and there’s no way she’s going to cut him out.
It might even go in the other direction, and the thought of her bonding with Jaxx and not me makes me want to punch him even more than every single other time since we met.
“What’s going on between you and Harmony?” I say through gritted teeth.
His face instantly lights up, and he claps his hands together.
“Ding ding ding! Look at you, Maddock Harrison, finally asking the right questions!”
“Fuck off, Jaxx. I’m being serious.”
“So am I,” he chuckles. “It took you long enough. Or did Harmony spill the beans?” He arches a brow, and I end up glowering at him.
“Forget about it,” I say. “There’s no point in talking to you.”
“No, there really is a point. Because if we’re going to be pack, we need to start getting along. Which means fixing the way you scowl every time you look at me.”
My heart suddenly plunges down into my stomach as I fully turn to look at him.
“What the fuck are you talking about?” I growl.
“You heard me. You know what I’m talking about. I wasn't joking around earlier. I offered her a bite. She might have said no this time, but we’ve got a sort of magnetism she can’t deny.”
I look at him with wide eyes, trying to keep it together, because it feels like my heart’s breaking and he has barely said anything.
When Harmony and I were dating, I'd promised I’d bite her when the time was right.
And when I won the championship title. But neither of us could ever find the time to have even a week together.
I was always busy with publicity and interviews, she was focused on training, and it just sort of slipped us by.
Until I was left wondering if she would have stayed if I bit her.
If I’d become her alpha in every way I could, would she have wanted to keep being my omega?
When she said she was leaving racing, it instantly felt like she said she was leaving me. And from there it only took months and she was suddenly walking away with her suitcase in hand. Our lives centered on racing. So, what did we have if we didn’t train and compete?
“Maddock, I’m making it clear to you now that I’m going to bond with her. We haven’t really talked about our future, but I’ll bring it up, and then you have to decide if you want to be in a pack with me, or if you’re going to spend the rest of your life looking like that.”
He points straight at my face, and I can only imagine my expression, because Jaxx Sands is the last person in the world I ever want to be in a pack with.
“It’s up to you.” He shrugs as if he’s completely innocent. “Either you and Harmony get yourselves sorted out, or watch us live nice and happy with our pack.”
I look at Jaxx, trying to catch up with what he’s saying. Jaxx may look like he jokes and flirts all the time, but he’s a smart guy, even when he tries to hide it. And he knows exactly the right words to say to piss me off. He’s been doing it since we met.
So he wouldn’t make some kind of slip-up like that. He didn’t say ‘me and Harmony’. He deliberately said ‘pack’.
“Is there another alpha?” I ask, and his grin turns even wider.
“Oh, I wonder.” He gives another one of his annoying shrugs. “Maybe if you’d made an effort to get over yourself, Harmony might have let you in on that little secret. But I guess you’re both going to be stubborn until the end.”
“It's not about being stubborn,” I growl. “She's the one who won't talk to me.”
Jaxx clicks his teeth, and I’m surprised to see him scowl, too. “You don’t know how good you’ve got it, do you?”
“What the hell do you mean?” Jaxx is the one Harmony is so attached to.
It's been three years of waiting for her, and suddenly he’s the one she moons over.
He’s the one who got to be with her when she stepped out of the car smelling like everything that I’d dreamed of for so long.
If she has to choose between anyone, Jaxx will be the one who will win in the end based on his smile alone.
“There’re conditions for Harmony forming a pack, even if she hasn’t realized it yet.
And you’re it, Maddock. There’s no way she’s going to be with us unless you get your shit together and make a move towards resolving whatever happened between you two.
I can blab at you all I want about how I feel about her, but she won’t make a decision about being a pack unless she knows you’re there with us too. ”
I’ve always regretted the way Harmony and I left things, and I've spent endless hours thinking of all the ways I could apologize to her.
I could list out the things I did wrong, the ways I could be better, and what I could do to make sure she was the happiest omega in the world.
I'd never talk to her about racing again if that's what she wanted. But I’m not sure I have another chance with her anyway.
“Do you really think that?” I ask him.
“I think if you pull your finger out and stop acting like this all the time, maybe we have a shot at actually going somewhere with our omega.”
I open my mouth to reply, but Jaxx suddenly slaps his hand against my arm, gripping me hard, shock bursting on his face.
“Something’s wrong,” he hisses.
I snap my head to the track, instantly searching for her car. It has to be Harmony; I can’t think of Jaxx looking like that about anyone else.
I glance at the comms booth, and everyone apart from the director is staring at the screens intensely.
We can all see it. It isn’t just because the director is basically performing acrobatics in the air as she races towards us.
I’ve watched Harmony drive since she was seven, and I know her style as much as I do mine.
But anyone can see from the way she keeps slowing down and picking up speed, how she keeps swerving on the corners, even how she keeps hesitating on the straights that it isn’t right.
“Are they going to keep making her drive like that? It just looks dumb,” Jaxx growls beside me.
“I don’t know. I don’t like it. Jacob should have stopped them by now.”
“Go and complain to them then, get them to pull her off.”
I pause, looking up at him, expecting him to be grinning at me like he’s making fun of me, but his expression is just as serious as mine.
I don’t know whether we can actually make them stop.
But my alpha senses are telling me we need to get her out of that car.
The shoot was too unplanned, and the stuntmen driving behind her need at least another month on the track if they’re going to pull off the kind of moves we can see them going for.
From the way Jaxx is switching his weight from one foot to another, he’s just as anxious.
We take off running down the stands. We’re nearly at the comms box when we hear the screech.
She’s just in our line of sight, close enough for us to hear the director yell from the tent, hear the shouts from the crew, and watch as a stuntman hits her and sends her hurling over the gravel to smash into the barrier.
And the world goes silent as the entire car crumples. The nose flies one way as the tail flies the other; a lone wheel rolls away as the main body of the car mashes up against the stacks of tires that cushion the blow.
It’s like a silent scream ringing inside me as Jaxx and I fling ourselves through the barrier door and keep running.
Until the fire starts. And the quiet ringing in my ears explodes into pure terror.
The stuntmen in their cars try to stop, but there’s no way they can manage it, and another pair slams into each other, both of them sailing in different directions. But none of them hit the barriers, and the worst damage looks like a broken wing.
But Jaxx and I keep running towards them. She’s so far away it feels like it’s too late as the fire picks up and the safety team reaches her first.
By the time we get there, they’re already spraying foam onto the car. An on-site ambulance pulls up as the other racers get themselves back to the pits and out of the way.
Another member of the safety crew has dived into the flames and is already peeling her out of the car.
And my heart plunges at how limp her body is.
I’m already pushing through the medics, my senses going wild at the sight of my omega being handled by other alphas.
They can’t touch her; I’m the only one she needs.
I can’t let them anywhere near her when she’s in danger.
I don’t care if they’re trying to treat her.
She’s my omega, and I have to be the one to take care of her because I have missed out on her life for three years, and everything is my fault.
“Harmony,” I croak, trying to get towards her, but something is holding me back. I snarl, trying to fight against it, but whoever grips my shoulders is too strong.
“Maddock.” Jaxx’s voice cuts through me with a sudden snarl. “Maddock, you’ve got to let them through.”
“She’s my omega,” I wheeze, trying to tell the medics I need to go with her as an ambulance speeds onto the track. “I have to—”
“Maddock!” Jaxx shouts, shaking me from behind. “Get it together! She needs to be treated.”
But I can’t let it go. My alpha sense tells me if I don’t go with her, I’ll never see her again.
The panic is so intense that I can’t breathe.
I think I’m going to topple over as every single fear I had about her driving bursts to the surface and I can’t focus on anything else apart from the way they lift her onto the stretcher.
It’s not right. She shouldn’t be limp like that. They haven’t even taken off her helmet, so it might not be her, even though she’s wearing that crazy pink suit that no one apart from the photographers and the Valkyries like.
“Maddock, I’m going to walk you over to the ambulance. Don’t fight me, okay?”
Another growl rumbles from me, but Jaxx keeps his fingers dug into my shoulder as he forces me to walk behind the stretcher and the EMTs.
If he’s really her scent match, if he feels the same way as she said she does about him, he wouldn’t be so calm.
“Just get in the ambulance. Stay with her. Try to keep your shit together, okay?”
I nod numbly as Jacob jumps in first. He gives me a look and reaches out a hand, telling me to climb in with him.
“What about you?” I say to Jaxx, my voice completely numb.
“I’ll follow behind. But she needs her alpha, okay? You know what that means?”
Why is this the only time he’s actually treating me like a proper person? We need to keep together to be there for her if we’re both really her alphas, so why is he stepping back?
“Just look after her, for all of us.”
It’s only just as they push the doors closed I see Everest standing there, his face completely white. A look of pure shock joins the single tear rolling down his cheek as Jaxx turns to him, throws his arms around him, and the doors slam closed behind us.