Chapter 6
Greth Dome
The fight was inevitable. The kitchen quiet, soft light glowing across polished counters, the sweet garden beyond their windows just beginning to color with dawn.
Nightgown flowing silk on pale skin, black hair tousled, and green eyes sleepy, Claire moved without hurry.
The morning ritual. Their ritual. Now that Shepherd had returned, they moved through the motions, Claire gathering patalcas pits from the counter, tidying after Shepherd’s green sludge breakfast…
her latest failed attempt to make it taste like anything but sewage.
She’d even grown used to the disgusting smell of it, sorry that the bright-orange tropical fruit’s flesh seemed to make no difference. It probably tasted like a liquefied rotting corpse.
It certainly smelled like it.
It was hushed between them, the domestic sounds of tidying a kitchen, sleepy yawns, and the splash of water as she rinsed her tools softening the air.
There was love in her eyes, even if she was put out, as she handed her husband his meal, her hand lingering on his when he took it.
Claire’s quiet show of support.
Until her hand slipped away and hit the counter. It surprised her, that thud. That physical manifestation of what intermingled with her relief to have him back without a scratch and seemingly unharried.
Because he had offered no explanation.
He’d been inside her, on the cusp of a knot—no, more than a cusp. That throbbing, beautiful swelling had already begun. And his COM had chimed.
He’d pulled out.
There had been no completion, that specific alarm dragging him out of her arms, out of the room, with a hurried apology and a backward glance that swore he’d make it up to her.
Left breathless in their nest, leaning up on her elbows as her wide green eyes followed him out of the room, she’d not even had a real chance to ask what the emergency was.
Which meant it was either catastrophic enough to end her life, or so far removed from her world it could never touch her, no matter how badly it unraveled.
Falling back on damp sheets to pant at the ceiling, she felt the saddest end to what would have been a spectacular orgasm dwindle into nothing. Annoyed.
Sexually frustrated in a way her mate never left her.
Deeply worried the world was about to end.
Counting breaths before she let herself fall into a spiral she’d worked so hard to circumvent. Claire knew she had Complex PTSD. She’d been medicated into a living high back in Thólos, having learned since coming to Greth that it had been done to keep her intact in case Shepherd survived.
He had.
They knew he’d come for her.
And they knew they could not survive him a second time.
When he had called her to him, when she had, in a dreamlike daze, walked through the snow to her vicious mate. He’d pulled her into his arms and carried her to a new land.
Where he was king. There was no war.
To a beautiful home he had prepared for her. And a life he had designed.
She’d been driven into therapy with a crusty old bitch of a female Alpha.
Claire would have been content to dissociate until she died after all Shepherd had put her through—intentional or not. He was the villain in her story, and the most dedicated mate imaginable.
Who forced her to confront her trauma.
Who grieved beside her.
A man she loved. Who pushed her… always. Because he loved her.
Claire had done the work, perhaps unwillingly at first, but she had slowly gotten better. Understood now that recovery was a lifelong endeavor.
That he would not let her fail. That she did want to be happy.
But she refused to be deluded in order to pretend everything was fine.
Hated therapy. Loathed Dr. Osin. Sometimes she broke things. Raged. Wept. But she had slowly faced what had happened in Thólos.
And Collin.
Her little boy. Dead.
She had been raped.
Everyone she knew was dead or would die.
And those feelings—the shame, the terror, the grief—hit her hard every time there was a taste of threat. A hint that something wasn’t right.
As if she were living in Thólos all over again.
Her husband leaving their nest mid-knot? The panic had her by the throat before he’d even shut the front door.
He’d known, and he’d gone anyway.
Instead of pacing and pulling at her hair as she would have when she’d been trapped in his underground bunker, she practiced those skills Dr. Osin had drilled into her mind. Found three things to look at and name. Felt three things. Listened for three things.
And gave a limbic brain a chance to recognize she was safe.
In her comfortable home, with windows… with a view.
This was not simple. Nor was it easy.
But it did work.
She thought of Shepherd, of how much she loved him… and could even admit to herself that sometimes she hated him too.
Peeling herself off the damp sheets to clean and repair her nest for his return. For her comfort. For the necessity of a task when her mind wanted to catastrophize.
It was not her best work. Shaking hands and shallow breath, a lack of attention to deep detail. But it was still lovely. Soft. Inviting. Scented of unfinished sex and the promise of an attentive lover.
Because he would come home. He would.
He always did.
He would kiss her and call her his little one. Play with her hair and pet her until she melted into a humming, contented thing.
Maybe.
Soft feet padded across the floor when the nest was complete, not to pace. No. To bathe. A simple shower. A repeat of her night routine. Long hair brushed, creams applied. Perfume even. Something to change the scent markers in the air.
Lotion.
A clean, flowy nightgown.
She had so many of them, never worn. And wondered if Shepherd had supplied them to her for moments exactly like this.
It would be like him. The bastard always a dozen steps ahead.
She’d done well, even considered some time alone in her garden. But stepping outside without her mate was too much for one deeply damaged Omega on a night such as this.
Bed beckoned, and she tried. Claire really did. She tried to sleep in that rebuilt nest scented with slick and tinged with Omega fear. She sprawled on his side, her nose to the sheets, and waited.
All night.
When the alarm filled the room with birdsong, she pushed up from the nest, rubbed hair back from her face, and went through the motions of an exhausted woman who had faith.
And a dead child.
And honed skills to survive it.
Tucked away the grief.
And went to the kitchen.
A beautiful kitchen with polished brass fixtures and elegant curves. Paned windows from ceiling to floor, a stone patio, and a garden the man who loved her nurtured, because he knew she adored flowers.
She’d been staring at a particularly pretty bloom when he’d appeared out of thin air. A man his size possessing some magic that kept his movements as silent as the unburied dead he’d left rotting on the streets in Thólos.
He was just part of the room, as if Shepherd had always been there.
Right there at his spot on the other side of the counter. Warm thumb’s path curving over her cheek in a caress. Gentle. Familiar.
“I missed you, little one.”
The way he spoke, the guttural Undercroft accent, she loved it so much that a tear fell… which his thumb was there to catch.
Because he knew.
“I love you.” Breathed from the lips of a very tired Omega. “Hungry?”
“Yes.”
And thus began the creation of another wasted effort on green sludge. Her act of affection for her difficult, dangerous, deceptive, evil, loving mate.
Had he mentioned her behavior in his absence had been impeccable, she would have started screaming sooner. But he didn’t.
Silver eyes weighed and measured each movement she made in the creation of his disgusting drink. Scarred face gentled into something less intimidating. Hulking form careful not to cast a shadow on his lady, yet stolid and very much there.
“Is… everything okay?” A soft, feminine voice for a lilting, loaded question.
A direct reply, a deep guttural assurance. “It is.”
Green eyes that had been soft, sharpened. They narrowed. The hollow spaces below them shadowed from lack of sleep and a night of stress.
And there it was—deep anger.
Old anger that had come on so strong, so acidic, she found a part of herself was itching to slap him.
Claire realized… she wasn’t traumatized by the night’s events. She was livid.
Furious.
Especially when she recognized he’d set an overflowing vase of red poppies—like some kind of fucked-up peace offering—on her counter.
“Where the fuck have you been?” She pulled a flower from the arrangement and threw it at him.
Then another. “Do you have any idea how worried I’ve been?
Don’t you drink that! Stop! You don’t get to sip my shakes after five hours with no word.
I don’t see fires outside the windows. I don’t hear screams! ”
“You did really well, little one. So well.” And he looked so proud of her, silver eyes shining and warm.
“Stop! No, you don’t get to tell me how well I did!”
Shepherd dared smirk. “The door was unlocked. You could have come out.”
As if he were proud of himself for not locking her in.
Eye twitching, Claire ground her teeth and sucked in a deep breath to scream, “Don’t play your games with me, Shepherd!
If I had stepped one toe out of this home, you would have abandoned whatever urgent thing you were doing, and I’d have to live with the consequences of pulling you away from your emergency.
I can’t even call you, when I have no idea what the consequences might be if you’re distracted by your mate!
And you smell like you took a shower!” Shrill, her voice grew louder. “Why? What smell did you wash off?”
And that’s what it was. That’s exactly what had set her off.
The lack of story in his scent. A cover-up of something that would have upset her.