Chapter Nineteen
Gaping at the phone screen, hurt and rage warred inside me. I moved my mouth to speak, but no sound came out. My gut churned and breathing became more difficult, a tell-tale ache building in my throat as my eyes stung.
Next to me, Dex was asking clipped questions, but I had stopped listening the second Sergio said he was willfully choosing to stay away for another two weeks.
He’d promised.
“—age. Sage.” Dex nudged me, his voice full of concern. His hand was on my bicep, the touch gentle and tender. “Sweetheart, are you al—”
I shoved his hand away and pushed to my feet. Glowering at the phone, I spat, “Just fuck off and stay in Europe.”
Then I turned tail and fled.
I was a jittery mess as my Jeep flew down the dirt roads to the speck-on-the-map town that Aaron, one of the local betas, had finally told me to visit for answers about the scent blockers.
My emotions were all over the place, my stomach still roiling from the anxiety of being separated from my alpha and telling him to fuck off.
Anger battled with embarrassment and hopelessness.
Worse still, I had left my phone behind —on the coffee table, with Sergio’s voice calling for me to come back and talk— when I had stormed out of the house, so I didn’t even have my usual playlist to calm me down.
It was probably not the smartest move to be tracking down illegal substance suppliers without composure and focus, but…well, I wasn’t thinking clearly, was I?
Muttering to myself about stupid alphas and selfish European shifters, I almost missed the turn I needed to take.
My tires skidded on gravel, sending up clouds of dust as I turned fast and hard, the squeal and roar of the rubber trying to find traction on the dirt kind of terrifying.
The Jeep wobbled precariously, and for a moment my heart thudded rapidly somewhere in the vicinity of my throat.
But the car didn’t tip, and I managed to get it back under control.
I breathed heavily and took my foot off the gas, driving more carefully after that scare.
Even my rage seemed to have been shocked out of me, though all that did was emphasize the embarrassment and loneliness surging through me.
Tears welled in my eyes, and I brushed them away impatiently with the back of my right hand.
“Stupid,” I murmured, but I wasn’t quite sure what I was talking about. My alpha? My driving? My temper tantrum?
All of it?
All of it.
By the time I got to the ramshackle cottage that was exactly as the beta I’d talked to described, my anger had been replaced by a melancholy which seemed to have seeped into my bones. I felt flat and sad. Drained. Maybe even a little heartbroken.
Some part of me knew that it was kind of silly to feel that way.
Deep down, I knew that Sergio wanted to come back, and that he would come back.
I just felt a little like I wasn’t his priority, much like I had never been Dexter’s priority, either.
Was it so wrong of me to want someone to put my feelings first?
But…that was a little bit selfish, wasn’t it? I mean, when I was comparing my yearning for my alpha to the ongoing disparate conditions for omegas all over the world, it felt like I might have possibly overreacted. Maybe. A little. And if The Magic had told Serge to help those people…
Ugh.
I owed my mate an apology.
How did I keep ending up in that particular position? Honestly, between myself and Dex, I would have put money on Dexter being the irrational, bitchy one.
And maybe that was unfair of me, too.
I was on a roll of being a jerk, even if it was mostly only to myself.
Still, I didn’t think it was wrong of me to want to have my feelings taken into consideration. To feel like I was important to my mates.
I should have talked it through instead of storming off, I berated myself as I moved to climb out of the Jeep. With a sigh, I scrubbed a hand over my face and resolved, I’ll apologize when I get back.
Nodding decisively, I made my way up the rotting boards of the front stairs, trying not to feel even more morose at the sheer grimness of the little shack.
The wood was all gray and brittle, and some part of me worried that the whole thing might fall down on top of me with a strong enough breeze.
The window beside the door had also seen better days, grimy as it was, and cracked across one pane.
On the inside of the glass, one gauzy curtain fluttered with movement.
Before I could even knock on the front door, it swung open to reveal an occupant who didn’t seem to be in any better shape than the house itself.
His clothes were smeared with dirt, baggy and torn in patches around the knees and around the collar of the loose green t-shirt.
The skin around his neck was graying in a circle just above the shirt collar, reminding me of the ring you’d find around the surface of a bathtub which hadn’t been properly cleaned in some time.
His eyes were a dull brown and his hair mottled. And his scent…
I gagged a little.
I couldn’t even tell what kind of shifter he was beneath the unwashed, unclean smell; an issue made worse by the pungent musk of stale pot wafting out from the inside of the house.
“What do you want?” the shifter in front of me demanded, squinting at me and scenting the air. “I don’t have any business with dragon omegas.”
Swallowing back the persistent urge to throw up in the face of unpleasant sensory overload, and already having been upset, it was easy to appear pitiful.
“I’m looking for blockers,” I replied, making a show of looking over my shoulders as if I was paranoid.
Lowering my voice, I added, “You’ve heard of the Unlocking parties a few towns over, right? Well, they don’t let omegas in, and—”
“Aren’t you one of ’em? The dragons that started that whole pack?”
“Nope. I’m just a dragon who heard about the Unlocking parties and…
well, I’ll try anything to try and find an alpha, y’know?
” I shuffled my feet, digging my hands into my pockets and looking at the weak timber beams beneath my feet.
I wasn’t lying when I added, “We’re going extinct and I’m desperate. ”
After a beat of silence, the guy nodded then stepped back, waving me into the house.
The squalid condition of the interior was somehow worse than the outside.
My mouth watered as he shut the door and sealed us from any remaining hints of fresh air.
The tiny space reeked of decay and that intense, skunky pot smell.
I was going to hurl.
“Wanna toke?” my begrudging host asked, pulling a baggie of joints out from I didn’t even want to know where and rustling it in my direction.
I shook my head, afraid that if I opened my mouth to speak, I’d lose my lunch. And my breakfast. And maybe even last night’s dinner.
Huffing derisively, he tossed the bag towards me and I reflexively caught it. “Wait here,” he demanded. “I’ll get your blockers.”
We hadn’t even discussed a price yet and…okay, I hadn’t really planned what to do from there. Not wanting to spook the guy, though, I figured I would have to buy the blockers and then go back to Shifters Sanctuary with the evidence in hand and tell Beck and Eric where to find their supplier.
He scurried from the room, through a door on the opposite side of the room to the one I had entered through.
I tried to breathe through my mouth, feeling woozy with the overwhelming nausea.
That was probably why I lost focus and didn’t pay any attention to what he was doing, or how much time was passing.
But I certainly paid attention when the front door burst open to shouts of “Police! Put your hands in the air!”
And that was the point where I lost the battle with my nausea.
It was all a blur from there. I was cuffed, read my rights, and stuffed into the back of a white patrol car with yellow lettering declaring its association with the sheriff’s office down the sides.
The officers who arrested me were very clear about what would happen to me if I even considered shifting, despite both of them scenting human.
They knew what I was, and cuffing my hands behind my back was a preventative measure for most shifter species.
If I tried to shift, I would probably injure myself pretty severely, but my dragon could still break the cuffs and do a hell of a lot of damage even while injured.
“I’m not…I didn’t do anything wrong,” I insisted, my stomach still unsettled from the scent of the shack, now embedded in my nostrils and in the fibers of my clothes.
The acrid taste in my mouth from having thrown up in the middle of that dank little room wasn’t helping either. “You’ve got the wrong guy. I was—”
“Dealing pot and a bunch of unknown substances?” the officer in the passenger seat snarked over his shoulder, meeting my eyes in the rearview mirror. “Owning what looks to me like a meth lab in your bedroom.”
“My—?” I choked out incredulously. “You think I lived in that…that…hellhole?”
“I think you were squatting there, yeah. Place has been abandoned for years, and nobody ever drives this far out of town, making it a perfect location for a little drug den.” He smirked. “Which I figure you already worked out.”
“It’s not…that wasn’t my place. I wasn’t squatting there, I was—” There to buy some illegal shifter chemicals often used in pack-on-pack warfare? Yeah, I wasn’t telling him that. “—asking for directions. I left my phone at home and…” I trailed off to the sound of both of the officers’ laughter.
“Asking who, exactly?” The driver finally spoke, but he kept his gaze on the road. “You were the only one there.”
“And you’re a shifter,” the passenger interjected. “Your kind don’t need to ask for directions. Somethin’ about superior senses and shit.”
He…wasn’t wrong.
Damn it.
Why had I lied?