Chapter 14 Callum
Callum
“She left.” Archer stares down at the piece of paper with instructions for the bond breaking at a Council building in the city.
I haven’t read a word of it. Neither has he. My fingers clenched around it when Roman, the white-haired beta, thrust it at me with a growled order not to be late.
It’s been ten minutes since I passed the piece of paper to Archer and helped Torin up from the floor once he regained consciousness. He has a black eye and a dark scowl on his face, yet I feel like I’m the one who was knocked out.
“She wasn’t supposed to leave,” I say, struggling to make sense of how wrong this all feels. None of that surprise interview had gone the way I thought it would.
Juniper didn’t argue with us. She wouldn’t even look at us until we pushed her to. It’s as if we stopped being anything to her at all. I never realized that all the time we were busy shutting her out of our lives, she was shutting us out of hers.
But quietly.
There were no doors slammed. No objects flung at our heads. No threats or attempts to slip into our beds. Just a quiet admission that we didn’t want her, so she no longer wanted us.
This wasn’t supposed to hurt. This was supposed to be when we won.
So why does it hurt so fucking much?
Without a word, Archer drops the piece of paper and walks out of the library.
I glance at Torin, whose eye is swelling shut, and we both follow him out of the room and up the stairs. I don’t know where Veronica is. Probably busy reporting to my dad.
Archer’s steps slow outside Juniper’s bedroom, and he pushes the door open. None of us has entered it since the first night we brought her here.
It smells like her.
Blueberry pie and brown sugar. Sweet, and so damn delicious that no matter how much I told myself I hated her, a part of me still wanted her.
She took nothing with her. Just the clothes she was wearing. But it’s perfectly organized. A book from our library is on the window seat. She must have been reading it before Garrison damn near forced his way inside and turned our world upside down.
I’d been expecting mind games and tricks. Yet there were no games and no tricks. Just cold indifference.
Archer walks through the adjoining room, pushes the double doors open, and my brain switches off.
An omega’s nest isn’t just her safe haven, it’s a reflection of her state of mind. A place she goes to heal and find comfort.
We’d wanted it to be perfect for her before we discovered we couldn’t trust her. We’d spent hours shopping, setting down the cushions, making it a space she would find peace and comfort.
She destroyed it.
Utterly. Destroyed. Everything.
Silk has been torn to shreds. Cashmere torn. Blankets ripped.
Nothing has survived. What she couldn’t rip, she used a pair of scissors and maybe even a knife from the kitchen to eviscerate.
This wasn’t a single attack.
Juniper destroyed this nest repeatedly.
If this nest was a reflection of her state of mind, something was badly wrong.
My stomach churns, and I feel dizzy and off-balance. I put my hand out on the nearest wall to steady myself, but the lightheadedness gets worse. Torin is calling my name. I ignore him.
In the back of my head, a tiny voice whispers, what if?
What if Juniper wasn’t the spy we thought she was?
What if she was innocent of everything we accused her of and we made her hate us?
What if we destroyed our scent match’s life for no reason?
I walk away from Torin and Archer when they call after me, feeling sicker the longer I look at Juniper’s nest. Out in the hallway, away from Juniper’s distracting scent, I stop. The tiny voice in my head is growing louder. It’s no longer a whisper; it’s a roar.
And I do something I should have done long before now.
I fish out my cell phone and dial a number from memory.
“Ah, son.” My dad answers on the fifth ring as Archer and Torin gather around me, watching me closely. “Have you finally decided to—”
“Why Juniper?” I demand.
My question briefly stuns him.
“Excuse me?”
“When you send a spy to watch me, they’re determined and they’re loyal. You pay them too much to walk away.” Archer walked away from my dad’s money, and he’s the only one who ever has. Because he wanted to be loyal to me. Not my dad.
Juniper didn’t look like she was walking away to anything. She looked shocked and scared, but determined.
“So?”
“Juniper just walked out of this house without a second look back.”
Silence.
When his laugh comes, it’s too late to be convincing. “I guess I should have paid her more.”
“You didn’t pay her at all, did you?” The sound of my heart is like crashing waves filling my head, making it hard to think. I swallow the sickness that rises from my stomach and burns my throat. “She was never a spy at all, was she, Dad? You lied about everything. You never chose her at all.”
Archer and Torin are silent.
My father laughs. “Of course I did. She—”
I hang up, and I turn to Torin and Archer. They stare at me, white with shock.
Breathless and sick, I feel winded, like someone drove their fist into my gut.
“She was never a player in this.” My cell phone slips from my nerveless fingers when I think of everything we did to her. So many wrongs she never deserved.
Juniper refuses to look at us when we enter a room on one of the lower floors of the Council building in the city center. She’s wearing a white shift dress that reaches the top of her knees, and four small pools of water block us from our mate.
We’re in white pants and nothing else. If we had a choice, none of us would be here. Thirty minutes after Garrison left with Juniper, a black car arrived. Kylian got out of the passenger seat, opened the back door and leaned against the side of the vehicle, waiting for us to get in.
The look on his face made it clear saying no wasn’t an option.
We got in.
The other four people in the room are silent but alert. Kylian, Garrison, Roman, and a petite dark-haired woman I’ve never seen before. They are there to break the bond between us. Forever.
Now that my eyes are open, I see all the things I was too blind to before.
She’s lost weight. She’s thinner than she was on the day we danced at the ball, and her back is stiffer. I can’t remember the last time I spoke to her. If she smiled or laughed over the last year, I never heard or saw it.
I noticed her coldness growing as the weeks and then the months passed. I thought she was cold because we were shutting her out, giving her no information to share with my dad.
I was wrong.
Her coldness was a shield to protect herself from us hurting her, and we hurt her in so many ways. Unforgiveable ways that no scent match would ever treat their mate.
“Don’t do this, Juniper,” I plead.
Her profile is carved from stone. Brittle, hard and fragile all at once. She doesn’t look at me as she speaks. “We are—were—scent matches. Will that stop this from working?”
Silence rocks the room.
The brunette standing beside Juniper shoots me a nervous look. “I—we’ve never—broken a bond between scent matches. I’m not sure. There might still be some lingering—”
“I want it gone,” Juniper cuts in.
“Juniper, there were reasons,” I say, trying again. “You don’t understand.”
“Because you never tried to get me to understand.” Her words are a whip she uses to flay me.
But her eyes are still cold. Still indifferent.
“You shut the door in my face, over and over again. Never listened. Never explained. And now I’ve had enough, you suddenly want to explain?
No. You never listened to me. You decided I was the enemy and made my life a misery.
I don’t want to listen. I don’t care enough to listen.
The cruelty was bad enough, but my book?
The other omega? Never speak to me again. ”
What book?
What other omega?
She turns away from me to focus on the woman in front of her. “Do it.”
Panic drives me forward.
Kylian, the man who knocked Torin out cold, blocks me, his eyes threatening death if I take another step forward. “The only reason you’re here is because you have to be. You’re not stopping this.”
The door beside Torin swings open, and three men wearing white t-shirts and pants walk in.
Each one grabs me, Archer, and Torin by the arm and pulls us toward the sunken pools of water.
Juniper steps into the first pool with the petite brunette without hesitation, shivering slightly as the water reaches her waist.
Garrison frowns as he says, “Three scent matches mean three broken bonds. That’s going to leave scars.”
Juniper lifts her chin. “I don’t care.”
Torin steps forward, one black eye completely sealed shut. “June, please. We got things wrong. We—”
She looks at him, her eyes so cold, it’s clear she hates him.
“My name is Juniper. Do not call me June. That is not who I am to you.” She turns away from Torin, back to the woman conducting the bond breaking.
“Do it. I don’t care what happens, any scars or effects it will have. I just want the bonds gone.”
“You could die,” the woman warns her softly.
“I'd rather die than stay tied to them a second longer.” Juniper nods firmly. “I’m ready.”
“Juniper,” Archer attempts.
She looks at him. “You ruined this. All of you poisoned it so badly that there is no coming back, no forgiveness, no making amends. Just regret. Better a cold, society mating than whatever this was.” She looks at us one by one.
“If I survive this, so be it. But I never want to see any of you ever again. You are all dead to me.”
I flinch at each word.
There is so much Juniper doesn’t know. So much I thought she knew already, but it’s too late. The men in white are dragging us into the neighboring pools of water, and the bond breaking is starting. It’s freezing, and the water smells of sage and lemon.
“You will always feel a piece of you is missing,” the woman says, her voice echoing in the low-ceilinged room.
Juniper holds her palm to the woman. “I don’t want the piece missing. I want it dead.”
The woman runs the blade across Juniper’s palm. She hisses, then wraps her hand in a tight fist as the first drops of blood hit the water’s surface.
“What was bound, let us unbind.”
A man steps forward, seizes my wrist and yanks it toward him, dragging the knife over my palm as another does the same to Archer, and yet another to Torin.
“Juniper!” I shout at her, willing her to stop this.
Juniper steps deeper into the water. It comes to the middle of her chest, and I can barely smell her scent now. It’s slowly fading.
A man grabs my wrist and yanks me forward. I plunge deeper into the water.
As does Archer.
And so does Torin.
The bond can fade in time if there’s enough distance between an alpha and an omega—years rather than weeks or months.
An alpha can reject their omega, walk away, and the omega is too submissive to hold on to that bond.
It snaps. That’s not what this is. This is a forced bond breaking.
Scrubbing away the past to emerge whole, unbonded in the eyes of the world, even if Juniper will always wear our bites on her throat.
Council staff thrust a paper, forms for us to sign when we entered the building—warnings of what could go wrong. I refused to sign anything.
The papers soon disappeared, but Juniper would have signed them. I saw the look in her eyes before she walked away from us. If she could have wiped all traces of us from her memory, she would have.
I will never walk away from Juniper. I’m too dominant to let my scent match go, and this is the result.
Juniper’s breathing is ragged, her clothes waterlogged, and her skin pink. She sways in the water, held up by the woman.
“Again,” she whispers through teeth that chatter.
I’m dragged forward into the water and forcefully submerged for two seconds.
I burst out of the water, gasping, looking for Juniper, but I can’t find her. Where is she?
Torin and Archer burst out of their pools, gasping, coughing, also searching for Juniper.
She emerges from the water, her skin so pale it’s almost translucent.
“I have to do it one more time,” the woman tells her apologetically. “Three times for three mates.”
“D-do it,” Juniper stutters.
The woman dunks her.
I watch, and I watch, but Juniper doesn’t emerge.
“Juniper!” I scream, flailing in the water, trying to get to her.
Feet away, and I can’t smell her or even see her.
And then I see it.
A hint of white fabric.
A strand of long, curly blonde hair.
Juniper floats to the top, upside down.
“NO!!!”