Nine
“Would you stop fucking pacing? These floors are worn out enough as it is. Don’t need her demanding we fix them next,” Moon barks at me, smacking my shoulder.
I think the fuck not. I crowd into him until his back is to the wall and I’m breathing the air he wanted for himself. “Don’t tell me what the fuck to do. This is all your fucking fault. Everything we’re dealing with is your fucking fault.”
His jaw drops open, his eyes bug out and I recognize the look for what it is; he wants to hit me. Badly. “How the hell is this my fault?”
I growl, pushing him even further into the wall.
“Because Winslow was your fucking fault. Remember when we met her and I wanted nothing at all to fucking do with her and you persuaded me to give her a chance? Told me to just try her out and see what happened? Remember when you shoved my dick in her and made sure I felt how tight she was for me? I could have run, Moon. Maybe if I had, I wouldn’t be fucking pining for an omega that is one strong wind away from collapsing and never getting back up.
I don’t want to feel like this. I’m not supposed to have an omega.
Winslow was…I think we can agree she wasn’t a real omega. ”
Oh shit, Moon does not like that at all.
Good.
Omegas shouldn’t stifle screams of pain when you knot them at their insistence.
Omegas shouldn’t be so lucid when in heat.
Omegas should crave their alphas around the clock and be possessive as shit about them.
Winslow was never an omega, though her scent was confusing enough to trick us all into believing otherwise.
Now that I’ve smelled the real thing from the source, I’m pissed at myself for falling for Winslow. Her taste never quite matched her scent, and that should have been yet another red flag.
Now I’ve got this…frail omega that I want to help, and that shit is dangerous for so many damn reasons. I don’t need this responsibility in my life right now. I just escaped the last one.
“Don’t want me, huh? I think the feeling is mutual,” the mouthy omega snarls at me as she escapes from her hole.
My knees lock into place when I fully see her for the first time, my breathing accelerates, and I know my fists are clenching and unclenching because my arms want her in them, but I’m not in a mood to grant wishes.
“Here. These are yours, I believe.” She throws a pair of sweats at me I haven’t seen in years, then one by one, smells the remaining pieces of clothing in her arms and subtly inhales each of our scents and matches them all perfectly.
Another fucking thing. Winslow never could tell our scents apart, said she had some sort of condition that affected her nose sensitivity.
I may be pissed at Moon, but I’m even more pissed at myself, and I don’t even know what to do with all this anger. There’s too much of it.
I stare down at the sweats in my hands, layered with Fable’s—gods, even her fucking name is perfect— floral berry scent, and the alpha in me is ready to rage.
The last time I wore these pants was so damn long ago that I can’t really pinpoint when it was, but I do know it was close to the beginning of our courtship with Winslow.
She had just started stealing clothing from us, and we thought it was so cute to have an omega that wanted our scents at her home, a home she refused to let us in, that she wanted a piece of us with her.
She was always so tough and guarded, but sometimes softness would break through and would make it all worth it.
Moon knows he never forced me to hook up with Winslow that first time.
She was so damn beautiful, and I knew she was dangerous as hell, because her eyes communicated exactly how she wanted to chew us up and spit us out, but we were alphas, right?
We could handle it. We figured she was a beta at first, but then the scent started blooming the more we hung out with her, and it was obvious she was ours.
Except, she wasn’t.
If this waif of a vampire is to be believed, she’s known of our existence the entire time we were with Winslow. Winslow was what, rubbing it in her face? Giving her our clothing so she could— oh fuck.
I run to the bathroom and throw up, because this is all too real to be fake.
I flush and rinse my mouth out, hunching over the small sink to splash my face clean. No towels, but the hem of my shirt will do just fine.
“What the fuck are those?”
I freeze with my shirt over half my face and turn to the omega in the doorway. Eyes wide, I look around trying to figure out what she’s asking about. Has she…never seen tattoos before? “My ink?”
She steps closer against all of our better judgement, and I know she’s holding her breath, but I’m fucking not.
Losing Winslow kind of sucked because it was so volatile at the end, but I’ve missed this scent. I’ve never had it so pure before and I’m ready to be a junkie for it even though minutes ago I was swearing to Moon I wanted nothing to do with it.
“No, dumbass. Are those…ab muscles?”
Somebody starts cracking up in the hallway, and I give them a death glare before focusing on Fable. Do I put the shirt back down or let her keep looking? “Yes?”
“You don’t sound too sure about that.”
She steps closer yet and I grip the sink behind me, my muscles cording all over my torso at her proximity. One hand reaches out, not bothering to ask permission, and full-on feels up my stomach.
“Eight? Who the hell needs eight muscles here? What the hell do you even do with all of them?”
Yep, there goes my boner. It’s kind of a miracle it took so long, actually.
Again, not asking for permission, she reaches lower and pulls my gym shorts open, and then begins to gawk at my dick. This is definitely cosmic payback for all the times I have been an asshole in my life.
“Now what the fuck is that thing for? There’s no way in hell that’s meant to do what I think it is.
That thing is as big as my forearm, and I know for a fact I can only comfortably fit two fingers inside of me.
Two of my fingers, that is. That’s just…
” She swallows and lets the waistband snap into place, and I swear to everything green on this earth I’m two seconds away from coming.
“And what are all of you laughing about, huh? Entertaining you, am I?”
Fuck. She’s actually so damn perfect for us. I hate that I acknowledge that so soon. But she is our scent match, so that checks out.
Her attention on me somehow made me forget about her condition momentarily, and she’s abruptly run out of juice. She sways, looking to me in panic as she starts falling.
But I catch her, of course I do. I’m apparently her fucking alpha.
“You’re too damn light,” I mumble under my breath.
I sit on the edge of the dated green bathtub and hold her, biting into my wrist and making sure she gets a good latch.
I watch the column of her throat as she swallows me down, and my mind instantly starts going down other roads, imagining her swallowing other fluids from me, and my dick gives another rallying cry.
She stares at me as she drinks, and she must have been as blood-starved as we thought because by the time the cut on my wrist has healed itself and she’s somewhat sated, she’s passed out again, a small drop of my blood escaping her lips.
That means I get to touch them though, right?
I wipe that drop up with my thumb and push it back into her mouth, startled when water drips on her cheek.
Like a dumbass, I look to the ceiling thinking that’s what’s causing the damage, but no, it’s me.
Holding her and understanding a fraction of what she’s been made to suffer, then getting to see how well she takes my blood, is making me produce actual tears.
I didn’t know that was a thing I could do.
Jos squats in front of us, same state I’m in.
I look up at him wordlessly, begging for help, but he’s as clueless as I am in this situation.
Both of us look down to the woman again, Jos gently pushing her long black hair from her face. “She’s ours. We’ve somehow massively fucked up before we even got to meet her, but we’ll find a way to fix this. We have to.”
“She needs a nest,” I assert. “We’re building her the best damn nest we can. She needs to be safe, and she needs to be warm, and we need to take care of her, Jos. We need to.”
“Not you, too,” Moon whines, but he’s losing a lot of the bravado he had earlier. He’s in denial, but it’s going to be so satisfying when he cracks.
I stare him down, knowing exactly what he needs.
Standing carefully, I press a kiss to the sleeping omega’s forehead, and I get out of that cramped bathroom and don’t let Moon see what I’m up to until I’m already putting her in his arms. He lifts them up automatically to receive her, his alpha primed to care for the omega made specifically for him.
He tries to give her back when he thinks too hard, but the rest of us back away so she stays in his arms.
I’m already dying to pull her back to me, but Moon needs to feel her weight and smell her skin and hear her breathing so he can get with the fucking program.
“I lied,” I admit, humbled. All the anger that was fueling me mere minutes ago is completely drained, and maybe it will flare up again later, but I don’t think it will ever be aimed at this omega again. “I’m keeping her. I’ll share though, if you all get your heads out of your asses.”
“This is fucking dumb. Look she’s not even—it’s clear that she’s—ah, fuck. Why’d you give her to me? I could just drop her here and walk away.”
“What a mighty fine example of an alpha,” Fable whispers, her voice all raspy. Her eyes stay closed, but the fact that she’s conscious is good.
“I have some essentials here, but I’d rather take her to the clinic so I can run some blood panels and check everything I can’t see on the surface,” Jos says, barely keeping himself away from her.
Nobody fights Jos on this, and nobody takes the woman from Moon because it’s sink or swim time. If he thinks she’s not exactly what she says she is, he’s going to learn immediately how wrong he is.