11. Rook
CHAPTER 11
Rook
L ight streaming in through the window wakes me up, and for a moment I don’t remember where I am. And then Beatrice stirs beside me and I remember.
Shit
I didn’t make it back to Piper’s room last night.
Which means nobody made it back to Piper’s room last night.
Guilt churns through me as I roll out of bed.
I’m the Head Alpha of this pack and I shouldn’t have let us do this. But the truth is, Erain only said what I was thinking.
I wanted one last time. One tiny little rebellion against my fated mate.
But I shouldn’t have. We shouldn’t have. Now we are going to have to go apologize to Piper. She’ll probably be pissed not knowing what happened to us. Hopefully, she’ll have been too tired from the reception to think about where we might be.
I yanked on my pants and pulled on my shirt. Try to at least make it look like I didn’t fuck another woman all night long.
“That was the last time,” I told Beatrice.
She rolled over in bed, letting the covers fall off so I could see the length of her slim legs and elegant, pink-tipped nipples. But I’m too irritated with myself to care this morning.
“Well, if you ever get bored of slumming it,” she teased, in a way that might have been funny last night, but just pisses me off now because I’m feeling guilty.
“Piper is my wife,” I said tightly. “I expect you to treat her with respect now.”
Ignoring her shocked face, I grabbed my tie and went out, trying to arrange it neatly and wondering how the fuck I was going to explain this.
So I was in no goddamn mood to see that Erain and Teddy were both still asleep. Teddy’s usual noisy snores could be heard all up and down the hallway.
I kicked in Erain’s door and found him entwined lovingly in bed with Cressida.
“Get up,” I ordered, slamming my fist into the frame of his bed. “We’ve got to go make our apologies to Piper now.”
When Erain only made a face, and moved slowly, I kicked the bed and added an Alpha bark.
“Get the fuck up! This was a mistake. You can’t do this any more.”
He got up, but when he went to give Cressida a kiss, I put a hand on his collar and dragged him away.
“Damn it,” he protested, shaking me off. “It’s not that big of a deal.”
But there was a growing fear in my gut that meant it was a big deal. A very big deal.
Teddy was stirring by the time we made it to his room, rubbing his eyes and stretching in bed.
Of course, he was covered in a mound of tits and pussy and ass, but I kicked his bed frame, too.
“Get up, asshole. We have to figure out how to apologize to Piper for this.”
“We’re her fated mates,” said Teddy with a yawn. “She kind of has to accept our apology, doesn’t she?”
I reached down and grabbed him by the ear and dragged him past all the protesting women.
“Get your pants on,” I snarled, “and let’s get the hell up to her nest.”
But when we knocked on the door of her suite there was no answer.
I knocked again, my heart pounding.
“Maybe she’s gone to breakfast,” Teddy suggested, yawning and rubbing his eyes.
“Straighten your tie,” I said. “I don’t want you looking like you came from an orgy.”
“I did,” Teddy smirked, but he obeyed, Erain impatiently flicking his hands aside to help tie the tie.
Unease and anxiety pounded through my body and I tried the doorknob.
It wasn’t locked.
I opened the door and walked inside.
Maybe this was going to take more finessing than I thought.
It looked like a cyclone had gone through her rooms. Everything was strewn wildly about and tossed on the floor.
The cushions were thrown off the couch and torn apart so viciously that there were still little feathers floating in the air.
Everything was out of her drawers, including the ornate golden tea set we had gifted her.
I sprinted to her bedroom, and her mattress was hanging out the damn window, all the art on her walls thrown to the ground. Everything was ripped and torn and smashed.
“Piper?” I called out. “Piper? Where are you?”
As we walked around her rooms, I began to smell a scent I’d never encountered before. At first, it was brisk and crisp, like the tartest, sharpest citrus fruit. Then I began to smell honeyed rose, so sweet that I felt drool begin to pool in my mouth, my incisors start to ache.
What was that? Had Piper ordered brunch? Could this delicious smell possibly have come from the palace kitchens. . .?
“Is that her ?” Teddy asked in awe, and I saw him rub the back of his big hand over his mouth, drool spilling from between his fingers. “Is that what her perfume smells like?”
“It can’t be,” Erain said.
“But it is,” Teddy insisted, and I saw his Alpha incisors lengthen, sharpen into his lips. “It’s definitely her. God, she smells good .”
As usual, he said what we were both also thinking.
That was our Omega’s scent.
It was way better than I had ever imagined, incredibly appealing and beautiful.
My cock, which had been lying dormant, was suddenly painfully, achingly hard.
I stared down at the bulge protruding from my pants, trying to shove it down with my hand, but it wouldn’t go.
“She didn’t smell like that on Selection Day,” Erain muttered.
“She hadn’t perfumed yet,” I growled. “Shut up and let’s just find her and make it right.”
I saw Teddy grab his balls and shift, trying to walk with the dick bouncing between his legs.
“What’s this?” he asked, stooping down by her heavy oak desk and picking up a tiny scrap of white fabric.
All the blood in my body had gone to my cock, so for a moment I stared at it stupidly.
“Her wedding dress!” Erain cried.
“Shit, what happened to her?” Teddy yelped, running hands through his hair so that his curly waves stuck up in all directions. “Was she attacked by something?”
He whirled around in a panic, and I stepped back to avoid him, hitting my erect cock painfully on the desk.
Erain was picking up the pieces, but I looked at how they had been scattered in a circle.
“No, I think Piper did that.”
“ Why ?”
Why the fuck indeed?
I couldn’t find the words, so I renewed calling for her, louder this time.
Where could she be?
The bathroom door was wide open, so I walked in.
This was a nice room, right? She had a whole suite of rooms to herself, with well-made furniture, nice marble counters and plush carpets?
But could it be nicer? Did Piper need a better room?
Anything she wanted for her nest, she could have. We were the wealthiest and most powerful Alpha Pack. Our pockets were deep and endless. She knew that, right? I’d make that extra clear when we found her.
Then I saw it.
I KNOW WHAT YOU DID
Written in bright, vibrant red all across the mirror, which only made me think about what that red would look like on her lips around my cock.
Well, shit.
So much for being able to make this right with an apology and brunch.
The other two Alphas rolled in behind me and read the words.
“Get your cocks off me,” I said irritably. “Can’t you two control yourself?”
But they just ignored me.
“What’s the joke about my dick? My dick is not tiny!” Erain protested. “Do you think that’s why she left? Because she wasn’t sure it was big? I can assure her it is big.”
His normally low voice was shot through with unfamiliar slivers of panic.
“Where’s she gone ?” Teddy asked, his voice cracking. “What if she’s hurt? Or needs us? We don’t know where she is!”
He gripped Erain by the collar of his shirt and pointed right in his face.
“If you hadn’t insisted on having one last night with your annoying ex we wouldn’t be in this mess!”
Erain tried to push him off.
“I didn’t see you complaining!”
I fought down my own panic at not knowing where Piper was.
She’s our Omega, and now that she’s perfumed and 100% and completely confirmed our fated mate bond, it feels strange to not know where she is, not be able to reach her.
I can’t believe I ever for one moment thought there had been a mistake.
There’s been no mistake.
If I had smelled her scent in a forest and there was a non-Pack Alpha between that scent and me, I would have killed to get to her.
All my Alpha instincts are screaming at me now that I was a fool and should have taken better care of her.
“Where’d she go?” Teddy asked. “Let’s track her so we can tell her how sorry we are.”
He and Erain bent down to follow her scent, their skulls knocking together like a couple of fucking stooge knuckleheads.
That scent.
God, it’s intoxicating, it’s invigorating, it’s maddening.
It’s mine, it’s a part of me, and I need it now.
I grip their collars and pull them both back as I shove by to be the first with my nose on it, tracking her scent through her rooms.
Where has she gone to hide? There is no place safe from us, not in the whole palace.
And it’s urgent, more urgent than I want to admit, to find her.
I’m hunched nearly double, using all my senses to track her now. My incisors are lengthened because my every instinct wants to bite her and claim her, drool dripping down my chin and soaking my collar.
Oh, she’s our fated mate, all right.
That’s pretty goddamn obvious now.
My cock is pounding in my pants, banging against my leg.
Erain pushes past me, his hands on either side of where he can scent her, his nose a few inches from the wall.
He’s got the most sensitive scenting skills out of all of us, and he’s always prided himself on them.
That’s why he’s the first one to smell it.
The first I notice is his grunt of pain and then he’s knocked over on his ass.
I get maybe one second to correct myself, and I stumble over him, barely managing to avoid falling as well.
And then I scent it too.
Something foul, unholy, and acidic seeping through our Omega’s pure, beautiful scent and as I pitch face-first into the wall I see it.
“Cat shit,” Teddy moans.
She’s perfumed all down her hallway and then scattered what looks like the contents of the kitty litter box all along every place she scented.
I am aware that I ought to be pissed because she’s literally scattered cat turds all over the palace carpets, but I can’t help reluctantly being impressed.
Erain is on his hands and knees, gagging and retching on the floor.
The smell is so bad that I have to grit my teeth against my stomach roiling with nausea.
“Shake it off, we have to keep going,” I said, nudging him with my foot.
“She got you good,” Teddy said, then he put his hands on his knees and threw up on Erain’s shoes as the other Alpha attempted to stand up.
“What the fuck, asshole,” Erain snarled, but I shoved them both away from each other.
“We have to clean this up first. We don’t want anyone else knowing how badly we screwed up, do you? So let’s get going.”
Cleaning up cat shit with a boner was not on my list of honeymoon activities, but unfortunately all I could think about is what a colossal moron I was.
When it’s finally cleaned up, we stumbled down the stairs and outside, trying to follow the trail as best we could, catching glimpses of Piper’s pure scent in between the vile stuff she’s attempted to disguise it with.
But I can still smell her.
Mine
Fuck, what have I done
Outside, I turned the hose on full blast and got Erain right between the eyes.
“What the fuck, asshole?” he sputtered.
“You want to find our Omega smelling like puke?” I snarled.
When I’ve deemed the worst of the smell to be gone, we continued to follow Piper’s faint scent across the palace grounds.
Where was she going?
“Do you think she’d buy that we just got drunk somewhere?” Teddy asked.
I scoffed. “Piper is smart. And I don’t want to lie to our Omega.”
But my stomach drops thinking about having to confess to her, thinking about how we got fucking caught and how it was so stupid to think we could hide it.
“And it’s not a big deal,” Teddy insisted, running his hands nervously through his hair. “Because it wasn’t a big deal. Really. I don’t give a fuck about any of them.”
“She obviously knows what we all did,” I said irritably. “I just want to find her so we can make this right.”
But when we hit the little brook that ran through the palace grounds, her delicious perfume seemed to suddenly disappear.
“She wouldn’t have left without making sure those kittens were taken care of,” Teddy said positively. “She loves animals.”
We seemed to go in circles, and even Erain couldn’t pick up a clear scent.
He tore angrily at his hair.
“How the fuck did she disguise her scent so well? Is she that angry at us?”
There was a stiff and unpleasant silence as we contemplated our Omega.
“I think we misjudged her,” I said.
I definitely had.
“Let’s just follow her scent, and think about how we’re going to make this up to her.”
“Why is it so faint?” Erain said irritably.
He looked green around the gills.
“She can’t have been gone that long. Her scent should be much sharper than this.”
“Where is she going?” Teddy asked in frustration. “What is she doing? ”
“She’s running,” I said, and my voice sounded hollow. “She’s running away from us.”
“There could be feral Alphas out here,” Erain said.
“Not likely on the palace grounds,” I returned dryly, but inside my stomach was clenching with nerves.
“We need to find her to keep her safe.”
Erain looked sick to his stomach again when we finally traced her with many false starts and stops out to the edge of the property.
“So she’s definitely left,” he said bleakly.
“Let’s think,” I said. “She must know we’d come after her. She can’t be on the run with three kittens. Maybe she left the kittens with someone here.”
“Who?” asked Erain.
“Well, who are her friends here?”
Erain and Teddy said nothing, and I felt my stomach sink to the ground.
We looked at each other.
She’d been at the Palace for almost a week and we didn’t even know if she had friends or had talked to anyone besides us there.
“We’ve all been the worst kind of assholes,” I said stiffly. “We claimed an Omega but we didn’t commit to her or even give her a chance really. We have to find her and convince her we can do better.”
“I thought I saw her talking to some guy after the wedding,” Teddy said.
Some guy?
My stomach clenches with sudden, raging jealousy.
I cannot stand the thought of any other man around Piper. She is mine .
“She did ask about inviting someone to the wedding,” Erain said.
He looked jittery, like he couldn’t stand still, shifting back and forth.
“And what did you say?”
“I said no. I thought the guest list was already set.”
“YOU TOLD OUR OMEGA NO?” Teddy thundered, putting both hands around Erain’s throat.
“Stop it!” I ordered, throwing Teddy back, but I also wanted to throttle Erain. Also Teddy. Also myself.
“Find her first,” I reminded them.
We went back and retraced our steps.
Her scent stopped completely near the groundskeeper’s little cottage. It sat at the edge of the property near some forest lands, so we decided to knock on the door on the chance they saw Piper.
The door opened and it was a big Beta in his 50s with a chef’s hat on and an apron stretched across his belly.
“Where is Piper?” Erain immediately shouted and charged forward to grip the Beta by the front of his shirt.
“Stop it!” I demanded, putting the full weight of my Alpha bark in the words, and it’s such an urgent order that it even unbalanced Teddy, who stumbled over the doorstep and knocked into Erain.
The Beta is the first one to recover, swinging the rolling pin in his hand and catching Erain painfully in the ribs.
I grabbed them both around the collar and tried to look less desperate.
“Can we come in?” I asked, forcing my mouth to stretch into a rictus of a grin.
A woman dressed for work stuck her head out from the kitchen and to my relief I recognized Mary, the groundskeeper.
“Let them in, Otis,” she said as she walked past us.
Usually Betas complied immediately after direct orders from an Alpha, but I hadn’t met Otis.
Mary left with an anxious look, and Otis led us into a small dining area cluttered with cookbooks piled precariously on top of each other, the whole room smelling like sugar.
He did not, however, offer us anything to drink, and nodded to the chairs in a way that indicated he would much rather not see us at all.
It was peculiar behavior from a Beta, since they are usually eager to do Alphas any favors.
I squeezed around the small table, knocking my knees painfully into Erain and Teddy’s and fervently hoping my cock would stay down for the duration of the interview.
Her scent was stronger in here, and I was absolutely sure she had been in the house now.
“Where is Piper?” I repeated, in a friendly manner, but I was not sure it was fully getting across.
Pasting a friendly face onto my own naturally stern and unexpressive one has always been my biggest challenge as a politician, and one reason I always assumed I needed a sweet and gentle Omega, to smooth over my shortcomings. But right now I didn’t give a shit about my career or anything else.
“Piper who?” Otis asked, scratching his chin with a floury hand. “Isn’t ringing a bell.”
“This entire house smells like her,” I said, struggling to keep my temper. “I know she’s been here. It’s useless trying to deny it.”
“I saw you with her at the wedding,” Teddy put in. “I know you’re friends with her.”
“So what if I am?” Otis asked indignantly, crossing his arms over his chest. “You’ll never torture any information about Piper out of me!”
“Who said anything about torture?” I bit out. “We just want to find her and make sure she’s safe. We’re her Alpha Pack.”
Otis snorted.
“Some Pack. With you all sticking your pickles where they don’t belong. You don’t deserve Piper.”
Shit shit shit
It was clear as Piper’s friend he was way too well-informed about the situation. And he was in no mood to help us.
“Tell us where she is,” Erain growled.
Otis only shook his head. “Never. You boys have fucked up on a cosmic level across the celestial planes.”
Before I had a chance to ask what that meant, Teddy gripped my bicep hard.
“There they are!” he cried excitedly, pointing at three tiny furry faces peeking around the corner.
“Since when is it a crime for a man to own three cats?” Otis asked indignantly.
“I know that’s them,” Teddy repeated. “A little white one, a little orange one, and a tortoiseshell.”
“I admit to nothing,” said Otis belligerently. “Torture me if you must. Tear out my toenails.”
“No one is—tearing out your toenails,” I said, grinding my jaw. The last thing I wanted was for Piper to hear we were harassing her friend.
“We want to—make up for our mistakes,” Erain said stiffly.
Otis snorted expansively.
“You all need therapy. Serious therapy. If you ever want to find out why you’ve been such disgraceful assholes, feel free to visit me. For a small fee, of course. Now, begone.”
He bent and picked up all three kittens and held them while they crawled all over his arms, chest, and shoulders. Then he glared at us belligerently.
I could practically see the wheels turning in Teddy’s head as he ran a hand through his curls.
“Could we maybe. . .watch her kittens? We promise to take good care of them.”
From the shocked look on Otis’ face and the way his moustache bristled in disgust you’d have thought we had suggested selling them to the circus.
“Over my dead body!” he snorted. “Piper left these kittens in my care and in my care they shall remain.”
“I thought you said you didn’t know Piper,” Erain put in, but Otis raised his arm majestically and pointed to the front door.
“Begone with you!”