13. Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Thirteen
Anders
S he didn’t look like she was feeling any better, and she didn’t try to hide it. Her answer was a bitter laugh and a roll of her eyes. She looked distressed, and I glanced up the quiet stairs, already blaming my pack brothers for the tears that she was clearly holding back.
Even like this, I wanted to fuck her. Sink my cock down on her, grip those pretty blond strands, and pull as I thrust in and out like a savage. What was so delicious about my pack brother’s daughter?
She was young, an omega, and forbidden. Was that enough to make me lose myself?
Isadora shook her head and closed her mouth in a flat line before walking from the counter and turning to the stairs. My eyes hit the back of her thighs. All I wanted was to spread those thick legs and fuck her. God, this was madness.
I hated her just like I hated her father, right?
It was a question to myself, forcing me to reply with hate, but instead, it was fire coursing through my veins. Desire that an unmated alpha in his forties had no right to feel.
Especially for her.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
I shocked her just as I shocked myself, and she turned back to me. “Knots. There are knots.”
For a second, I couldn’t understand what she meant. I furrowed my eyebrows in question, and she snorted to herself, tipping her head back and looking at the ceiling before looking back at me. “I didn’t know about knots.”
I nodded, and instead of letting her go, I gestured to the fridge. “Beer?”
She was entitled, and we haven’t exchanged one word that wasn’t hostile since she got here. But in the light of the moon, when she looked so fragile, and my cock was still hard from watching her whine over the bed… I wanted a truce.
It took her a moment to accept, but eventually she nodded and came back in.
I handed her a can and jerked to the side, making my way to the living room.
I didn’t wait for her, but I wasn’t surprised when I heard her steps following me in.
My eyes cast up once again, wondering where the others were and why the doctor wasn’t the one explaining to her about knots.
“It wasn’t right for Karl to keep everything from you,” I said as I sat down in the armchair.
Her expression closed in a second. Her eyes flashed with anger, but then she lowered her eyes, sitting across from me on the bigger couch. Like a switch, I just watched her control herself, and I decided that if she could, I could too.
“Yeah, I don’t know what he was thinking. Even if he had bad memories…”
“He didn’t,” I said.
She snorted. “How the fuck do you know?”
I grunted and sipped from the beer, and she followed my lead. Weapons down , I reminded myself. She didn’t know anything. Defending her father wasn’t a crime, was it? If my heart wasn’t so full of hatred, I’d even think it was honorable.
“He had a good life here,” I finally said. “I’ve known Karl since he was a child.”
“But he left and asked me with his dying breath never to come back,” she challenged me.
“Maybe pack life wasn’t for him,” I said out loud something I’ve been thinking about for over twenty years. “He wanted to do more. He talked about traveling a lot. I thought he would calm down eventually. But once it was clear we weren’t getting an omega, things only got worse.”
The words coming from my mouth were bitter like unripe fruit. I wanted to spit them between us and draw a line. I wanted to push her away and blame her for being his, but instead, I sipped from my beer.
“He and Mom traveled a lot,” she said, and those tears that she was keeping in her eyes were running down her cheeks. “It was their favorite thing to do.”
Silence wrapped us like a warm blanket, and we both drank without saying anything else.
I thought this was it, the moment I let go of my anger and started anew.
I thought she was going back to her room, but once she finished her beer, she placed it over the coffee table without a coaster. Sven was going to kill her.
“It’s fucked up he never told me.” She distracted me from her water rings over the wooden table.
“It’s better you found out here than with your pack,” I grunted.
I ignored the stab I felt in my heart and grabbed a coaster before putting my can down.
“You know I don’t want a pack, Anders.”
The way she said my name had my insides twisting, and suddenly, I was too aware of the situation. I was still just in my boxers, and she was sitting naked from her waist down, careful to keep her legs closed or I’d get an eyeful of her cunt.
“You don’t know them yet. Maybe you do,” I argued even though I wanted to keep her.
Keep her? I couldn’t keep her. Not when she wasn’t mine, not when she was my friend’s daughter, and not when these few words were the only ones we ever exchanged without a bite.
“All I want is to go back home and—”
I could understand the urge to go back home. I loved our village, and I’d struggle being away from home. “You love Brazil.”
But confusion flashed in her eyes, and her eyebrows furrowed. “I like my country, yes. But it’s not why I want to go back home.”
“Why then?”
Did it matter? No, I guess it didn’t. In the end, she was leaving.
It shouldn’t matter to me where. My job was to alert others to the existence of a possible omega and get her in the database.
If she refused her pack? It wasn’t my problem.
I’d be the first to defend her choice if anyone decided to contest it.
“I want to be closer to Dad,” she said, surprising me. “I don’t want to give our house away. Is that stupid?”
“No,” I said at once. I knew what it meant to cling to the past, afraid to let it go. “But you’re in his house too.”
She gasped, and her lips parted in wonder.
I watched her beautiful face as her eyes traced every wall like she was seeing it for the first time.
For a second, I felt self-conscious, afraid that she would see the flaws of our house, and maybe the reason her dad left was the reason she would too. I shook that away when she spoke next.
“He lived here too?”
“This has always been our pack house.” I nodded and looked away from her. “We thought about moving when he left. To shred the memories away, but we realized it didn’t matter where we were, his absence was loud.”
She had his eyes, but where Karl was easygoing and kind, she was full of determination. Any time I looked at her, it seemed like she was ready to start a fight. Yet this time, her tone changed, her voice softened, and she breathed out slowly.
“Do you really blame him, or do you just miss him?” she asked.
It wasn’t a well-kept secret, so I snorted. “That’s what you think?”
Isadora lifted a shoulder. “You all hate my dad so much. Maybe there’s something behind all this hate.”
This time, I actually chuckled. “That’s not a discovery. We were packmates, and he left.”
She bit down on her bottom lip, resting her back to the couch and bringing her hands to her face. She looked tired like this. More than the heat, it was something else, and I found myself wanting to fix whatever it was that made her feel that way.
“Maybe that’s a cultural thing,” she said, finally interrupting my white knight thoughts. “I don’t get it, and sometimes you say half of a sentence as if I should understand the whole thing.”
There wasn't a bite in her words, not the usual I expected from her. There was too much vulnerability in those words because she knew as much as I did that this culture should be hers. It was Karl’s fault.
He denied the girl knowledge about her own biology, but I didn’t point it out.
Not when she so painfully knew that. Instead, I nodded, trying to connect with the person inside me who would also hate being lied to.
I kept pushing her away as if she was the reason Karl left, as if she had anything to do with it. She didn’t.
She was lost and alone, and I made her feel unwelcome and confused.
She was an omega who wasn’t raised with our people and didn’t understand the depth of the brotherhood.
To her, we only disliked her dad because he left our village, yet that wasn’t it.
The feelings churned in the pit of my stomach.
If she stayed, she could see. She could meet our people and see how pack life worked.
She would understand us better if she gave us a chance.
I opened my mouth to tell her so. To say she should stay longer and try on this life before turning her back, but before the words made it into my mouth, she got up.
“Good night.”
And she left with all her questions unanswered.