Twenty-Three
TWENTY-THREE
Luca
HAVING THIS CONVERSATION out in the open with Mia might not have been my worst nightmare, but it was definitely somewhere in the top five. Top three , probably.
Did she seriously not see it? Did she not see the way the others looked at her? Hell, did she not see the way I looked at her?
But she wasn’t a liar, and she didn’t play games like this. Her expression of utter confusion could only be real. Mia Dimitriadis, Michelin star chef and part-time collector of broken alphas and omegas, had no fucking clue that we’d all fallen into her orbit like planets circling around a sun.
I knew it was cruel to put Emiel on the spot like this, but someone had to tell Mia the truth, straight to her face. And by breaking into my private nest without an invitation, as far as I was concerned, he’d just nominated himself. I glared at the alpha seated against the wall across the room from me, the dim light obscuring the details of his facial expression.
He drew breath, hesitating.
“Well?” I snapped, because if I had to feel this shitty, then he could damned well feel shitty right along with me.
“I got no business mating anybody,” he said. “Not ever. No one deserves a front-row seat to the things that live inside my head. Much less anyone I care about.”
I reared back as the words slid between my ribs like a knife. Mia’s hands clutched at my shoulders, keeping me from pulling away completely. Princess meowed as I accidentally jostled her.
“You know exactly what I mean, Luca,” Emiel continued, relentless. “I know you do. But you also need to know that if I wasn’t like I am, I’d mate you both in a heartbeat.”
I choked back the fresh sob that wanted to escape. It wasn’t fair. None of this was fair . I didn’t want to hear any of this. I didn’t want to feel what I was feeling. I didn’t want to think about mating, or pack bonds, or how impossible it all was. And yet, that seemed to be all I could think about, these days.
Mia looked back and forth between us.
“Wait,” she said, with dawning horror. “You both think you can’t mate because of the psychic bond that forms? Because of what happened to you when you were young?”
I didn’t say that alphas like Emiel could do whatever the hell they wanted. Instead, I turned a bitter gaze on her and grated out the truth.
“No one wants a broken omega. Blaze had me for years. Years , Mia. Keeping his lackeys from biting me while they fucked me might’ve been a power trip for him. But why do you think he never bit me?”
I saw her blanch in the soft glow of the fairy lights overhead.
“Yeah,” I said in response to her unspoken reaction. “Only an idiot would sign himself up for a lifetime of secondhand PTSD. I was good enough to fuck, whether I wanted it or not. I wasn’t good enough to mate.”
I’m still not .
I managed to bite back the final words, knowing they’d just end up upsetting her more. The silence that settled over the room felt heavy and thick.
Mia let her hands fall, straightening away from me. “By that logic, Zalen couldn’t mate again because he’s got the trauma of losing Julie. And I’m pretty sure Byron’s carrying around his own brand of PTSD from getting shot; he’s just better at hiding it.”
“Now she’s getting it,” Emiel mumbled.
She whirled on him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
He shrugged a shoulder. “Just what you said. We’re a pack of fuck-ups. Not even a pack, really. And no one in their right mind would mate any of us.”
“Bullshit. It’s different for alphas.” I bit out the words.
“Is it?” Emiel sounded genuinely confused.
“Yes!” I shouted, irrationally incensed.
“I don’t know if that’s true,” Mia said carefully. “But whatever the case, I’m still married, even if Nat and I are separated. Which makes all of this kind of a moot point.”
I snapped my jaw shut, not sure if her failing marriage made the whole thing better or worse.
“Do you still care about Nat?” Emiel asked. “Only sometimes it seems like you do.”
Now it was Mia’s turn to hesitate.
“I... yes. I don’t know if the marriage can be salvaged, or if I even want to try. But, yes. I still care about Nat. We were friends before we were lovers, and I miss that part. Badly.”
“Sounds like you don’t have to worry about the other two snapping Mia up while she’s still figuring out the rest of it, Luca,” Emiel said. “Does that help?”
I hated the fact that it did, a bit.
“I’ve got a floundering marriage, a floundering restaurant, and a one-sided gang war to fight,” Mia agreed. “As close as I feel to all of you—and that means you, too, Luca—I’m not exactly in the market for a mating bond right now.”
Emiel shifted uncomfortably, and I remembered his confession about how close he’d come to biting Mia without her consent. She must have remembered, as well—but if so, she didn’t show it.
“Did you ever dream about it when you were young?” I asked, the words escaping before I could stop them.
“A pack bond?” Mia asked. “I mean... didn’t we all? I was smuggling alphomic romance novels into the house before I even presented as an omega. My dad would’ve had an aneurism if he’d known about some of the stuff I was reading.”
“Same,” I whispered, then cleared my throat. “Well, not the parental oversight part, obviously. My parents were too busy shooting up heroin to take much interest in my reading material.”
“There are alphomic romance novels?” Emiel asked, sounding bewildered.
We both turned to stare at him in disbelief.
“Of course there are alphomic romance novels,” Mia said. “Holy crap. I am so getting you some to read now.”
It shouldn’t have been enough to break through the heavy blanket of depression weighing down my shoulders—and yet, somehow, I found myself giggling like an idiot at the mental image of Emiel reading some kind of terrible Mills I filled a cup and drank, swallowing a couple of painkillers to hopefully short-circuit my headache.
My trip to the counseling office yesterday shouldn’t have thrown me for this much of a loop. I could have filled out the paperwork online, but I’d wanted to get a feel for the place directly... to make sure the building and the people didn’t set off any alarm bells, as stupid as that sounded.
It wasn’t as though the receptionist had demanded that I write out a synopsis of my trauma on the patient application. Everyone I’d interacted with had been polite and professional. I had no excuses not to follow through and attend sessions there.
Maybe that was the problem. I had no more excuses. By filling out that paperwork, I was committing to actually doing this. And I really didn’t want to do this. Or, rather, I wanted the end result of maybe not being such a psychological dumpster fire after getting some proper therapy; I just didn’t want all of the painful bits that I knew would be coming between now and then.
I hadn’t expected Emiel to force his way into my nest when my nightmares woke me up, screaming. That had been dumb of me. Like he’d said, I’d started us down that road, not thinking that it might come back to bite me later on.
What’s good for the goose is good for the gander . That’s what my mother had always said. I guess it was inevitable that even she would be right about something eventually.
Staring at my swollen, bloodshot eyes in the mirror beneath the unforgiving light of the bathroom, I contemplated running and hiding somewhere rather than going back to my nest, and the people waiting there. Problem was, not only was I too tired to run... I also didn’t want to.
As problems went, I had a feeling that was going to be a big one.
Up until recently, I’d trusted Byron not to let it turn into a ‘ thing ’ on those occasions when Mia and I ended up crashing in his bed after an evening of particularly inventive sex. Then he’d called it ‘ our bed ,’ and I’d realized too late that Byron was as weak as I was.
Now Emiel, of all people, was succumbing to the siren lure of things we couldn’t afford to let ourselves want. And I was about to dive right back into the nest with him.
I stared at the idiot in the mirror and let out a resigned sigh.
“It doesn’t have to mean anything,” I repeated to my reflection, not believing it for a minute.
When I returned to my room, Emiel had joined Mia among the cushions. He was leaning against a convenient beanbag chair, and Mia appeared to be fast asleep against his side. One of his arms was wrapped around her narrow shoulders, his thumb rubbing gently over the skin.
A bolt of yearning shot through me like an arrow.
“You want me to go back by the door?” he asked, looking up at me with deep brown eyes.
My breath caught.
“You don’t have to,” I said hoarsely.
I could curl up on his other side , I thought in a daze. He’d put his arm around me just like he was doing for Mia .
It was too much. Too big for tonight. I lay down next to Mia instead, resting my head on her thigh. She made a humming noise, waking only enough to shimmy around so my head was on her stomach and she could get an arm across my chest.
The scent of spicy citrus and summer flowers surrounded me.
“Night, Luca,” Emiel said, his voice a low alpha rumble. “Can’t help with the nightmares, but I won’t let anything else get near you.”
A moment later, a soft weight hopped onto my thighs and curled up, purring.
“Well, except for Princess,” Emiel amended.
I turned, pressing my cheek into Mia’s stomach to stifle the watery smile that wanted to come through.
“Night, Emiel,” I whispered into the dark.