Twenty-Eight
TWENTY-EIGHT
Byron
I’D MANAGED TO KEEP my shit together when I’d walked into the kitchen after work to find Mia wearing a high-necked sweater—one that didn’t quite cover the top of a suspicious bruise decorating her throat. After hearing about Tony’s asshole parents showing up at Zalen’s office door and upsetting Mr. Cool badly enough that he had to leave work early, I tried to tell myself that if he and Mia had fucked, it was no different than when Luca and I needed stress relief.
I didn’t exactly succeed , but I’d been willing to keep my mouth shut and pray that it was a one-off, rather than something more serious between the two of them. Then, I’d gone upstairs after dinner and opened my bedroom door.
The scent of Mia’s elderberry-flavored slick clung to my couch—damningly fresh. A few hours old, at most. And hanging in the air like an accusation, a hint of lime and coconut, sharpened by lust in a way I’d never smelled it before, outside of a heat nest.
At which point, I’d stormed down the hall to Zalen’s suite and barged in like a complete dick.
“You brought Mia to my room and fucked her on my couch ?” I demanded, a red haze settling over my vision. “Because you needed a condom ?”
Zalen’s eyes widened. “No! That’s not... we didn’t...” He cut himself off with a sharp headshake and ran a hand down his face.
Despite myself, I felt a small thrill at putting a more dominant alpha on the back foot like this. Instinct propelled me to lean farther over his desk, into his space. My lips peeled back, baring teeth.
Zalen let his hand drop. “We didn’t have sex in your room, Byron. And I realize now how incredibly inappropriate it was to intrude on your space the way I did. I’m afraid I wasn’t doing most of my thinking with my big brain, at the time.”
He didn’t mention that I’d just shoved my way into his private space without an invitation. He didn’t back down, either... or show any discomfort or weakness in the face of my open challenge. I bit down on the all-too-familiar frustrated humiliation of not being alpha enough to successfully dominate other alphas in a fight, verbal or otherwise.
That humiliation held a new dimension now. Before, I’d never challenged another alpha over an omega. I’d never had to fight for Luca. Outside of heats, he didn’t trust any other alphas with what remained of his sexuality. I was the only one he ever came to. Plus, he’d have hated it if I ever tried to fight for him, because we weren’t like that.
But with Mia, it was different. And didn’t that difference just scare the ever-loving shit out of me? Terrifying sentences like ‘ She was mine first ,’ and ‘ I won’t let you take her away from me ’ fought to escape from behind my clenched teeth.
“You’ve got a lot of fucking nerve,” I barked instead, caring less and less about the consequences of my words. Instinct had already dragged my higher brain functions into the basement of my consciousness, bound and gagged.
“ Stop ,” Zalen said, his own bark understated, but no less effective for it.
I growled, the urge to resist a more dominant alpha’s bark an unfamiliar itch beneath my skin. But I hadn’t magically become less of a goddamned coward, just because I was jealous that Zalen had been balls-deep in an omega I’d thought was mine and Luca’s. Dark, placid eyes bored into my skull, and within seconds, my gaze slid away. Hot shame licked at my face, along with soul-deep desperation over the prospect of losing what my instincts had apparently decided was mine.
Fucking irrational.
Fucking devastating .
My breathing came fast and hard; my fingers clenched the edge of Zalen’s desk until they ached. With a sharp pang, I recognized that I was about two seconds from completely losing my composure over a relationship I’d sworn up and down was nothing more than casual sex.
“Byron.”
And, oh, how I hated Zalen’s soothing tone. It was a tone that said he saw right through me... that he wasn’t angry. That he wanted to take care of me.
“ Sit .”
It was still gentle, but it was no less an alpha command. I knew, with every fiber of my being, that giving into it would hurt like knives. Like failure. But that didn’t stop my knees from giving way, tipping me into the extra chair that sat on this side of the desk.
I continued to clench the edge of the smooth wood surface, my face burning with humiliation. Abandoning the fight for Mia felt like giving up a limb, and I silently cursed the deeply ingrained alpha instincts that were so utterly ill-suited to life in a modern world.
“I don’t even know why I’m so upset,” I choked out, still unable to look Zalen in the eye. “I sleep with anyone who wants to be in my bed. Can’t exactly get jealous if she does, too.”
There was a short pause. “Have you, though? Slept with anyone else since she came here, I mean?” There was genuine curiosity in Zalen’s voice.
“With Luca,” I said, not sure why the question made me feel so defensive.
“But only with Luca,” Zalen finished. “Byron, you must realize that everyone in this house is falling for her, in their various ways. Luca included.”
I heard his chair scrape as he resumed his seat across the desk from me.
“So, what if they are?” I asked mulishly. They , not we . It felt like a lie, bitter on my tongue.
“I don’t know yet,” Zalen said. “And maybe now’s not the right time to act on whatever’s happening between all of us. If for no other reason than it’s not fair to her, when she’s already overwhelmed with big life events.”
He took a deep breath and let it out in a sigh. I dragged my gaze up, finally regaining the cajones to look him in the face again as he continued speaking.
“For what it’s worth, I had no intention of falling into bed with her when I left the Hope Project this afternoon,” he said. “And at this point, I don’t know if it ended up being a good idea or a terrible one.”
A traitorous little voice whispered that falling into bed with Mia—or Mia and Luca together—was always a good idea.
“Planning on making a habit of it?” I managed through clenched teeth.
Zalen shook his head. “No. Not under these circumstances. Like I said, I’m not sure it’s fair to her to muddy the waters right now. I know it probably doesn’t feel like it, but I’m not trying to take anything away from you, Byron. Or from Luca, either.”
He was right. It didn’t feel like it.
His mouth twisted unhappily. “Still, I think it would be best if we all got a little more honest about what we want in this house.”
My chest felt like someone had welded an iron band around it. “I don’t want anything,” I grated.
A hint of sadness pulled at his expression. “Yeah, I can see that,” he said, utterly deadpan.
I did not go straight downstairs and haul Mia over my shoulder like a caveman dragging a prize back to his den. I did not summon Luca to my room to drown our frustrations in each other’s bodies.
Instead, I went to bed and stewed in my own juices for the rest of the night. Or, more accurately, I stewed in the slowly fading aroma of Mia and Zalen’s juices. I wondered, briefly, whether there might be a bottle of industrial-strength upholstery cleaner in the basement closet that held our housecleaning supplies. But I actually hated the way that shit smelled, so it wasn’t like I would have used it anyway.
The urge washed over me to go out and score a week’s worth of one-night stands, bringing every single one of them back here to my room to cover up Mia and Zalen’s scent with the scent of strangers. Then, I tried to picture what it would feel like to do that, and a wave of nausea hit me. My gorge rose.
What the fuck was happening to me?
I shook my head, trying to dislodge the buzzing thoughts swirling around inside it. In the end, the only thing for it was normalcy—or at least, the appearance of it.
And so, I acted normal.
I went to work. I did my job. I came home and was mostly civil to the other people in the house. And at night, I ruminated on where and how everything had gone off the rails so badly. After considerable thought, it occurred to me that Nat Fucking Bell was probably to blame.
Mia’s husband was undeniably hot, and apparently not as much of an asshole as it appeared at first glance. He’d screwed up his marriage to a beautiful, ambitious and talented omega. That was what had dropped Mia into our lives in the first place. At which point, everything had become complicated .
Nat needed to either fix his shit or cut Mia loose completely, I decided. That way, she’d either be back to her old life and not in the middle of ours, or else she’d be free to move on...
I quashed the end of that sentence ... with Luca and me .
Because what the hell were either of us going to be able to offer Mia Dimitriadis, compared to what Zalen could offer her? As if that wasn’t bad enough, I couldn’t even begin to think about where Emiel might fit into this mess without my head feeling like it was about to explode.
No, it was better if she went back to her husband. It removed temptation .
The next step was obvious. I needed to have a conversation with Nat; preferably somewhere that wouldn’t arouse suspicion. And when Mia formally invited everyone in the house to attend the grand reopening of her restaurant on the coming Friday, I was pretty sure I’d have my chance.