Sixty-Eight
SIXTY-EIGHT
Nat
MIA WANTED ME TO TAKE omega hormones. Or rather, she wanted to know if I wanted to take omega hormones. She was offering me, to the best of her ability, a chance to be part of the bond... for a few days, at least.
I’d stuttered something about needing to think about it, probably looking about the same as I had right after Blake Berlusconi’s goon had punched me in the kidneys in a back alley. Mia seemed to understand that she’d blindsided me.
“Okay,” she’d said, and kissed me lightly before heading for the nest she shared with Luca.
Staring blankly at the wall of my room, I lasted about an hour before I couldn’t take it anymore. And now, here I was, pacing restlessly back and forth across the length of the converted attic where Emiel slept as I tried to verbalize the crazy ping-pong match going on inside my skull.
“What if I do it and I hate the way the hormones affect me?” I said, my hands tangled in my hair. “I’m not an omega, I’m a beta! Isn’t it unnatural to try and change that?”
Emiel was lounging on his bed with his laptop out and Princess curled up next to him. At that, he looked up.
“Is that you talkin’, or your old man?”
I came to a halt so abrupt it felt like I’d walked face-first into a brick wall. “What?”
“I’m saying, that sounds like your shit-stain of a dad,” he said. “Not you. If Luca or Mia had been alive fifty years ago when the fuckin’ fascist regime used to rip out omegas’ wombs and remove their mating glands, would you call it unnatural if they wanted to take hormones so they could bond?”
My stomach rolled in a sudden bout of queasiness at the reminder of where we’d been as a society a scant few decades ago.
“No, of course not.” I rewound the words that had poured out of my mouth in an unfiltered stream of consciousness. And goddamn it... they’d been my dad’s words, just like Emiel had said.
I was standing there with my mouth hanging open, and I must’ve stayed like that too long—because Emiel frowned and asked, “You okay?”
My left hand was still tugging painfully at my own hair. I unclenched my fingers and let it drop.
“Christ,” I said. “He’s still living rent free inside my fucking head—even after everything that’s happened.”
“Yeah,” Emiel agreed without judgment. “Shitty dads tend to do that.”
He paused, his attention visibly turning inward in a way that I knew meant he was feeling something through the bond.
“Luca?” I asked.
“I think he felt what we were talking about,” he said. “He was worried, but I let him know everything’s all right. Figured it might be more awkward for you to talk about this with an omega in the room.”
Deflating, I collapsed into Emiel’s desk chair and let my head fall back, staring at the slanted ceiling.
“Right,” I said with a sigh. “Because Luca sure as hell doesn’t need to hear me making things sound like I think omegas are somehow less-than. God , I need this man out of my head.”
“Told you,” Emiel said. “I know a good therapist.”
“And I said I’d consider it, but then I didn’t follow through,” I finished. “I’ll call her office tomorrow.”
“Good,” Emiel said. “So, we know what your asshole dad thinks about what Mia suggested. What do you think about it?”
I backed up to the beginning of my tangled trail of thought again, and tried to start over. “Okay. So, I really am worried that it might affect me in a way I don’t like. But it’s just short term; it’s not a permanent change, right?”
Emiel glanced down at his laptop, brows knit in concentration. “Yeah. The people who are talking about it on this forum tested high-dose, short duration. They say it doesn’t let betas be permanently in the bond; just when there’s a pack heat and they have fresh bites from one or more alphas.”
“Which makes sense,” I said, “because I don’t have a mating gland. That’s what regulates the bond long-term, isn’t it?”
Emiel nodded. “Right. Alpha saliva circulating in your bloodstream can work for a few days until your immune system clears it out, because you’ll have the right omega heat hormones circulating. But it’s not as strong a connection, and you don’t have the gland to encode that bond permanently in your DNA.”
I blew out a breath. “What about the heat itself? Would I actually be in heat like Luca and Mia?”
The prospect made my guts squirm in a way that was both exciting and uncomfortable. To lose control to that degree? I wasn’t sure I could handle it. And at the same time, a deeply buried part of my brain pictured being taken over and over by dominant alpha men while being so very, very desperate for it.
I must have been telegraphing some of this, because Emiel looked uncomfortable.
“Sorry,” I said, my cheeks heating.
“Nah,” Emiel replied. “It’s just... if you decide to do this, I’d feel weird biting you. You and me, I don’t think we’re like that.”
I let out a breath of laughter. “No, agreed. I value our friendship, and you’re right. It would feel weird. But the pack thing... it’s kind of like a big web, right? So, if you’re mated to Luca, and Byron and Zalen also bite Luca, and then one or both of them bites me ...”
“Then it’s all one big bond, yeah,” Emiel confirmed. “But not everyone in every pack is together. Y’know, sexually.”
“And I’d be on the edge of things, anyway,” I mused, turning the idea over and over in my head. I’d be lying to myself if I tried to claim I hadn’t felt any jealousy about the pack bond. But... “Okay, I think I know what’s got me so tied up in knots about this.” A moment later, I realized what I’d just said, and snorted. “So to speak.”
“Yeah?” Emiel prompted.
“When I was thinking about the bond,” I said, feeling the words out as I spoke, “I was jealous of it from the perspective of an alpha. And now, if I choose to do this, I’ll be coming at the bond from the perspective of an omega.”
Emiel thought about that for a few seconds. “I guess I can see that. Is it a problem, though?”
The answer came to me, so simply that it seemed like I should have stumbled over it right away.
“No. I told Mia earlier that I was just happy to be here, after everything I did to her... after everything that’s happened. And I meant it. Anything beyond that is just an unexpected bonus.”
Emiel met my gaze and held it. “So, you gonna do it, then? Because if so, we need to get this shit underway sooner rather than later.”
“I am going to do it,” I said, all of my uncertainty lifting. “I mean... I need to talk with the others first, since this involves them, too. But assuming they’re okay with it—”
“They will be.”
“—then, yes. Let’s make this happen,” I finished.
Emiel was right, of course. While Byron predictably used it as an excuse for snark and innuendo, he, Zalen, and Luca were all for the idea, if it was something I wanted.
And it was. The more I thought about it without looking at it through my father’s shit-colored glasses, the more I wanted it. Like Emiel and I had talked about, it wasn’t a permanent thing. The alphomic medical specialists who talked about it online—quietly and using pseudonyms to be safe—agreed that there were few health risks for short-term usage in betas. Frankly, common drugs like blockers and suppressors used by omegas were far more dangerous.
Which had led me to have a heart-to-heart with Mia, where I’d begged her to have natural heats more often, going forward. She’d climbed in my lap, kissed me soundly, and promised that she planned to have all the natural heats from now on.
All of them .
Of course, my dick had promptly surged at that, and we’d ended up having noisy sex in the TV room.
God, I fucking loved my life now.
Then, with typical A+ timing, I’d opened my laptop that evening to check my emails, and found an angry message waiting in my inbox from my parents.
Oh, joy .