Chapter Seventeen – Bradford
Out of all the things I could have told Kayla, I had to go and dive into all of that. It’s a mess is what it is, a big mess. A quagmire that has weighed me down my entire life, practically haunted me. It’s threatened to swallow me on many occasions.
Yet I’m still here. I’m still alive, somehow. Some days it doesn’t feel like it, if I’m honest. Some days it feels like I’m caught in a rerun of a boring sitcom that has lost its amusement a long time ago, and I follow my routine because there’s nothing else I can do.
I can’t break free. I’m stuck, just like I’ve been stuck my entire life.
Talking to Kayla, though, brought things up I haven’t really thought about in a while.
As much as the wounds are healed, nothing more than scars on my body and in my mind, they still feel so fresh.
Time is supposed to be the great equalizer—it comes for all of us, one way or another—but to me, it’s only been a prison, much like this damned house and my damned last name.
Getting back to work is a futile effort, just as working was in the morning, right after Hayden and I discovered what Kayla was hiding. I’d say today is a wasted day, but I can’t, not when I got the truth out of her.
Most of the truth, anyway.
Kayla is an omega.
I’d say it makes sense, why I wanted to smell her, but at the same time, it doesn’t make sense. Not to me. Not with my past. Everything I am, everything I stand for; I never cared about claiming a mate. Everything that comes along with having a mate sounded like torture to me.
The closeness. The touching. The need that supposedly can’t ever be fulfilled.
None of that sounded appealing to me. The thought of touching someone like that, of them touching me like that…
you often hear about broken omegas like Kayla, but you don’t ever hear about broken alphas.
The feral ones who lose their minds? Sure, they make the news every now and then, but not other alphas like me.
I’m alone in that. I’m broken.
And the thing is, even if I wasn’t broken, would I really want to have a family?
They would become a weakness to my father, something he could use against me.
People he could hurt. If I had a child, what would stop him from controlling them the same way he controlled me?
Of course, I want to say I’d throw down, stand up to him for the first time in my life—not let him raise a hand to them—but it’s easier said than done.
Kayla is an omega. I don’t know what this means for her, for her job. I don’t know where we go from here. Clearly she cannot return to her old life, but where will she go? I suppose I can let her keep living here for as long as she needs, but with how I reacted to her faint scent before…
When that scent gets stronger, I fear how I’ll react, the things I’ll want to do.
It’s just after four when I decide to check on Kayla and that list. I get up and exit my office, wandering to hers just down the hall.
I set her up with everything she could need in there—all the office supplies anyone could ever want, along with a laptop and a tablet that she appeared new at handling.
Since she’s an omega who’s been trying to hide her designation, I have to assume she’s from a poor family, so being new at technology makes sense. Same with her not wanting to accept any of the clothes I bought her yesterday.
I stand before her door. It’s closed, so I lift my hand and knock once. I don’t hear anything inside the office, so I cautiously push inside. I’m seconds away from asking her for that list when I spot her behind the desk with her head down.
Is she… asleep?
Another thought occurs to me: she could be dead. It’s such a harrowing through that I need to make sure she isn’t, so I step inside the office without making a sound, inching closer to her desk. Relief floods me when I see her shoulders rise and fall with a slow, even breath.
Good. Just napping, then. I suppose it was a difficult morning for her, full of excitement—although I don’t know that excitement is the best word to use to describe everything that happened.
Frankly, I don’t know what I would have done if I would’ve come in here and found her not breathing.
The notion simply doesn’t compute in my head.
Standing before her desk, I spot the list near her hand. It looks as if it’s been completed, although I suppose I can’t be quite sure until I see it for myself. The last thing I want to do is wake her up, so I stealthily sneak around her desk to check the list over her hunched, sleeping figure.
The list is not overly detailed. Just bare basics, nothing specific. She wrote down shampoo, as if she doesn’t care which shampoo she has. Same with soap. Toothbrush, toothpaste, a hairbrush; nothing out of the ordinary, and all so very plain.
I suppose she’s used to using whatever she could get her hands on, whatever’s the cheapest. Why bother having a favorite scent or a favorite lotion if she can’t get the same thing when she’s out?
Seeing the sad state of her list makes me wonder what kind of life she lives outside of this house.
Beyond the abuse, it doesn’t seem like a good one, and that makes me feel strange.
Not good. It makes absolutely no sense, but I don’t want her to know what hardship is.
I want her to have a favorite scent, to have a particular kind of body wash she prefers to use.
My eyes slowly pull away from the list, landing on her back.
She’s so small. Too small. Too thin. Too frail.
No wonder she’s asleep right now. That body of hers can’t house that much energy to get her through the day.
I don’t know how she functions. She has to be one or two missed meals away from a coma.
If she stays like this, it won’t be good for her long-term.
She can’t stay like this. She needs to eat like an adult. She needs to fuel her body—and that means she’ll need to go through her heat. I don’t know how long it’ll take, or how long or strong that heat will be, but she needs to.
And since she doesn’t have anywhere else… she’ll have it here. I can order her anything she might need to get through it. She can pick any room in the house. She’ll have her privacy as her body does what an omega’s body does naturally.
I don’t know how long I stare down at her, how long I study her from above and behind, but eventually a strange urge rises inside, an urge I can’t say I’ve ever had before.
I want to touch her. I want to feel if she’s warm or if she’s cold. I want to know whether her skin is soft. So many different things, different desires, all new and at war inside of me. I’m not used to it, and I don’t know if I’ll ever be.
Lifting a hand, I bring that hand to her, though I stop just short of touching her. Mere inches away, I hesitate. What would I do if she wakes up and I’m looming over her like this? It’s not a good look, and I’m not some cool, suave alpha who always knows what to say in situations like this.
So I don’t touch her arm or her shoulder. At the same time, I can’t pull my hand away just yet, so, even though it might be a mistake, I take a tendril of her hair between my fingers—carefully, of course, so as to not wake her or brush against her in the process.
Her hair is brown, but it has an almost reddish hue to it. It’s pretty long, and it often leads to an unkempt look when it comes to Kayla. She doesn’t style it, for obvious reasons. She lets its kinks and random waves be. It suits her.
I don’t know what makes me do it, but after I finally let go of that piece of her hair, I bend down further and close my eyes as I inhale.
I know I shouldn’t, but it’s just like before: it’s instinctual.
It happens before I realize it’s happening, as ridiculous as it is.
I breathe her in, that inner beast I thought had been starved a long time ago coming to life, needing to smell her.
It’s faint. It’s oh so faint, but it’s there: a soft rose scent.
It’s not strong enough to smell when you stand far away from her, or even a few feet.
Maybe it’s because of the donut she had earlier, or maybe it’s because she’s asleep without a care in the world, but it’s there.
Soft and subtle, merely a fraction of what she should smell like if she nourished herself better.
It’s the first time I pick up her scent, and I instantly want more of it.
As much as that scent threatens to drive me crazy, as much as it makes the alpha in me come back to life, I know I can’t linger here too much longer.
The longer I stay here, the more opportunity she has to awaken and see me, so it’s best if I pull back, take the list, and get out of here before she does.
I straighten up, and as I do so I slowly pull the list off the desk. The corner of the paper is under her arm, and I hold my breath until it’s in the clear and I have it completely in my possession. I stride to the door, pausing only for a few seconds to gaze back at her before I leave her be.
That was… odd. Very odd for me. I don’t know how to explain it or why I even had the urge to begin with. Maybe it’s because I opened up to her in an effort to make her feel better, to get her to open up in return and tell me who hurt her.
Yeah, that has to be it. Even before the visible bruise on her neck, I knew there was something about her, something familiar. We might have come from different backgrounds, but we know what it’s like to be hurt by those who should care for us.
I bring her list into my office and add a few things to it.
Pajamas, hair ties, other things I think someone like Kayla might need.
I’m not accustomed to dealing with women or their daily routines, but I imagine there’s a lot of things she might find useful that she’s simply done without in her life.
As long as she’s here, she’ll never want for anything.
It isn’t like I don’t have a fortune behind my name. What use is money if you can’t spend it every now and then?