Chapter 12
12
DASH
Ronan lingers in the alley, his bike rumbling and helmet on, but doesn’t make a move to hit the road.
I watch him from the driver’s seat of my car, shaking my head at his stubbornness.
He didn’t want to leave the omega— Briar .
I don’t blame him. Leaving her felt wrong for me too.
But I also know that we can’t do anything else without speaking to Jasper and Landon.
The sweet girl with the pale blue eyes, round cheeks, and a tiny diamond in her nose that glittered in the starlight stole my breath at first glance.
And once I regained it, all I could smell was the hint of a comforting lemon sugar scent that stroked a part of me that I’d forgotten existed.
It kicked my heartbeat into overdrive, but compared to Ronan’s reaction to her, mine wasn’t anything special.
She’s clearly his omega.
If she were mine, wouldn’t I have been all over her too?
Historically, time and place have never really mattered much when it comes to scent matches.
The pull between us should have been strong enough to shift the entire world beneath my feet.
She should be my centre of gravity now, but I’m still anchored to the ground.
Good god, when we get to the house, one sniff of Ronan and Landon’s going to lose his shit.
If she truly is supposed to be our pack omega, Jasper will try to get as much information from us as he can.
Our pack is already fracturing, but if this truly goes how I’m expecting it to, there very well might not be anything left of us by the end of the night.
My fingers feel weighed down as I roll down the passenger window and lean over the centre console.
“Go home, Ro!”
His face is hidden behind his matte-black helmet, but I know he’s staring at me when he keeps his head tilted in my direction and kicks the bike into gear.
Clouds of dirt puff up behind him when he spins into the street, the loud purr of his bike drowning out the rest of the noises in the neighbourhood.
I shift the car into gear and follow him, not wanting to risk losing him in case he tries to come back here instead.
From what I saw earlier, it wouldn’t surprise me one bit if he snuck into the building and found out where Briar lived before standing guard outside of her apartment door all night.
To my surprise, he doesn’t try to lose me the entire way home.
I keep my distance to not crowd him when he pulls into the driveway behind Landon’s missing SUV.
The garage door doesn’t open for us.
I realize why the moment I come to a stop behind his bike.
Ronan doesn’t plan on wasting time pulling in around the other vehicles in the garage.
Barely waiting for his engine to stop running, he kicks his stand down and hops off the bike, leaving it on the driveway.
The black helmet is off in a flash before he’s slamming it onto his seat and storming up to the front door.
I park my car and scramble out the door, running after him.
“Hey, calm down, Ro. Maybe tonight isn’t the right time to talk to him about this,” I suggest.
He ignores me.
“Landon isn’t ever going to change his mind on an omega if you come in this hot. Think on it first. Maybe she’s not?—”
My packmate stops so suddenly I nearly plow face-first into his back.
When he whips around to look at me, his snarl makes me glad I didn’t make contact.
“Time won’t change who she is. Not to me and not to you.”
“She’s not my scent match, Ronan.”
“You’re not stupid. Don’t act like it.”
I clear my throat to hide a wince.
“She’s not. I’d have been able to tell.”
“Maybe you couldn’t tell because the only person you could think about was Landon,” he spits before leaving me there.
I don’t make it three steps after him when the front door opens and Jasper steps outside.
There’s a smudge of what I hope is dirt from his temple to the edge of his jaw as he comes face to face with a pissed-off Ronan.
Dread pools in my gut.
They’re so close, and Ronan might as well be wearing the omega’s slick on his skin with how strong her scent is on him.
It’s left a trail down from the driveway to the house.
One whiff will be all it takes for Jasper to lose his mind if she’s?—
Ronan tears past him, shoving his way into the house and out of view.
I jog after him and pass through the doorway without Jasper blocking the way.
“Where’s Landon?” Ronan grits out.
Jasper is at his side now, unmoving.
I hold my breath, mentally preparing for the shit storm that’s brewing as he grips Ronan’s shoulder and fists his shirt to haul him closer.
“What is that?” he groans, a stuttered, rough purr kicking up in his chest.
Ronan lets him paw at his clothes, their height similar enough that they’re nearly nose to nose.
I inch toward them, trying to keep my steps as silent as possible.
While we do get classes on omegas in school, we’re not exactly taught how to handle shit like this.
I assume interrupting them right now isn’t the best course of action.
There’s a wildness to Jasper now as Ronan tilts his head and bares his neck, welcoming our packmate to get more of the omega’s scent into his lungs.
“It’s what you think it is,” he grunts.
His pissed-off stare finds me over Jasper’s shoulder, attempting to pin me into place.
I don’t stop moving.
“Where is she, Ro?” Jasper asks, curling his fingers into his shoulder while he attempts to pull himself away.
It doesn’t work. “ Who is she, and why isn’t she here?”
His voice is weak, the words spoken with a plea that cuts clean through me.
He’s never hidden his desperation to find an omega, but now, hearing him like this, it’s painful to not be able to hand him what he wants.
It makes me feel like I made a mistake not allowing Ronan to bundle her up and haul her back with us.
“Ask Dash,” Ro grunts, standing stiff as a board.
Jasper whips around, and fuck me, the emotion written all over him nearly undoes me.
His scent spikes, filling the living room with the comfort of warm, fresh laundry.
The most sensitive alpha I’ve ever met stares at me with a hope so intense he must be able to taste it and waits for me to speak.
Suddenly, it’s the last thing I want to do.
“Tell me she’s outside waiting,” he murmurs.
Fighting back a wince, I say, “She’s not.”
Ronan growls.
“She’s alone instead. All by herself in the same building my family lives in.”
“Why? She belongs here with us,” Jasper croaks, a hand shaking as he lifts it to push his dirty-blond hair back.
His laundry scent shifts, the sharp bite of leather drowning it out.
“Let’s go get her. Bring her to the pack house so we can all meet. Why didn’t you do that in the first place?”
“Because of Landon,” Ronan snaps, eyeing the staircase that leads to the second floor.
Our bedrooms are all upstairs, including Landon’s.
But I’d bet he’s not hiding away up there.
When he’s home, he’s in the basement, busying his mind with another workout that pushes his already fatigued body to its breaking point.
“He made the call to leave her behind?” Jasper asks with a wince.
There’s a shift in the air the moment Ronan opens his mouth to reply.
I prepare myself for his anger, knowing that I can’t blame him for his emotions.
Only the voice that appears isn’t his.
And I think that might be even worse.
“Who the fuck brought an omega into our house?”
LANDON
The voices from upstairs draw me out of the gym.
I’m tense, my neck stiff with tension that I can’t get stretched out.
The tweaked muscle in my knee hurts like a mother right now as I try not to limp.
Last game was shit. I hit the ice more times than I think I have in the entirety of my career.
The medic warned me to take it easy, but I couldn’t stop myself from heading into the gym the minute I got home from practice tonight.
An ice bath will help enough to take the pain away, but I don’t know for how long.
Exhaustion has me in the worst mood.
I haven’t gotten more than a handful of hours of sleep for weeks, and it’s wearing on me.
Breathing in, I stumble, the toe of my running shoe catching on the edge of the top stair.
I shoot my arms out and brace myself on the walls, my chest caving in.
Lust zaps through me, an invisible hand reaching between my legs to squeeze at my knot.
I grit my teeth and drop my head forward, muffling a groan by burying my teeth in my tongue.
Fuck, I can’t do this anymore.
These phantom whiffs of her have kept me up at all hours of the night and distracted me so badly I’m injuring myself on the ice.
The omega is everywhere.
Even after paying a detailing company thousands to rescrub the interior of my SUV three times, she’s still there.
In the cracks of the upholstery, the air vents, and, for god’s sake, even lingering on the breeze that blows in through the open windows.
I don’t know what else to do.
Even here, in the empty stairwell two weeks later, I smell her just as strongly as that first and only day.
Lemons follow me everywhere, the sweet aroma of warm cookies lingering in my hair and on my skin.
My cock is raw, rubbed to death by my palm three times a day in hopes of easing the insistent fucking pull in my groin and chest that demands I go back for her.
I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve convinced myself that even if I did, the odds of her being there are slim to none.
My desire shows no sign of calming, so I push out of the stairwell, focused on getting the fuck into my bedroom and a cold shower.
I don’t make it ten steps before my chest rumbles with a weakly contained growl.
The omega’s scent is too strong to be memory.
It makes my scent gland pulse in time with my knot, my vision darkening around the edges.
She’s here. The omega is here.
Unable to fight the pull, I tear into the living room, lip curled to bare my teeth.
“Who the fuck brought an omega into our house?”
It’s Ronan who turns to me first. The storm in his eyes is vicious, the kind that sinks ships and destroys neighbourhoods.
An irredeemable cruelty.
If I weren’t so worked up, I’d have taken a step back at his reaction.
There’s no hope in doing that now.
Instead, it feeds into my rage and releases the chains I keep on my dominance, encouraging it to break free.
He doesn’t heed the warning I offer him with my delayed response to his feral energy.
“How would you even know what an omega smells like anymore?”
I roll my jaw to hide my initial reaction to him catching my slip-up.
“It reeks in here. I could smell whoever she is all the way in the gym.”
“Whoever she is,” he echoes lowly.
“She’s our omega.”
“We don’t have an omega,” I hiss.
I’m aware of Dash and Jasper watching, lingering closer to Ronan than they are me.
The pang in my stomach is shoved away just as quickly as it appeared.
Ronan doesn’t back down.
“I do.”
“You don’t smell it too, Lan? Clearly, you smell something,” Jasper says.
A dark laugh from Ronan, taunting me.
“Oh, he fucking does. You’re bursting at the seams, Landon. How does it feel? Your instincts are screaming at you to go find her. Come here and get a better whiff of it before you try telling us that we can’t complete our pack.”
“Ronan,” Dash warns, planting himself between us now.
“Let’s just sit and talk. As a pack.”
Jasper is silent, and when I look at him, the reason why is obvious.
He’s always been the smartest of us all.
If there was one member of our pack who could have taken the leader position from me based on intelligence alone, it would have been him.
My stomach drops between my knees.
“Have you already met her? Do you know whose scent this is?”
Dash’s eyebrows fly up his forehead while Ronan seethes, hands buried so deep into his pockets that he’s sure to bust holes in them.
I don’t lie to my pack.
They’re my brothers.
My family. Everything I’ve gone through in my life, they were there to witness.
Whenever I’ve faltered, it’s Jasper who ducked beneath my arm and held me up.
Ronan’s protected me our entire lives.
And Dash has listened to every complaint, every rant.
He’s never judged me for anything.
Not once.
But this?
This isn’t a situation where I can trust Jasper to take his place beneath my arm and hold me steady.
Ronan won’t ever forgive me for how I treated the omega he already sees as his.
Dash’s beta instincts keep him more level-headed, but will that be enough to keep him from abandoning me too?
The lie tastes like bile in my throat.
“No. I have no idea who this omega is. And I don’t want to, either.”
Jasper flinches.
“You can’t possibly know that without meeting her.”
“It doesn’t matter who she is. She’s not for us. We don’t need an omega,” I declare through my teeth.
“It’s not only up to you,” Jasper says.
I narrow my eyes on him.
“You haven’t even met this woman.”
“No, but I can smell her. And she smells like she could be mine, Lan. Ours.”
“Don’t let your desire for an omega confuse you. She’s not ours.”
Ronan laughs again, this time making sure it’s loud enough to make us pay attention.
My chest caves in when he shakes his head and walks right past me.
His shoulder slams into my body with a strength that creates an ache deep in my muscle, not bothering to speak another word.
I stand in place, quieting my alpha when he demands I follow him.
To make sure he’s okay and warn him to be careful.
There’s only one place he’s going, and I want to tell him not to go.
Our conversation isn’t over.
If he leaves now, I risk him slipping even further out of my grasp.
I stay silent.
Dash looks in my direction, a plea for me to speak up glaringly obvious in every twist of his features.
I’ve grown so used to disappointing these men that it’s almost instinct to do it again.
“You’re going to let him walk out of here like that?” Jasper asks, his disappointment a knife in the gut.
“If he wants her, he can have her.” Every word tastes like poison.
Jasper doesn’t let it go.
“You don’t mean that. I can see how off you’ve been recently. You might not think that we need an omega, but we do. The pack is crumbling, Landon. You’re just too stubborn to figure out how to go about facing it.”
The air is too tainted with her.
Ronan’s gone, and she’s still all I can smell.
All I can think about.
I ache to follow Ronan so I have even a slim chance of seeing her again.
My centre of gravity has been rotated, and everything leads to the woman I don’t even know where to find.
I’ve never felt anything so manipulative.
My own mind has turned against me, and now, my pack.
“I don’t want her. Not now, not ever. Have at it, Jasper. Find whatever it is you’re looking for because I want no part in it.”
Dash sucks in a sharp breath, and I’m moving, leaving before I have to deal with the repercussions of my words, both with them and myself.
I don’t stop until I’m stepping into the shower and cranking the water to ice-cold, letting it soak through my clothes.
Teeth clattering, I tilt my head back beneath the spray of water, letting it rain down on my face.
Ronan will be fine. They all will be.
I’ll protect them the way I always have, and when they realize that the omega they thought they knew was nothing more than the one person who could tear us apart, it’ll be me who gets them past it the way I did my father.
They’ll get past it because I’ll be here.
That’s the one thing I can promise them.