Chapter 30
THIRTY
KNOX
Luckily, I’d never been one who cared what others thought of me.
If I were, it might have been a lot, standing in the middle of an art shop, attached by the wrist to a collared, chained Omega who’d just burst into animated and piercingly loud wails.
People were gaping at us, clearly too nervous to linger as they hurried by.
“Doll,” I growled. “I don’t really care how loud you cry. I’m not taking you out of this shop until you pick a sketchbook.”
She’d begun to hiccup, and I drew her into my arms, feeling her legs tangle around my waist in an instant, the little solid bump of Bunny between our abdomens as she sobbed into my neck.
Well.
Uh, fuck .
Not because we were drawing stares or because I was embarrassed, but because it was as if this sobbing Omega in my arms had reached into my chest and closed her tiny little fist around my bare fucking heart.
I had been planning on telling her that she could have as many sketchbooks as the shop had in stock, but I thought it might break her—again.
So instead, I settled for choosing the first one she managed to point a wobbling finger towards. I also selected a tin of pencils and an eraser before we left.
Unfortunately, there was no self-checkout, and Thistle was still sobbing in my arms, chain and all, when I bought the items. By the look the cashier gave me, I decided we should book it from the parking lot pretty quickly in case she called the cops on suspicion of… well, kind of exactly what it looked like, collar, chain and all.
When we returned, I took Thistle to the ballroom.
I didn’t really know why. I think sometimes I felt trapped in the north wing, and the ballroom had always had a cove in the corner with armchairs, a day bed, an eccentric, six-foot electric fireplace, bar, and a plush, dark rug.
It was a nice place to draw.
I set her down on an armchair. Her tears had dried up now, but she still looked shell-shocked, raven hair scattered and messy, cheeks bright pink from crying.
Carefully, I drew the bag from her arms, ready to unpack it, but she tried to shove it against my chest.
“I… I don’t um… I don’t want it.” It looked like it was the hardest thing she’d ever done, saying those words. Her pupils were so wide there was no more violet left.
“You… don’t?”
Her voice was a husk. “I want Rogue. I want him to be mine.”
“You think if you take the book, something will change with Rogue?” She was fragile, so I refrained from reminding her that Rogue still wasn’t supposed to be on the cards.
“I… I n-need him.”
I sighed. I was starting to see that, and it was a huge problem. “The sketchbook has nothing to do with Rogue.”
Well. Okay. Not entirely true.
She’d asked him to get her one, and I wanted to be the one to, because fuck him.
But it had no trading value on Rogue.
Even though I should push that point if I was being smart.
But her reaction had told me everything I’d already suspected about her, and I wanted to give her the strength to want more than she’d been given.
“It’s yours,” I told her. “No strings. Doesn’t matter what you do with it.”
She just stared at me blankly like she didn’t understand, so I left her to process, telling her I was fetching snacks.
I returned with a tray of fruit to find her laying on her front before the electric fireplace, Bunny seated upright at her side as (to my delight) she began a sketch.
I was quiet as I stepped in, always curious to get a glimpse into her mind when she thought she was alone.
“Still think it’s a trick, Bunny?” She asked. There was a pause, and she let out a nervous little hum. “Strange trick, if it is. Bit him on the dick, and he’s bought us our first sketchbook ever.” She giggled. “But… wait. What if…?” She cocked her head, pencil slipping a little from her fingers. “Have they been lying to us? That’s all I needed to do with Dan, and he’d have been nicer to me?” She snorted, tilting her head and nudging Bunny. “Or he’d have killed us dead in an instant. Though—probably would have been quick—” She cut off, seeming to notice my shadow in her periphery.
Her cheeks flushed as she caught my grin.
I sat down cross-legged beside her, placing down the tray and peering at what she was drawing. I couldn’t tell, yet, what it was, but I thought I made out clouds in the corner. “Ace never got you a sketchbook?” I prodded, picking up a slice of apple.
I’d definitely just caught her saying it was her first sketchbook ever, which seemed strange.
“I never asked,” she said, not looking up from her art.
“Why?”
She shrank a little, fists getting tight on her pencil. “It was, uh… complicated.”
“Complicated?” I asked. He should have been tripping over himself for her.
“Ace… protected me, but uh… he didn’t like me all that much.”
“What?”
“He had to keep me because I was his, but he hated me. Would um… would lock me in my rooms for weeks with no one else. Came for my heats, but not for long.” She gave another nervous shrug. “Made sense though, right Bunny? I don’t know what the universe thought it was doin’.”
I frowned. I could see it though—how she might have fit at his side. If he had missed that, he was a fool.
“He never said it, but there was a mistake because Ace is like… special, right?”
I shrugged. “He was… something.”
“I’m… different from him. There was a mix-up, and we both knew it, so he kept me around, but I wasn’t ever really supposed to be there.”
“How are you different from him?”
“Well…” The shading she was doing across the top of the page was getting more intense. “You know how there are different kinds of Omegas?”
I cocked my head, about to say no, but she seemed so nervous, eyes flickering to me. “I haven’t heard of that,” I said slowly.
“Well, there are,” she said in a rush. “Like there are the good ones who have all the right instincts and know what they’re doing, and then there are the other kind. Like uh, like me.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Not good for much, you know? Just good for balancing Alphas but not like… long term or bonding.”
“I don’t think that’s real—” I cut off as she looked up at me sharply, pencil balled in her fist.
“It’s real. I couldn’t even be with an Alpha without it hurting before. That’s not right. And Dan said it’s ‘cause if it hurts for me, it feels better for them and I’m good for nothing else. And he’s right that my instincts are all wrong for an Omega.”
I paused, trying to formulate my thoughts around that. Who the fuck was Dan?
“What’s wrong with your instincts?”
“I’m always too… much. Want too much. I should be sweet, not angry. Alphas are supposed to claim me, not the other way around, but I just can’t help it no matter what I do. He was right. Even Ace hated it when I got possessive over him.”
That, I wanted to say, was because Ace probably saw it as a threat.
The war she waged against herself, trying to battle that claim she so desperately wanted to make of me. It was one of the most beautiful things in the world.
Something warned me against arguing, though. Her scent had shifted in the air—so much more anxious that I’d felt it. A cord stretched so tight the smallest breath would snap it in two.
Nothing she said was true, but I think for her… maybe it had to be. For now. It was, I thought, the structure holding up what remained of her sanity.
I ached to deconstruct it and catch her when she fell, but I couldn’t.
Not like this, anyway.
Not when I hadn’t proven I was better than any other Alpha in her life.
“Who is Dan?” I asked, instead.
“He was the lead of the pack that kept me before Ace.”
“Kept you?”
“Well, I did some really bad things, and my dad didn’t want me anymore, so he… he needed me out of his hair. He gave me to Dan’s pack. Told them to keep me away from my instincts. They owned a shitty club and made me pretend I was there because I wanted to be.”
“Did they bond you?” I asked. I’d only ever noticed one bite mark on her neck. It was faint and tucked away beneath where her hair fell.
“No. Wasn’t good for nothing like that, but he made me say it though—that I was theirs—if the cops ever showed up.”
That sounded… Well, it sounded worse than what I’d pictured with Ace.
“How did you get out?”
Somehow, I knew the answer before it came, by the way Thistle’s eyes lit up.
“Ace came in one night.”
“And you scent matched him?”
Fuck me. I tried to picture the bloodbath that must have followed the day Ace Maverick walked in to find bottom feeding criminals with their claim all over his scent match…
“Well, yeh I guess, though I didn’t know at the time.”
“You didn’t know?”
“I thought he was really amazing, but I didn’t think he could be my… mine.”
I considered that. Odd thing for an Omega to be unsure of, but then, it was so clear she didn’t see her own beauty. “You said your dad gave you to them. How old were you?”
“Uh…” I think it was the first time I saw the light truly die from her eyes as she contemplated that. She shrugged, frowning as she peered at her sketch.
“You don’t have to talk about it.” I tucked a lock of her hair behind her ear, my touch lingering on her cheek. “I just…” I cleared my throat. “Want to know about you.”
We sat in silence for a long time. I could almost feel her scent unwinding and spiking again, like she wasn’t sure what to make of me. She worked on a tree on the page, and adjusted Bunny two or three times. There were parts of the drawing that were amateur and unrefined—perspective and placement that were a bit too literal—which made sense if she hadn’t drawn much. But she’d also started with shadow and shapes, corrected small details and built out the lighting in a way that suggested she had a discerning eye.
The looks she was shooting me ranged from unsure, to suspicious, and I took another piece of apple, wondering what conversation she was having with him in her head.
Finally, she peered up at me from beneath thick eyelashes. “I was like… uh, seventeen. But it wasn’t so bad. I always had Bunny, wasn’t alone like some of the others.”
Seventeen?
How old was she now?
Twenty-two?
“But the others got packs, or Alphas to love them,” she muttered. Then she looked up at me. “I was really stupid back then, and I think it was worse ‘cause Dan said he shouldn’t have to waste his time teaching an Omega like me my place, but I didn’t know before… I barely knew what it meant to be an Omega at all. Just had my dad and brothers and they didn’t care.” She pressed the head of the mechanical pencil so aggressively one of the slips of lead tumbled out. She didn’t notice, empty tip of the pencil tracing uselessly over her drawing. “I even went into heat when I arrived. He said I was too young—meant I was a whore.”
I frowned, processing that. It wasn’t abnormal, going into heat that early. Depending on when an Omega presented, they could go into heat before they were adults, but heats before maturity were dulled, and easily suppressed with over-the-counter pills.
“And after,” Thistle went on, before I could collect my thoughts. “He said I’m the worst he’s seen because my heats came so often.”
“They came often?”
She wrinkled her nose, her voice turning mocking, but the pencil had slipped from her fingers, and she was tense. “You always know an Omega slut, because they can’t stop going into heat when they disobey Alphas.”
I stared at her, mind scrambling, a vile sickness in my stomach. “You went into heat irregularly?”
And… when she’d done something wrong?
That didn’t sound right at all.
“Kinda.” She shrugged. She was tense, an incomprehensible whisper slipping from her lips as she picked up Bunny.
I shifted closer, and she jumped violently as my fingers curled around her arm, but she didn’t look up. I drew her onto her knees and then into my arms, following my instincts as her whispers to Bunny became incomprehensible.
I wanted to just hold her, but something about the story wasn’t right.
“Did they give you medications?” I asked, weaving my fingers through her hair and holding her tight.
“Um… yeh. Nasty injections to manage my instincts when I was really bad. ‘They’re haywire’—he’d always say haywire . Stupid word for a stupid Alpha.”
She was shaking violently.
None of this was adding up. That wasn’t how biology worked. Yet… it wasn’t impossible. There were drugs that could induce heats, make them stronger or worse. I’d seen them abused within the trafficking ring more than once. “They’d give you injections after you misbehaved?”
She shrugged. “I think they were scared of my instincts.”
“And then you’d go into heat?” I asked.
She wrinkled her nose, acting. “Every time you fuck up, you go into heat again. You know, little whore, this is all you’re good for…” She trailed off, though, eyes darting up to me quickly, brows drawn as she considered what I’d just said properly. “I…” She didn’t look sure though, and I could practically see her running back over what she thought she knew. She might be a few sandwiches short of a picnic, but she was far from stupid.
A protective rumble of a purr rolled through my chest as I held her against me, lifting the pad and pressing the pencil into her hand. “Keep going, Doll, it’s just starting to come together,” I told her.
Her body relaxed and trembling fingers shook graphite along the sky of the craggy landscape she was shading. “I don’t…” Her voice was shaky. “I don’t wanna talk about this anymore.”
My heart cracked in two at the edge of panic in her moonflower scent as she so clearly tried not to connect the dots I’d just laid before her. “We don’t have to,” I said quietly.
I was trying to keep my distance so I wouldn’t lose every last brain cell, but now I felt like shit.
She’d had enough Alphas in her life mistreating her, lying, or withdrawing affection as a form of punishment. I never wanted to leave her alone for another night of her life.
And that was the most frightening thing I’d ever considered, because a thousand promises I couldn’t keep kept trying to fight their way to my lips.
“I’m not sure why things are different now,” she said, pulling me from my thoughts.
“What things?”
“I don’t know. Like… maybe after Ace, I’m not the same kind of Omega as I used to be. You didn’t even notice.”
I refrained, again, from saying that might be because it was a lie told by a cowardly Alpha whose only way to feel strong was to make her small.
She shrugged, glancing up at me with a shifty look. “You’re different.”
“How?”
“You don’t want what other Alphas want.”
“I don’t?” I thought to every encounter I’d had with her.
She shook her head, continuing on with her drawing. “Don’t you know that?”
I felt a stiff smile on my face. “Always been odd.”
I thought back to our first night together, and how it had blindsided her. To the constant instincts that had warned me from claiming her fully. One last thing I could have taken— wanted to take, and hadn’t.
It had turned to dust since she’d chained me up, mounted me, and fucked me like she had, but then… maybe that was the point.
She’d claimed that, not me.
And suddenly, the meaning of it changed.
That offer of claim amidst the razor-sharp brutality she’d been subjected to since she’d arrived was not only a miracle on its own merit, but a bud of green in a wasteland that stretched far further than even I’d known.
She’d offered me trust in a world that had turned its back on her.
Ace—her own scent match had turned his back on her.
This, I realised, was everything I’d wanted. I’d played the game I’d set out to win, and now I had.
This Omega curled up in my arms, trusted me—and that made her easy to break. There were a thousand ways, now, to deliver Rogue a death blow.
And yet the thought of doing that made it feel like someone had just pressed hot coals into my chest.
I realised, suddenly, her sketching had come to a halt. “Did I say something wrong, Daddy?” Her round, violet eyes were fixed on me. I swear she was weaponizing that title, but I couldn’t even be mad. “Should never have told him what we were, Bunny,” she whispered, glancing away. “Now he’s going to hate us.”
I snorted, and she paled as if it was another moment she hadn’t realised she’d spoken out loud.
“Why did you start calling me that?”
She considered that carefully. “Because you’re a liar.”
I reached out, cupping her cheek and tilting her chin up to face me. “A liar?” I asked as I held her full attention.
“You told me I couldn’t take Rogue’s punishment because then he’d go feral.”
“I did.”
“I don’t think that’s why you didn’t do it,” she said, a wobble of a triumphant smile on her face like she’d cracked an impossible puzzle.
Ah.
I didn’t even think that was something I could be proud of.
She’d seen past the poorly concocted lie on why I hadn’t wanted to beat the shit out of her with knuckle dusters.
It seemed it was, to her, of utmost fascination that the answer might be that I just didn’t have it in me.
The bar for Thistle, it seemed, was subterranean.
Looking at her, though, glossy black hair, observant violet eyes, and strange, strange mind that was, it turned out, as fragile as it was wondrous, I wanted that bar raised sky high.
She frowned when I said nothing, nervous eyes already second guessing. “So, you don’t mind?”
I paused.
I should tell her I did.
Cut this off now, since there was no happy ending. Not with how attached she was to Rogue.
“I shouldn’t have done it,” she muttered. “Ace saved me once, you know? A few weeks after he brought me home, one of his guards tried to kill me. Had a knife to my throat and everything… And then… He was there. Put a bullet right through that dumb guard’s skull—it all looked so pretty. I called him Daddy, and he told me to shut up. Guess he didn’t like it.”
My stomach dropped like a stone, fury hitting a boiling point.
Ace was an idiot. She needed better—deserved fucking better.
Not from me…
Tell her she can’t.
Who did I think I was, fucking about with her as if there was something normal on the horizon?
But I jumped as she shifted the sketchbook aside and dug her teeth into my arm hard enough to pinch. “You’re all mine, Daddy,” she hummed.
I fought my possessive growl at that—at the way the world faded in my vision, instincts rearing their head.
I’d never, in my life, met an Omega who could undo me like she did. “If I bit you, would you accept?” I asked.
She went absolutely still. “Is that… an offer?”
The words were coming out before I could stop them. “It could be.”
“Would you take him from me?”
I opened my mouth, then shut it, realising there was no good way to answer that.
Of course I would.
Wouldn’t I?
I… I needed her. But he was her match.
“Why does the scent match mean so much to you?” I asked.
She’d been willing to do anything for Rogue long before she’d met him.
She shot a nervous glance at Bunny, pencil drifting aimlessly in the air above her sketchbook. “We need a scent match. Everyone else leaves. Rogue can’t ditch me…” She laughed anxiously. “My own dad gave me up. Ace tried. What if you… you pretend to want me now, then you scent match a real Omega?”
“If I bit you, that wouldn’t happen.”
No more scent matches. I would be locked in.
“Yeh, well…” She wrinkled her nose. “We didn’t get this far in the planning.”
I snorted. “You are a real Omega, Doll.” I shut my eyes. “And another scent match isn’t something you have to worry about.”
“Why?” There was a challenge in her eyes as she looked up at me. “Without a bite, you’re gonna go running the second they turn up.”
“She already has turned up.”
She froze, pencil slipping again as her eyes went wide.
“W-what?”
“You don’t need to worry.” My fingers dug into her waist as she tried to squirm away, as if that news changed anything at all. “She’s Hellspawn. I wouldn’t bond with her if she was the last Omega on the planet.”
Thistle froze.
Again, my mind flashed to that forest clearing.
The hours dragging on as my own instincts were turned inside out, one piece at a time…
Thistle, though, the beautiful Omega in my arms. She still looked afraid. “I’ve known about that scent match for years, Little Doll.”
“Does she know?”
“Yes. If I wanted to be hers, I would be.”
“She wants you?”
I breathed an empty laugh.
Yes, she did—fuelled with an ire I couldn’t fucking shake. “It doesn’t matter.”
Rogue, I hated, yet I’d take a pack with him over her a thousand times over. He was the rot that grew along the edges of hell’s crust. She was a demon in the flesh.
And yet, that thought was somehow a gift in a way it had never been. “What if I said I’ll bite you if you heat bond him?” The words were out of my mouth before I could stop them.
I realised, as insane as it was, I think I might mean it.
Would that be enough?
A punishment enough that my hatred was paid…
Could it be paid?
For her… perhaps.
“What’s a heat bond?” she asked, clearly still rattled by the scent match information, though she didn’t push it.
“If an Alpha goes feral and his Omega enters heat, she can pull him back from the edge. But then she’s in charge—whenever you feel like it, you can send him back to being feral. He belongs to you.”
“Oh…”
I snorted at her stunned expression. Rogue hadn’t thought it was real either, but the accounts I’d found were well sourced.
There was a long silence as she processed my words. “So, um… question: if I did that, wouldn’t that make me a bad Omega?”
“Not if he deserves it.”
“Oh…” She visibly relaxed. “Uh. Okay.”
I perked up. “You’ll do it?”
“What?” Her gaze snapped to me. “No. Rogue doesn’t deserve it.”
“You don’t know what he deserves.”
“Why do you hate him so much?” she asked.
I clenched my jaw, seriously considering telling her the truth. But the words, like they always did, became heavy rocks stuck in my throat—unwilling weights trying to drag me down to drown.
And I thought, perhaps, this time they might succeed.
But with Thistle, everything was changing.
Maybe I couldn’t find the words, but the claim I wanted on her neck, that was something I could no longer deny.
I could bite her right now, tell her Rogue was forfeit if she didn’t accept, but that wasn’t the kind of claim I wanted.
I wanted her to choose me, which meant… Well, it meant I was going to do something stupid. But I was already tapping on my phone screen, pulling up a contact, and shooting a text off before I could second guess myself. Then, since I was on my phone anyway, I pulled up Rogue’s contact. I could give her another reason to pick me.
Me: Cage and muzzle, mutt
I watched as Thistle used the eraser to add lighting to the clouds in the picture.
Rogue’s response was almost instant: I got a selfie of him lying on the hard cage floor, muzzle already on, middle finger flashing the camera.
I raised an eyebrow, surprised by that.
Me: Bit eager
I’d never seen him get into the cage himself . There was a long pause, and then another text from him.
Rogue: Next time you see Vance, tell him to go fuck himself.
I snorted, smile quirking on my lips as I set my phone down. “You can visit him tonight if you want.”
Thistle’s pretty violet eyes met mine as she craned her neck to look at me. “I can ?”
I nodded, fighting my own smile. I had a lot less of an issue letting her around him when he was in a cage with a muzzle on.
She was an Omega, as receptive to the dominance between us as we were.
I wanted her to see that.