Chapter twenty-seven #2
“When are you going to get it?” he asks, soft enough to sound almost kind, which makes it worse.
“Nobody wants you. Nobody ever will. The Carrs are being nice because that’s what Jeremy does, and the Fosters want you for reasons I don’t understand, and right now I’m having a hard time seeing why either of them bothered. ”
My knees want to buckle underneath me. “Stop—“
“You must have put on a very good show for them, because they clearly can’t see who you really are underneath all that fake softness. I’m certainly not going to tell them—it’s my only chance of getting rid of you now.”
He lets it all hang in the air, lets me feel every word down to my bones. He wants to rewrite my DNA with them.
“I want you gone, Lily. Away from my omega. Away from me. Away from my alphas. Before you ruin all of us.” His eyes are so cold that even my instincts, the biological ache that’s been reaching for him since the gala, recoil. “Do you understand?”
My omega is on the ground inside me, cowering. The need to appease, to submit, to make the alpha stop is so much bigger than anything else. The anger, the pain, even the tiny voice in my head that knows he’s wrong. My body takes over.
“I understand, Alpha.”
It comes out soft and shattered, the automatic voice of an omega who’s past thinking and just needs to survive.
Gabriel freezes. He looks like I just hit him.
“What did you say?”
“I understand, Alpha.”
His face changes. The fury twists into shock. Or maybe it’s the realization that he just heard something he’s never heard from me before. Alpha. Not Gabriel. Alpha. The word you use when you’re either bonded or scared and we both know what I am right now.
“Don’t call me that.” The words come out rough. “I’m not your alpha. I never will be.”
The worst part is that my omega doesn’t believe him. Even after everything he’s done. All the damage and hurt and words that will haunt me forever, she still pines for him.
Who knew ghosts could be haunted, too?
He turns and leaves. His footsteps are heavy down the hallway, then upstairs, then gone, a door closing hard enough to make the wall shake.
I stand in the empty living room.
The house is silent. The scent of sex is still there, but it’s different now, tainted by Gabriel’s anger and my fear and the sour edge of an omega in distress. The warmth from earlier is gone. The hope, gone. The glow, gone.
I think Gabriel needed this to be my fault.
Because if Miles chose me on purpose, then everything between them changes too.
I know I didn’t coerce Miles. If anything, he coerced me.
He gave the orders, he set the pace, he told me when to move, when to sit, when to follow him to the bedroom.
I went because I wanted to, but the wanting came after the command.
That’s not manipulation. That’s an omega following a stronger omega because she desires them.
But what if Gabriel is right about the rest?
No one ever picked me at the registry. Six years, and only a handful even wanted to meet.
Even my scent matches—the people whose bodies are supposed to want me—they don’t.
Not enough to keep me. Maybe something’s more broken in me than I knew, there even before the suppressants.
A wrongness at the root that pushes alphas away, that makes me want the wrong people in the wrong ways.
Maybe that’s why I act so weird around Miles. I’m not supposed to want to obey another omega. Our kind submit to alphas, not to each other. But I did. I let him control me so completely he had to tell me to stop. So Gabriel must be right: There’s something miswired in me.
Maybe I was never supposed to be an omega at all.
I guess everyone else figured that out before I did. Especially alphas. They can see what I can’t.
The thought is so close to home it barely hurts. It just moves into my brain, like all of Gabriel’s words do, turning into facts before I even notice.
I’m not welcome here. I never was. And if Gabriel wants me out that badly, I’ll go.
I consider the Carrs, but I can’t show up there tonight.
It’s late, they’re not expecting me, and I don’t need to bring this version of myself to their door.
I don’t want them to see me like this. An omega who’s just been called a snake and defective by the only person whose biology says he should love me.
If I go right now… they might see it too.
I can’t handle being rejected again. Not tonight.
I picture my mother. She’d take me in. She’d make tea and tell me it would be okay. But she’s been worrying since Dad died, and me showing up still unbonded and cast out after dark would probably send her over the edge. I can’t do that to her.
My sister. She has a home—a good one, three alphas who treat her like gold.
She would take me in. Her pack would let me stay until I figured things out.
I’d have a guest room and a little space to breathe.
At least until the registry comes knocking.
They’ll check my family’s homes first. But maybe I could at least buy myself a few days of peace.
I don’t know how I’d get there though. She’s two hours away and I don’t have a car.
Don’t have money for a cab, either. It’s dangerous traveling alone as an omega but I guess I wouldn’t have anything to worry about anyway.
Gabriel is right. Alphas don’t want me. They won’t even take me the legal way.
No one is about to snatch me in a cab or off the street. I’m not even worth stealing.
I sigh. All I have are the clothes I’m wearing. I don’t even have a phone because I’ve never had any money to buy one. My mom offered to once, but I refused because she’s already stretched thin living alone and I could always call her from the registry’s phone.
Doesn’t matter. I’ll figure it out. I’ll walk to the bus station if I have to. Beg them to let me on. Tough it out.
I go to the entryway. My shoes are by the door. I slip them on, hands shaking, fingers numb. My coat is in the closet but I don’t even try for it. The closet is in the hallway upstairs, and the hallway leads to them. I can’t risk running into anyone right now. I’d rather freeze.
I open the front door.
The cold slaps me in the face. February air, frigid and mean, going straight through my t-shirt. My breath comes out in clouds. The driveway is dark, trucks lined up in a row, the streetlight at the end of the path barely lighting up the black.
I should go back for my coat. My medicine. The suitcase that’s still half-packed from the last time Miles tried to kick me out.
But I can’t go back. I don’t want to see that house again.
Don’t want to smell honey and sage, cedar and smoke, leather and black pepper.
Don’t want to hear Gabriel call me nothing, or a reject, a snake, defective.
I don’t want to see Miles’s face and wonder if Gabriel was right, if I set a trap without knowing it, if even the best thing I’ve felt in years is only more proof that I’m broken.
I step off the porch. Gravel crunches under my shoes. The cold wraps around me and holds tight. At least the cold doesn’t pretend to care first.
I start walking though I don’t know how I’m going to get there.
All I know is I’m leaving. Gabriel wins.
Everyone wins. Even me. I don’t have to wake up and walk on eggshells anymore.
I don’t have to inhale scents that my instincts long for but I’m not allowed to have.
I don’t have to hear how pathetic I am anymore. That in itself is freeing.
The road is dark, long, and the cold is already deep in my bones, but I keep going. Because the alternative is turning back, and turning back means letting Gabriel destroy what’s left of me.
And I’m not ready to do that yet.
So I walk.