Chapter 29 Rada
RADA
“Idon’t remember sex being this messy,” I murmured once we finally managed to pry ourselves away from each other and head toward the shore to clean off in the ocean.
Lachlan wouldn’t let me walk to the water, not without shoes.
He claimed his selkie nature made his feet tougher even in human form, and insisted on carrying me.
But it was still a chivalrous move. I’d thank him later for it in an intensely physical way.
“It’s not usually this messy,” he agreed, wading into the water.
The waves were turbulent, the sea an odd green-gray, and the waves splashed up on me.
I shivered, the cold on my insides more than enough chill to handle.
He set me down in the water, the rocks beneath my feet far less jagged as we sluiced water over ourselves.
“Of course, I’ve never been in that… state, before. ”
“Heat?” He nodded, and I gave him a rueful smile. “Me neither, but pre-heat cycles came and went for me every month when I was with Goran. So painful, right? And the perfuming would bring in asshole Alphas from all over Starlak, so we had to hide in caves.”
“Huh. He always made that part sound romantic, like you were hiding from the world.”
“From a world of knots and hairy warriors who only wanted to kill Goran and fuck me.”
He winced. “I’m sorry. I can’t imagine how hard that was.”
“You don’t have problems with the scent?”
“Not as much. Of course, my scent isn’t as sweet as yours.
It hasn’t changed much since I became an Omega, eleven years ago—” He cut off, squinting at the horizon.
I followed his gaze, but saw nothing. I didn’t like that the few weapons I still had were so far from my reach.
I glanced at the shore, where my cloak was on the rocks just above the lapping waves.
“Eleven years ago? What happened then?”
He shrugged, still not looking at me. “Who knows?”
“You met me, didn’t you?” I tried to remember what had happened that day in Drakonspear. “Your brother was an ass to me. But you didn’t even talk to me. You went off with Goran—”
“You’d been rubbing Goran under the table the whole meal, and everyone was trying to pretend we couldn’t tell,” he said, laughing. “All through the meal, I saw the way Kellin was looking at you.”
“How?”
“Like he’d been starving his whole life, and you were a cake with his name spelled out in the icing.
” His smile turned wistful. “He was my older brother, and he’d had lovers, but that night he lost all of his usual calm.
He was obsessed. So after dinner, I left you two together and dragged Goran into one of the tunnels. ”
“He was awful, Lachlan. He didn’t speak. I asked him if he liked me, and he shook his head so hard, it could’ve fallen off!”
“No, you asked him if he didn’t like you.
He was choking on spit and panicked. He told me all about it afterward.
” I groaned, suddenly understanding. “Meanwhile, I was being given a tour of a tunnel with an alcove piled high with furs and velvet pillows that smelled like someone had crushed mint in a rainstorm all over them.”
“Oh no, not the tunnel of love?” I almost hooted with laughter. Goran and I had used that particular tunnel until the scent of me seeped through to the castle and Wren sent us back to Wargate Hall.
“It was fine until I tripped and fell face first into the furs. I sucked in a breath of that scent of yours, and started smelling like… Well, I almost lost control of myself right then. It was a good thing Goran was as far from my type as a creature can get.”
“Don’t like Alphas?”
“Not like that. I ran out, grabbed Kellin, and begged him to take me home.” He sighed.
“He didn’t even ask why. He helped me get back to the Eastern Seas, swimming for both of us on some of the worst days.
Back home, we read every damned book in the remains of the royal library, looking for an explanation.
But there had never been a male Omega, from what we could tell. ”
“She’s remaking Her lines,” I murmured, wondering what the Goddess was up to this time. He didn’t have a womb to get pregnant; I was almost sure of that.
Lachlan made a face as he scrubbed at his thighs. “I’ve also never fucked an Omega before. This is a sticky mess, isn’t it?”
I nodded, wishing we had a nice hot selkie mating bath right now. “Who did you fuck, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“Ah, mostly merfolk,” he said, quickly ducking his head under the water.
“Only a few. There weren’t any other selkies, and I never felt close enough to humans to…
Well, I’m not experienced like Kellin. I hope I wasn’t a disappointment.
” He batted his lashes at me, small droplets of water on them making his eyes look even more sensual.
Below his waist, his cock started to thicken again.
I stared at him until we both broke into laughter. “If you were any better in bed, I’d need a healing tonic. Put that weapon away, mate.” He pursed his lips, repeating the word silently.
Oh shit. I hadn’t meant to call him that. I ducked my own head under the waves, the roaring of the ocean far louder, and the burn of my cheeks far more bearable, beneath the surface.
He was there when I surfaced and wrapped his arms around me. “I like that very much. We are mates, even if we fell into it.”
“I’m sorry I claimed you officially and all, without asking first. You and Kellin both got the shit end of the privy stick, I’m afraid.”
“I disagree. It was meant to be, right?” He pushed my wet hair back, his thumbs tracing my cheekbones, then my jaw, with one brushing my lips. “Goran told me once that he knew he’d never have you for his own. You told him you’d met another mate before him?”
“Yeah,” I muttered, thinking of Serak. And…
for some reason, another face swam into view.
I grabbed my pendant. “But I hadn’t been with anyone else since him, until you.
” I felt his curiosity in our bond and shrugged, looking out at the horizon again.
“We were both so young when we married. I thought he understood that I couldn’t stay in Starlak and start making little warlords.
I may have overreacted when he gave me a fertility charm knife thing. I was nineteen.”
“Ooh, he never told me that part.”
“My stupid Omega body kept reacting to him, trying to go into heat over and over. I took so many heat suppressant tonics, my hair started to fall out. That’s what first gave me the idea to leave.
One of my braids came out in the bath. The whole chunk of hair and the bead…
all of it. I knew I had to take drastic action.
The bridal blade was just the final straw.
“I didn’t just leave him. I left the Goddess, too. Made a deal. If She’d let me do what I needed to, I’d give up running from the mates and the babies.” I made a face. “I only have a few months left before I’ll find out if She still has some use for me.”
“What you needed to?”
I told him about the apothecaries and safe houses I’d planted in every country I’d visited.
By the time I’d gotten to the one in Wyngel, where Omegas had populated a deserted island and were growing their own herbs to send to all the other clandestine Omega groups on the continent, his jaw was hanging wide.
“You’re a… merchant? A diplomat, and a shipping magnate.
” His laugh was slightly hysterical. “No one knows, Rada. They all think you’re a thief and an apprentice spy.
Goran thought that was what you left him for, so you could go home in glory and claim the Master Spy position.
” He went quiet. “Why didn’t you tell him? ”
There were a lot of reasons, and promises I’d made to the Omegas I’d hidden and helped. But I would have shared more with him, after we’d married. “Why didn’t he ask?” I replied evenly, but I knew Lachlan could feel the old hurt there.
His arms came around me. “Males are idiots.” He pressed a kiss to my neck.
“One of the universal truths.”
“What can I do to help you finish your mission?” Lachlan asked, testing that universal truth.
“Help me get to Pict?” His arms tightened around my shoulders, but he stayed quiet.
“You said you thought it was unlikely that the Pict marauders would have left Omegas to die. I thought the same and went looking for information. I found a hidden archive in a camp in Verdan eight years back. There, I read letters written by the disgraced Chieftains of the Eastern Reaches, the ones who imprisoned the Omegas. They’d made a list of all the women they’d left there and of the numbers of bodies they burned when they went back.
There were forty Omegas unaccounted for. I believe they took them back to Pict.”
“There were rumors of a slave camp there,” Lachlan mused aloud.
“Kellin and I have swum as close to the island as anyone, I would think, but far to the south. The currents all around it are treacherous, and the seas too hot and acidic for most fish to survive. The sky is ash, with no green on the land that we could see.”
“I found a sailor in Gael years ago, whose captain had been obsessed with finding the edge of the world.”
“Gael?”
“He said it was as far from Pict as he could get.” I closed my eyes for a moment, remembering how the sailor had insisted I put out the fire in his room before he told his story.
Even then, if he hadn’t been dying, I wasn’t sure he would have said a word.
But my herbs would kill the pain of the wounds that had been festering on his body for a decade.
Bone-deep wounds in the shapes of handprints, burns with scars that would never heal.
“They tacked close enough to make out the coastline, on a day when the winds swept the ash clouds away, and discovered a main island with two southern, barren islands.
Only the main island and a smaller one to the north have plants, and long, low-roofed dwellings of some sort.