Chapter 12 #3
Angela didn't. Angela wanted another. That's the part nobody understands unless they knew her—she came through the worst year of her life and what she took from it was that she'd do it twice. She said it to me in a hospital bed with the baby on her chest. She had already decided.
And because I loved her so much… I let her. I could have said no and I didn't, because she wanted it and I had never once been able to hold a line against her.
She died on the table. The doctors got Killian out, but couldn’t stop the bleeding, and I stood on the other side of a door while a room full of people failed to keep her alive.
Then someone put my son in my arms. That's the minute I've never been able to forget. A red squalling scrap of a thing, brand new, furious about it, and his mother dead twenty feet away in the same hour that gave him to me. I stood there and digested exactly what had happened.
I wanted her, Angela, so bad… and that wanting killed her.
I made a decision in that hour. I didn't say it out loud—there was no one to say it to—but I handed it down like a sentence and I’ve never once appealed it.
Never again. Never another omega. Never put that fragile a life in the path of what I am.
I would keep my sons, I would keep my grief, and I would keep my distance from the one kind of person my own nature is built to destroy.
Twenty-five years. I've kept it for twenty-five years.
And Killian—God, Killian, who came out of that hour furious and never stopped feeling that way. Who found out too young exactly how he came into the world and decided he was a monster for what he’d done. That his existence is a debt and the interest is blood.
My wildest son hates himself for being born and I’ve never managed to talk him out of it. Because how do I? He knows what his birth cost. He's known since he was old enough to miss a mother’s presence, and he wears it the way he wears everything.
On his sleeve–out loud and swinging.
And now there's an omega in my house. Unsuppressed. About to go into his first heat, any time now, if it hasn't already started.
Three unmated alphas under that roof—it’s a recipe for disaster.
What the fuck am I going to do?
So I do what I'm good at. Lay it out flat, look at it, find the move.
I need him. Starla is three towns over decorating a rental with my dead wife's things and all the money she stole from me because she doesn't believe I'll come for her.
The one lever I have to make her believe it is her son sitting in my house.
Turn him loose and I lose the only leverage I've spent more than a week building.
I can’t use him either.
An omega in heat can't say no. Not really. Whatever I wanted out of him this week I would get, and his own body would help me take it. I could tie that boy to my bed and I’m sure he’d trigger a rut, fuck him until I broke him just to satisfy my desires.
I could bond with him and own him outright, and no court and no con artist mother untangles that, ever.
Or I let it be known that Starla's son is unclaimed and unsuppressed, and I sit back and take offers. Sell him off to the highest bidder.
Fuck. I pinch the bridge of my nose hard enough to hurt.
He doesn't even know that I know he’s an omega. He should be terrified of me and my sons. But he’s stupidly brave.
I should have kicked him out of my room last night.
Sent him back down the hall shaking. Kept him exactly as scared as he's been since we hauled him out of that apartment, because scared is manageable. Scared was the entire point of him.
I didn't.
He settled against my chest and went quiet. Heart slowed under my hand. The shaking stopped. Whatever that kid has been carrying his whole life, his nervous system settles within seconds after I pulled him to my chest.
Like I'd fixed something. Like I was the answer to a question his body had been asking since before he had words for it.
That's what has me sitting on the side of a road in the dark. Not the diagnosis.
The fact that I…fuck, I liked it.
And I can't just turn him out. Send him back out to fend for himself. An unclaimed omega going into heat, bad heart, no suppressants, nowhere to go and no way to get there. That's not freedom. That's handing him to the first alpha with fewer scruples than me, and there is no shortage of those.
He wouldn't last a week.
Every option fucking sucks.
There’s no “best choice” here.
I pull back onto the road and point the car home, and I tell myself I'm driving toward a decision. A long night at my desk figuring things out. Some careful, managed version of this where the boy keeps breathing, my sons keep their heads, and I keep my leverage.
That's a lie and I know it while I'm telling it. I haven't decided anything. Twenty-five years of knowing exactly what I want and exactly what I don't, and tonight I've got nothing.
No plan. No line. No move.
What I've got is a foot heavier on the gas than it needs to be.
I notice it somewhere past the county line. Eighty. Nothing waiting at that house but a problem I can't solve and a boy I have no business wanting in the same room as me.
And still…
I want to be there. I want to be inside those walls, near him, and I don't have a single good reason for it.
Jesus Christ. I’m fucked.