Chapter 15
Vincent
Four hours in this kitchen and I’m nearly losing my mind.
Poured a drink I haven't touched. Wiped a counter that was already clean. Tried to open my laptop and pretend to work. I can’t focus on a single thing.
The whole house smells like an omega in heat.
There's nowhere in it that doesn't. It's in the vents. It's in the curtains. It's in my shirt and my hair and the back of my throat.
My cock has been rock hard the entire time. Jaw aching from it. Every sound that's come through that floor has gone straight down my spine and there's not one thing I can do about any of it.
What I haven't done is go up those stairs… That’s the line I set for myself.
After dragging Killian down to the cellar and tying him up, drenching the room in bleach and turning off the lights, I came back up here and have been fighting every urge in my body since.
Calder's upstairs with Sonny, and I fucking sent him.
I scrub my hands down my face, gnashing my teeth. It’s going to be a long fucking heat.
Then a door slams upstairs.
I jolt up, speeding around the kitchen island just in time to hear Calder’s boots on the stairs, fast, three at a time. He barrels into my view and looks like a wreck.
Shirt on inside out. Jeans unbuttoned. No shoes. He's got his keys in one hand like he's going somewhere and I don't think he knows he picked them up.
There's blood on his mouth.
Everything in me stops at once.
A growl is up in my throat before I know it's coming. My hands have gone tight at my sides. Some old, ugly thing that has been asleep in me since before either of my boys was born rolls over and opens its eyes and wants to know who touched him.
My own son. Standing in my kitchen. And I want to put him through the wall for it.
I tamp the feeling back down, but it takes longer than I'd like. "Calder, what happened?"
He goes straight past me for the back door.
"Calder," I shout.
He stops, but doesn't turn around. His shoulders are locked, his shoulders falling up and down as he heaves in and out.
"Look at me," I order.
I've seen this boy take a hammer to his own thumb and not change expression. I watched him sit through his grandmother's funeral at eleven years old with a face like a shut door. Calder’s the strong one. The resilient one. And that’s exactly why I sent him up there in the first place.
But the face looking back at me is hollowed out–like something ripped his soul out and made him watch.
"Whose blood is that?"
His hand comes up to his mouth and then he looks down at his fingers. His brows pinch as he looks down at the crimson and he winces.
"Calder. Whose blood?"
"His."
The word comes out flat and ruined.
I keep my voice as level as I can. "Is he hurt?"
Calder’s eyes go glassy. I step in closer so he’ll focus.
"Is the boy hurt?"
"I… hurt him." He says it to the floor. "I did. Not—" He stops. Starts again and can't. His jaw works. "He asked me not to touch him."
"What did you do?"
He doesn't answer.
"Calder! Fuck!"
He startles, his eyes going wide. "I have to get out of this house."
"You'll answer me first."
On heavy feet he retreats, backing up with his hands up like he’s surrendering. Like he’s a criminal and I have my gun drawn ready to kill. "I can't say it out loud to you," he says. "I can't… Don't make me."
My stomach sinks."Where is he?”
"My room."
And then Calder's gone. Out the back door before I can ask anything else. The door bangs off the frame and swings there, letting the cold in.
The cool blast helps me process my thoughts and lets me inhale fresh air–no omega heat tearing me up from the inside out.
Part of me wants to go after Calder. Drag him back in here by the collar and get the rest of it out of him, whatever it is he can't make himself say.
Or just be there for him. The haunted look in his eye, the way he was so keyed up–but he’s a grown man now. He knows what he needs.
And every cell in my body is dying to go the opposite way.
I can smell it from where I'm standing. Sonny’s heat hasn't stopped. It hasn't eased off an inch since the second that door opened upstairs, and Calder just walked out the back of my house and left him in the middle of it.
My son can wait.
I head to the stairs, taking them two at a time, then tear down the hall to Calder’s room.
I put my hand on the door and the scent comes through the wood like heat off an engine block. I have to stand there a second with my palm flat against it before I can make myself turn the handle.
The scent in that room nearly takes my knees out.
It's nothing like what came down the stairs. This is hours of it with nowhere to go, soaked into every surface in here. Under the sweetness of Sonny’s delicious heat there's blood, and my son, and exactly what happened in that bed.
A growl crawls up my throat as I search for Sonny, but the bed is empty.
Sheets torn half off it, pillows on the floor, the whole thing wrecked—but no boy in it.
The bathroom door's open and the light's off. I get three steps toward it before something stops me and I whirl around.
He's on the far side of the bed. Down between the frame and the wall where I couldn't see him from the door. Naked, folded onto his side, one shoulder wedged against the bed frame like he went down hard and never got back up.
Fuck. A bolt of lightning rips through my chest as I realize he’s not moving.
"Shit—"
I’m at his side in a blink, grabbing him by the shoulders and giving him a gentle shake.
"Sonny."
Nothing. He flails in my hands, his head rolling back against the bed.
I get two fingers under his jaw. His pulse is there but it's wrong—fast, thin, stumbling over itself. I put my head to his chest to listen and each erratic beat makes me wince.
I pull back, check the rest of him.
His skin is soaked with sweat. He's absolutely burning up.
The heat is still in full swing. My body knows before my head does. Unconscious on a floor and the scent is still climbing. Still begging.
Every instinct I have goes off at once.
Get him up off that floor. Get my face in behind his ear where it's strongest and breathe until my lungs give out.
Strip my son's scent off his skin and lay mine down over the top of it until there's nothing left of Calder in this room but furniture.
Find somewhere dark with one door in it and put him on the floor behind me.
And my hands are already on him. I can’t fucking help myself–it’s pathetic. I’m crouched over a naked, unconscious omega with both hands on his shoulders and my face a foot from his throat. I’m old enough to be his father. I kidnapped him.
And yet I want to devour him.
It takes everything I have not to.
Breath held. Every muscle in my back locked down. Twenty-five years and my true nature–my needs–have never once come this close to getting out of me.
And suddenly she’s here with me again, tormenting me from Heaven where only an angel could be.
A vision of Angela in my bed with her hand in mine. The way her mouth looked at the end of it. A red screaming newborn in my arms, a door I wasn’t allowed through, and the absolute certainty standing there that I was the one who did it to her.
There. It’s as if she struck me right in the gut.
It hurts the way it always hurts and it works the way it always works. The thing behind my ribs goes quiet and lies back down. My alpha instincts snuffed out like the last embers of a wildfire.
Then I can move.
I pull my shirt off over my head and lay it over him, and I know exactly what I'm doing while I do it. Two minutes ago I wanted my scent on this boy badly enough that it nearly got away from me. Now I've got a reason to put it there.
I don't examine that too closely.
I get my arms under his back and his knees, and lift.
His head rolls into my shoulder. He makes a sound against my collar—low, needy, entirely unconscious—and his hand comes up and fists in my shirt.
I stop breathing through my nose. It doesn't help.
My shirt slips off his shoulder and that's when I see it.
Left side. Low, where the shoulder starts. Two crescents of broken skin, deep and dark, still weeping. The whole area swollen and furious around them.
Right over the gland.
Claimed.
Calder claimed him.
I expected something like this from Killian, not from Calder. Not from the one I trusted.
And underneath all that—fast and filthy and gone before I can look at it straight—there's something in me that wanted to be the one who did it.
God, all this is my fault. I sent my own son into a den of wolves and expected he wouldn’t lose control? He’s still young–just like I was back in those days. An omega in heat makes a young alpha do crazy things. Based on the crazed look in his eye I wouldn’t be surprised if…
No, I know it. Sonny must have triggered Calder’s rut and he lost control.
“Dammit,” I grit, my jaw so tight I think I might break a tooth.
I made my peace with every sound that came through the floor tonight. Every one of them. I stood in my kitchen and let it happen because the alternative was Killian going up those stairs.
Or me.
Every part of it except this. Him being claimed.
I stand there a long time with Sonny in my arms.
Then I carry him out and down the hall and put him in my bed, because maybe I’m too selfish. Maybe I can’t fight my fucked up desires after all.
I call the doctor from the hallway with the door open so I can see the bed.
He picks up on the fourth ring and I don't give him room to argue about the hour. Fever. Tachycardia. Unconscious. First heat, full onset, going on two days. He stops asking questions somewhere in the middle of that and tells me fifty minutes.
Fifty minutes is a long time.
I get a basin of cool water and a cloth from the bathroom and I try to cool Sonny down.
Forehead, throat, the backs of his wrists.
Wring it out, start again. He's soaked through my shirt and the sheet under him and every time I get the cloth on him he leans into it, chasing the cold with his whole body.