39. Lucy
CHAPTER 39
Lucy
“Is that what you’re actually upset about?” Cassius leaned over me and turned off the water, but he didn’t move back. “That we didn’t use condoms?”
He draped his body over mine like a blanket. He even had the audacity to rest his chin on top of my head like he had every right to. I wanted to push him off, but it kind of felt like wearing an oversized hoodie with the hood pulled up.
I could hide for just a moment without being alone, and gratitude washed over me again.
Cassius was just as good at all this as Liam and I wondered if maybe I was wrong. Maybe they weren’t boyfriends, but something else.
“Answer me, Lucy.” There it was, that deep growl that always vibrated through my bones. I loved how it felt, but it was a dirty little secret I didn’t want to confess because I felt like the second I did, he’d use it against me.
But the dominance in Cassius’s voice combined with the weight of his body was more than I could resist when my head was still swirling with the scent of our combined pheromones as well as the haze of my heat still waiting in the wings to burn me all over again .
It seemed I really was no different than every other omega out there.
Which was strange, because I’d wished for that so many times, but now…
Now, I had no idea who or what I was.
To anyone.
My chest hurt and I wrapped my arms around my legs again to try to ease some of the pain. “It was just the pheromones,” I whispered against my knees, hoping he wouldn’t hear me, but Cassius was always listening, even when you didn’t know he was. “None of it meant anything.”
I didn’t find his following silence strange or uncomfortable since he was generally a very quiet person, but I had hoped he would say something to that – maybe reassure me I was wrong.
Not that I needed reassurance from him.
Watching the water lap against the sides of the tub, I tried not to make it obvious I was waiting for him to say something—anything.
I should be getting clean, scrubbing their scents from my body so I could get as far away from here as possible, but even if my legs didn’t give out on me, I knew I wouldn’t be able to leave.
None of what happened between us during my unexpected heat should mean anything, but it did.
At least to me.
This was why I’d been so careful to avoid alphas when I could. It wasn’t hard when they didn’t particularly like me, but during my rare heats…I always wanted them – their knots and their pheromones.
My father had warned me over and over not to fuck an alpha during one of my heats, if ever. He’d warned me so many times that omegas got easily attached thanks to all our pheromones and we would become dependent on alphas if they managed to do even a halfway decent job at taking care of us .
I hadn’t really believed him back then, but I knew exactly what he meant now.
All we’d done was fuck, and yet my pheromones were all tangled up in theirs. The scent was insanely comforting. I wanted to keep it wrapped around me instead of scrubbing it from my skin and when I finally walked out of this house, I wanted everyone to smell it clinging to me so they’d know to stay far, far away…
So they’d know that I belonged to someone.
But reality had slapped me in the face, reminding me just how stupid I could be.
Liam hadn’t even been in the bed when I’d woken up, and the one who’d stayed was Cassius – the one I’d labeled as the most likely murder suspect in Gideon Valor’s case.
I was so fucking stupid.
“Lucy…Liam is downstairs making you food.” Cassius pressed his chin down harder on the top of my head when I stiffened at those words. “He was worried you’d be hungry when you woke up, and I agreed, but I would have made him stay if I’d known you’d be so upset to wake up without him.”
I didn’t want to believe him, but there was no hint of a lie in his tone, only exasperation.
“I promise it meant everything,” Cassius murmured against the back of my head. “Liam has been waiting for this for a very long time.”
How…
No.
Why?
I had to be losing my fucking mind all over again because I just didn’t understand. We’d only met the other day. Unless…
Unless he’d heard of me back when Frankie’s blog post had gone viral and we became an internet sensation overnight. She never posted any pictures of us, but Liam had the kind of money and power that could accomplish anything. It was a leap, but nothing else really made sense. Not when I had no memory of meeting him at any of the legacy events Frankie had dragged me to.
Maybe Cas meant Liam’s been waiting since that moment I ran into him in the elevator.
“I may not have been waiting as long as Liam, but it meant more to me than it probably should,” Cas admitted.
He draped his arms over mine and I flexed my hands on instinct, lacing my fingers through his effortlessly. When I relaxed them, they got caught between his fingers and my arms hung there, relying on his strength to keep them up.
I couldn’t stop staring at the way my hands looked against his as I tried to process his words.
Cas had stark veins and his fingers were long and thick, exuding strength and competence even if I wasn’t sure why it made me think of that. They were almost twice the size of mine, but my hands looked sharper than his.
My nails were longer, my bones pressing against my skin – almost as if they were trying to break through the flesh to fuse with his. Even though I couldn’t see him, I felt Cassius staring at our hands the same way I was – trying to decipher the true difference between us the same way I was.
It made me wonder…
Could he really weather how vicious and distrustful I could be? Could he deal with how damaged I was? Could Liam?
Or would I slice him open just as easily as all the others – until his shadow hanging over me disappeared?
Cassius seemed content to drape his body over mine, oblivious to my inner turmoil, and it was nice but I couldn’t get used to this. No matter what they said, we were all under the influence of our pheromones and none of us knew what would happen when all traces of them were gone.
“Do you know why Liam and I are…together?”
I flinched at his unexpected question. The depth of his voice rumbling against my back surprised me more than what he was asking .
“I might have been wrong about your motives.” It wasn’t easy to admit, but Cassius watching me get fucked by Liam as he shoved his cock in my mouth put a lot of my original observations into question. “If you were really together the way I thought you were, I don’t think you could have watched him fuck me like that and do nothing.”
“Your conclusion may have been wrong, but your observations weren’t,” Cassius admitted, flexing his own hands to squeeze mine like he knew just how much that statement would bother me. “Ever since high school, Liam and I have been together, if not… together , because Liam doesn’t really like omegas. They’re too fragile for him.”
I didn’t want to believe him, because if I did, it would just feed into my insanity and obsession, which was the last thing I needed, but that stupid voice in the back of my head kept reminding me we’d only ever seen Liam go out with an omega once, and it had made the news – the very same omega he’d mentioned before who was nothing more than a blind date set up by their packs.
“Liam can take care of an omega just as well as any other alpha, but he can’t help them through their heats without hurting them.” Cassius sighed, his breath ruffling my hair. “I may not be a legacy alpha, but the same goes for me.”
Maybe it was stupid to risk it, but I turned my head and rested my cheek on my arm so I could see his face.
Those bright blue eyes stared me down, but they were still empty. This topic didn’t cause enough emotion for it to leak through, but his body was tense. Whatever he felt about this, he didn’t want me to see it.
Why? Did he think I was too fragile, or did he think he couldn’t trust me? Not that I’d really given him a reason to.
“Finding an omega who can handle not just one, but both of us?” Cassius released one of my hands to pull my hair out of my face, gently tucking it behind my ear. “It feels like a miracle when I never thought I’d get to have an omega to take care of. ”
Those words combined with his tenderness…I tried not to let it affect me, but my heart actually clenched . It physically hurt in a way I wasn’t expecting and didn’t know how to deal with. Those words combined with this sensation in my chest overwhelmed the part of me that wanted to panic at how casually he’d said that – how easy it was for him to see me as not just an omega, but one he wanted to take care of.
I forced myself to look away from those breathtaking blue eyes and stared at our intertwined hands, wondering if I could even do this.
Not only could they scent my pheromones, but they found them pleasing enough to help me through an unexpected heat. Neither of them seemed to care that I was a private detective who worked in the field, and Cassius had even asked me to pretend to be Liam’s girlfriend just in case he was arrested, all so that I could protect him.
Cassius Valentine believed that I could protect the man he loved – whether it was platonic or romantic love, I wasn’t sure anymore, but they loved each other in one way or another, or they would never have been able to do what they’d done last night without trying to kill each other at least once.
And now that my pheromones were suddenly making Frankie sick, I wouldn’t have an alpha to rely on, not even platonically. It might be a temporary issue, or it could be permanent. There was no way to really know, but I had to assume the worst.
Just imagining her keeping her distance from me for the rest of my life…
Once again, I was forced to realize what it meant to be an omega and this time, it wasn’t a warm, fuzzy feeling.
I couldn’t hold back the tears anymore – not when the grief that overcame me was strong enough to wash away everything else, even the anxiety.
I wasn’t born to stand on my own and that was a fact regardless of how I felt about it personally .
This solitary life was slowly killing me, and up until now, there hadn’t been a single person who could give me what I truly needed. I’ve been starving my whole fucking life until these two had stuffed me to the breaking point.
My father was right…
I never should have fucked an alpha, let alone two. It didn’t matter that I was made to handle Liam and Cassius when no one else could – that I could calm them down or send them into a feral frenzy depending on the state of my emotions and pheromones.
Whether I was truly a dominant omega or not didn’t matter either, because I knew I could, and would, wield my pheromones like a weapon – especially if Liam and Cassius were the only ones who could detect them.
I wasn’t a kind person and never had been. My father had made sure of that, and now I finally, finally understood why.
Because now that I knew what I’d been missing out on, I would do anything to have it again.
Anything .
My father had made me into this starving thing, that up until now, had simply existed with the bare minimum. I’d convinced myself that my life up until now was enough, because the hunger burning inside me was fucking terrifying.
I’d walked into that bloody bathroom as a child and hadn’t felt horror or grief, but curiosity above all – the desperate need to understand . The second I’d realized that, I’d run out of there crying, all covered in blood…
But not because I was devastated to lose my mother.
I’d bawled my eyes out for hours because in that moment, I’d understood there was something very, very wrong with me. And when I found out my father was murdering alphas of all people…
Everything had clicked.
Finding out why still pricked at me, but I’d known that if my father could do it, then it wasn’t that much of a stretch for me to manage it either. Not when he’d trained me so well.
It may be in my nature for me, an omega, to be whatever an alpha needed – but the soft, sweet, and caring traits I’d been born with hadn’t been nurtured.
Only the desperate need to survive.
Tears streamed down my face, and it felt like maybe they’d stay like that forever. I didn’t know how to explain everything I was feeling to Cassius even if I wanted to, or why it was grief taking over instead of something else that might make a little more sense.
Whether Liam’s and Cassius’s pheromones miraculously fixed mine or not didn’t matter, because I was pretty fucking sure they wouldn’t be able to overcome the nurturing I’d received.
Nature could only do so much, and in my case, I knew it wasn’t enough. I would destroy them both without even meaning to. I would never trust them not to take advantage of my needs, and their alpha natures couldn’t handle that. Not over years anyway.
I really didn’t think I could do this, and it had nothing to do with what I wanted or how I felt. It was simply a fact, and if I didn’t end this now, it would destroy everyone, not just me.
Maybe I really was a dominant omega, and maybe that meant something – something different than what we’d all been taught, but I didn’t have enough information to base a decision off of just a guess.
I did know who I was though, and what I was like when I became obsessed with something. It would consume me, and the way my father had instilled his own distrust of alphas in me was too thorough for me to assume some pleasing pheromones could change anything.
The only way I could really protect these two from me was to end things, but in a way that made them feel like they were making the choice. If I told them how afraid I was, how desperate I was for them – they might just do anything and everything they could to help me.
I couldn’t let them turn out just like Frankie. I’d already destroyed one alpha. More than that would just be cruel.
They were good alphas, but I still couldn’t trust them, and I wasn’t going to let myself ruin anything else.
“Cassius?”
His body stiffened, almost as if he sensed a shift in my tone and I was pretty sure he was the first person to ever notice the difference. I smiled slightly, wondering if he’d walk away after this or try to break me into pieces so he could put me back together in a way that would suit him , not me.
Never me.
Honestly…
I kind of hoped he’d break me.
“What is it, Lucy?” There was that cruelty that kept me coming back. It was sharp enough I could almost taste the blood on my tongue. Cassius was a lot like me, honestly. Neither of us knew how to trust the other.
But I’d finally broken through his armor, and now we’d see just how strong he really was.
I smiled at him through my tears and couldn’t help but feel pleased to see those psychotic blue eyes weren’t empty anymore. “Would you like to know why my father killed my mother?”