38. Zoe
Zoe
Warren is silent as I shove him into a supply closet outside of the hall.
"What is wrong with you?" I hiss. "Are you drunk?"
"What's wrong with me? What's wrong with you! You had sharp teeth like some sort of monster!"
I pinch the bridge of my nose. "I do not. Look at my mouth. My teeth are as blunt and normal as yours."
He scoffs and tries to push around me but stumbles, barely catching himself on a rack. "I know what I saw."
"Let's get you out of here, Warren. You need some coffee or something. We'll sober you up and then talk."
I expect him to push back, but he doesn't, letting me take his hand and lead him to the dining hall.
It's mostly empty now, with only a few stragglers who started their day late sprinkled around the large space.
I grab him some coffee and a pastry. He bites into the flaky confection as soon as I place it in front of him.
"I've been wanting to talk to you about how we left things. I think we both said and did some things we didn't mean."
The memory of Warren's hands on me, the way he felt like I owed him my body, hasn't left me. I'm not trying to make excuses for him, but it was so wildly out of character for him that I can't believe it's who he is.
It has to be the Omega effect, right?
Except my necklace is supposed to conceal my Omega status. Is it possible that Warren is so in tune with my natural state of being that he's noticed the small changes since the ceremony?
"Why didn't you tell me, Zoe?" His mouth is full, but I can understand him fine. "You're my best friend."
"It was so new. I was going to tell you about Cliff and me, Warren, I swear it."
He shakes his head. "Not you and Cliff. Why didn't you tell me about your…" He gestures at his face and chomps his teeth together. "Why don't you trust me?" The hurt in his voice has my heart in a vice.
This feels like a pivotal moment.
I can tell him the truth and hope that he is still the man I have known my whole life and that he will protect my secret, or I can continue to gaslight him and keep him in the dark.
I feel like I am spending most of my brainpower on evaluating who is trustworthy when I should be figuring out what Ilota wants me to fix and why.
"I trust you, Warren. You're my best friend."
The words feel hollow. Is he still my best friend? Can we ever go back to what we were?
"Then why won't you tell me the truth? Why won't you tell me what you are?"
My mouth falls open, and I don't know if I am about to speak a denial or fold and tell him everything, but I don't get the chance to do either.
"Ansell." My surname is growled across the room in a tone I wish I'd never hear again. "Come with me."
I angle my body toward Dominic. "No, thank you. I'm busy."
"Not a request." Today, the Alpha is wearing ripped jeans that give me a glimpse of the dark, geometric tattoos covering his legs. His dark eyes are narrowed and heavy as he crosses the hall and leers over me. "Let's go."
"What do you want with her, anyway?" Warren's voice has less of a slur than it had a few moments ago, but it's still obvious that he's not sober. "You hate her."
Dominic ignores Warren and turns back to me. "Let's go, bunny." He grips my upper arm not hard enough to hurt, but enough that I know he's not letting this, or me, go.
"I'll find you later, okay, Warren? We'll finish our talk." The Alpha doesn't let me go as I clamor to my feet, and he hauls me out of the dining hall. "Where are you taking me?"
He doesn't answer, doesn't even look at me, as we leave the building and head towards the gymnasium.
"This doesn't feel like an official Institute errand you're on."
The glare on that man's face would turn a weaker person to dust, but I am quite used to his chilly expressions.
Neither of us speaks until we're deep in the forest, at the clearing he found me at when I was in my dragon form. He shoves me, and I stumble away.
"Shift."
I cross my arms over my chest. "Excuse me?"
"Shift. My beast is antsy and needs to see yours."
For a moment, I feel a twinge of pity for his poor beast, trapped inside a dick like Dominic, but it's gone pretty quickly. "I don't think so. Thanks for the walk, though. I needed the exercise."
Every step I take, he mirrors, trying to trap me here. "This isn't a suggestion."
"That's fucking rich, Dominic. You treat me like shit every time you see me, but now you expect me to put myself at risk of being discovered because you ask?" I shake my head. "You're not worth it."
He reaches out and grabs my forearm. "Please," he says through gritted teeth. "He's driving me crazy. I wouldn't ask unless I had to, you know that."
The raw need in his voice almost has me stripping down and shifting right away. I can feel my dragon beneath the surface, interested in what he's asking and excited about the possibility of her scent match, but there is a lump in my throat I can't speak around.
It takes me a moment to realize that it's fear holding my words hostage.
I worry that if I take off this necklace and let my dragon loose and he rejects me again, I won't recover from it. I can tell myself all I want that I don't need him, don't want him, but the fact is, he is supposedly a gift from the Gods.
Wait a second.
"Why would you gift me Dominic Bradly as a scent match, knowing who his father is?"
Ilota speaks in my mind almost immediately.
"I do not have the strength to Bless you with a match."
"Then whose choice was it?"
If scent matches are gifts from the Gods, then Dominic's patron is the one who stuck us together. I want to know why.
"Hey, Kashmyre?" I say out loud. "I know I'm not one of yours, but could you please explain why you paired us together?"
Dominic looks at me like I am a fool. "What are you doing?"
"Trying to find out why the Gods matched us. Ilota says she had nothing to do with it."
The Alpha shakes his head and rubs his temples. "Can you just shift, please?"
Do I tell Dominic that his dad would kill me if he knew I existed? Does he even know what a bad guy his father is? His shady treatment of the Omegas at the Institute alone is enough to convince me he shouldn't hold the position he does.
"Shit," Dominic swears, bending in half. "That hurts, fuck."
I rush to him and grab him by the arm. "What hurts?"
"A God yelling in my fucking head."
I fight my smile. "Ah, Kashmyre saying hello, is he?"
"He has never spoken to me once, and you ask a question, and now he's all too happy to answer?"
"What did he say?" Dominic clams up and rolls his lips together. "Come on, what did he tell you?"
His eye twitches, followed by a loud exhale. "Fine. Fine." He waves through the air, as if the God in his mind is a pesky bug flying around his head. "He says that I need you as much as you need me."
"I don't need you!"
"And I don't need you."
"I don't know, maybe you do. You did drag me out here to shift."
He growls and stalks away from me toward a tree, bracing his arm on it with his back to me. "My sabertooth is demanding it. Just because he needs you doesn't mean I do."
"Aren't you tired of fighting this, Dominic?"
I don't know what my goal is, asking that question. I don't want to be with him any more than he wants me, but I'm having a hard time spitting in the Gods' faces by rejecting him. They're all-knowing, right? If Kashmyre thinks we need one another, who are we to deny it?
Dominic strips off his clothes and shifts into his sabertooth tiger form to avoid answering me.
My dragon pushes against me now, asking to be let out, and I'm struggling to deny her. The beast lowers himself to the forest floor and rolls over, showing me his belly.
If there was any thought in my mind that Dominic was in control, it's gone now. He'd never show his belly to me.
That is enough to have me pushing my clothes off, but once I'm standing naked in the forest, my garnet necklace placed carefully on my stack of clothes, my worries come back.
What if someone sees me and reports me to the Archon?
But my dragon doesn't care about any of that, wanting to be with her scent match, and pushes to the forefront.
It's only my second time in this form, and it feels both foreign and like the most natural state of my body at the same time, which is an odd sensation to get used to. I do feel more connected to my dragon now than I have before, but I don't know if that's the shift or the lack of my necklace.
I lower myself as much as I can and curl up around the sabertooth. His sweet cedar scent is much more pronounced in this form, and I can feel the way my soul stretches to his.
Sadness that I'll never be able to feel this with Cameron, unless I can figure out a way to get that collar off of him, momentarily overwhelms my dragon's joy. She knows just as well as I do what the government has done to him by blocking his beast.
As if noticing my attention is elsewhere, the sabertooth growls playfully and bats me with his paw. I bump him with my nose.
I cannot deny that this feels nice. Right. I knew I needed to shift again, but I didn't know that being around Dominic Bradly would feel so good.