31. Six #3
I pulled away, surprised to see tears shining on his cheeks. I swiped one away with my thumb. “What’re you thinking?” I breathed.
He gave a single shake of his head, eyes wide and awed as though he could hardly believe I was real.
“I feel…home…with you. With you both.” He swallowed hard.
“From that very first day when you blocked my car in, refused to let me run away from something that could help me.” He breathed in a deep breath.
“That was why I stayed. I’d already made an enemy of you both, I thought, but you still fought for me.
“And Taryn…” Fresh tears trailed down his cheek. “I’ve been the burden on my pack for so long. But Taryn needs me. In her most…most scared and vulnerable moment, she needed me. And I need someone to need me.”
I finger-combed his hair and dried his tears, so proud of how much emotion spilled from him.
This wasn’t pheromones or biology. Even if I never experienced Caine as a sexual being, the love I now realized I held for him withstood that.
It was intimacy, true intimacy. An understanding we each had of the other down to our marrows.
The same demons, the same tics and nightmares.
“I just…I didn’t know there was anyone else who could be safe for me,” he whispered after a moment. And I understood. Agreed. Their pack didn’t complete ours, or vice versa. I could’ve lived my entire life with Taryn and Taryn alone. And they probably could’ve as well.
I ran my fingers through his hair, dragging my nails lightly along his scalp.
“I don’t believe in fated mates, or soulmates, or any of it,” I told him.
“Only in people choosing each other. People who…who see each other with such clarity that when they’re not in your life, you feel like a ghost.” I stroked through his locks again.
“I’d be a ghost without Taryn. And I’d be a ghost without you. ”
Another tear rolled down his face, dropping off the edge of his jaw.
With a swift kiss to his cheek, I stood from the couch, grabbing his hand and pulling him along with me.
He gave me a questioning look. I simply kissed his knuckles and pulled him through the living space, the kitchen, back toward the room where the rest of our loves slept soundly.
I’d left the door open, and as we approached, Caine halted in the doorway. His face was just as awed as he looked in on Taryn, Lin, and Brooks tucked in together, arms wrapped around torsos and fingers twined. He leaned against the doorframe as though he’d sink to the floor without it.
I nodded toward Taryn in the middle. “Tell her,” I breathed.
He met my gaze.
“She knows, deep down,” I assured him with a hand on his forearm. “But omegas…they need to hear it.”
His brows drew together, and he looked back into the room as though surveying a steep cliff face he was required to scale. Slowly, silently, he stepped toward the edge of the bed, crouching down on the balls of his feet.
He reached toward her but hesitated. Maybe he was afraid to confess so openly his feelings for her, for us.
Maybe he just wanted her to keep sleeping.
She looked so peaceful, so pure and untainted by the horrors and dangers of the world.
I wished we could just stay here, away from it all, where she could always look so content.
Finally, though, Caine’s hand completed its journey, brushing a stray lock of frizzed hair behind Taryn’s ear.
Brooks slept soundly behind her, his arm hooked around her waist with Lin behind him, flat on his back but face turned toward Brooks mass of curls, as though even in sleep he craved the scent. He must’ve moved after I left the room.
Caine brushed his fingertips down the line of her cheek, tracing the edge of her jawline.
His face was soft, eyes tender in a way I’d never seen them before.
He repeated the motion, fingers just barely grazing the skin of her face.
She stirred then, eyes scrunching together before blinking slowly open.
Before registering who knelt before her.
Before she could move or speak, Caine caressed her face a third time, swallowing as the muscles in his face tightened. “I’m sorry,” he breathed, barely audible.
Taryn frowned, sitting up slightly against her pillow. “Caine—”
“I’m sorry.” He cupped his hand on her cheek. “I’m used to Brooks and Lin just…just knowing what we are, without needing to tell them or put on a happy face and pretend. It’s not fair to have held you to that standard when that kind of trust hasn’t been built yet.”
“What are we, then?” she asked softly.
Caine looked back at me, Taryn following his gaze. I didn’t move, neither forward to help Caine, nor back to leave him on his own. I gave a small smile, and I stayed put.
He turned back to her. His thumb ran absently over the apple of her cheek.
“You’re home,” he said. “Both of you. Same as Brooks and Lin. You’re…
all of you, you’re the only part of the world I want to live in.
And I’d burn every other inch of this fucking globe if it meant this little piece of it would be safe. ”
Taryn’s chin wobbled as emotion threatened to overtake her. She broke eye contact, looking down toward the mattress.
Gently, Caine pulled her chin back up so he could see her eyes. “I’ve kept myself on the outside all my life, because it was safer that way,” he said through a thick voice. “But you and Brea…Brooks and Lin…you make me want to be part of something.
“I grew up mostly alone. I was in foster care at nine, and I was just…angry, and scared. I met Lin in school that year, and something about him quieted the noise in my head. He was my best friend, the one good thing I could see in my life. All my firsts were with him. First drink, first cigarette, first kiss. First all of it.”
It spilled out of him, all the details it had taken weeks and weeks of patience and directed questioning for me to get in his sessions.
His aging out of the foster system, leaving school, leaving Lin and his family, the only stability he’d had. Answering a sketchy help wanted ad only to realize it was for AlphX trafficking.
“It went like that for years,” he said softly. By this point, Lin and Brooks were awake, eyes open but bodies unmoving. “I was making close to ten-grand a week, and still living in a dump, barely making it. Ten-grand buys a lot of fucking drugs, Taryn.”
He paused for the first time, steeling himself for the worst of it.
Then he told her about Melody, the strung out omega he’d met in the trade. How she’d begged him again and again to try AlphX, even though it was fatal for omegas, especially with prolonged use. How he’d refused, even keeping his stash out of the house.
And he told her about the day he returned home and found Melody stroked out on the floor.
Taryn’s face was tear streaked. Caine’s was too. “I didn’t love her,” he whispered, eyes still locked with hers. “But at the time, I thought shooting each other up and passing out on the floor together was love.
“Going back to Lin, bonding with him and Brooks…that’s how I knew I didn’t want to die. If I hadn’t joined them, if they hadn’t taken me in, I would’ve found some lethal dose and drifted off in an alley somewhere.”
Taryn stroked his face, her other arm holding the sheet up to her chest. “Why are you telling me this?”
He mirrored her, cradling her cheek with his hand. “Because packs know these things about each other.” Taryn’s eyes squeezed shut as Caine pulled her face toward him, planting a long kiss on her forehead. “And you’re pack for me, Omega.”