Episode 30 Midnight Strikes
I blame the date.
Florence’s date.
The one that was so perfect and relaxed, it let me forget for a single night who I am. What my duty is. Somehow, after knowing us for only a few weeks, Ren was able to give us all exactly what we needed.
A night where we were a pack again. A full pack.
With Piers right at the center of it.
The way it should always be.
I’ve failed him as an alpha. I know that. I’ve known that for a long fucking time. But I’m also a selfish arsehole who isn’t willing to give up someone I love, even if they might be happier if I did.
He’s mine. And I will protect him at all costs.
The date with Florence was a reminder of that. Of what it was like when my pack first bonded. That sense of rightness had woven itself through every moment of that date. Like my pack was finally complete with Ren.
And it was all too easy to fall under the spell, to begin to think that I could have that.
Have my beta and my omega and my pack. That Court was right days ago when he said the queen won’t be able to deny us if it's recorded and aired on national television.
If we just keep her until the scenting ceremony, if we let them record us smelling her for the first time without the suppressants, and the descenter, then no one would be able to deny what she is to us, even the queen.
I woke up full of plans, of… hope. Choosing Florence wouldn’t be the easy choice, but it would be the right one, and I was willing to weather my grandmother’s displeasure to have her.
It's that kind of thinking that got me into trouble.
Early this morning, while I was still buzzing from the high of tasting Florence, my grandmother called, some sixth sense of hers blaring that I’d been on the verge of ignoring her demands and following my heart. Of being happy.
Or, more likely, someone on the crew is a spy and reported back to her that I was getting too close to Florence Karlin.
There’d been the usual talk of duty to the crown, to the family. The usual reminders of everything at stake. And then, when she could tell that her words weren’t having the usual effect on me, on my alpha, she… changed tactics.
The threats weren’t blatant. Weren’t outright threats, but the subtext was there. Mentions of Florence’s mother, a nurse at a hospital, being discredited and wouldn’t that be a shame? Her family’s townhouse in Granton and how hard it must be for a single mother to pay that sort of rent.
How awful it would be if something like what ended Florence’s dance career were to happen again.
All of those things the queen is absolutely capable of, even if Florence isn’t a citizen of Bravonne. My grandmother has her fingers in all sorts of pies and I am certain she knows someone in the states who could manage to ruin Florence’s life in a handful of days.
There was a large part of me—my alpha mostly—that felt certain we could protect her and her family.
That once we’re bonded there’s nothing the queen can do, if something were to happen to Florence or her family, it would be seen as an attack on the royal family, and the queen wouldn’t allow that to happen.
But then… There's the part of me that is bound by my duty, that has had the importance of honor and familial pride beat into it since a young age, a part of me that truly believes in the monarchy, in our ability to effect positive change.
The part of me that doesn’t want to make things more difficult for my sister—my twin—when she takes the throne.
That same part of me believes without a doubt that the queen would have no qualms in hurting the people Florence loves while making sure there was no possible way for it to be traced back to her.
Accidents happen all the time. She’d said after casually mentioning Ren’s little sister Ginny.
By the time I’d hung up, I knew what I had to do.
What we had to do.
And I’m going to go to hell for it.
Too late, you’re already there.
I’ve come to hate this room. The one where we break omega hearts or give them false hope.
I’ve come to hate the cameras and the people watching like vultures, looking for the right amount of heartbreak, of drama, anything to get their already sky high ratings even higher.
We never should have agreed to this show.
But the queen demanded it, and we are but her humble servants.
Always.
My jaw ticks as I glance around the room, take in the space between all of my packmates.
Thayer seated in a chair with his elbows resting on his knees, head bent as he stares at the floor.
Grieves on the other side of the room from me, arms crossed with a stony expression on his face.
Courtland is pacing, hands running through his hair in frustration, trying to come up with a way out of this, even after I told him about the threat to Ren’s family.
And Piers, who hasn’t looked at me all afternoon. Not since he came back from comforting Florence and I gave him the news. Made a liar out of him, because he’d just finished promising Ren we weren’t sending her home tonight.
Florence.
Fuck.
I’ve been avoiding thinking too much about her, about how pretty she is when she comes. The sweet sounds that fell from her lips, the flush on her cheeks, and the absolute fucking trust in her eyes when we told her—-when I told her—I wasn’t going to be able to let her go.
And then this morning, the hurt expression when she came out from her interview with Lulu and found Isadora sitting on my lap like I belonged to her. The half choked whine that made my alpha claw at my insides, demanding I dump Isadora on her ass and go to my fucking omega to make it right.
But I couldn’t, not with my early morning conversation with my grandmother ringing in my ears, the blatant threats she’d laid out. Against Florence. Against Piers.
Two people I would give anything to protect.
Including my happiness.
Including my mate.
My eyes close as I think the word.
Of course the universe is just this cruel. Of course, my pack would find our mate only for us to not be able to keep her.
Instead for her safety, for her future happiness, we have to let her go.
“Your Highness?” a timid voice says from my shoulder. I turn to glare at the freckled redhead I recognize as the PA assigned to Florence. “I have the order for you.”
He sounds worried that I’m going to tear him apart, and I can’t blame him. My entire pack is bristling with pissed off alpha vibes.
I hold out my hand wordlessly, and he slides the tablet into my hand.
I scan the list, noticing Florence is at the bottom.
Likely to ratchet up the tension. Everyone knows she’s a contender, the fans love her, production loves her, and they love the drama she brings.
The battle between love and duty that is currently being waged.
I fucking wish I could let love win.
But I can’t.
“Florence should go first,” I grit out. In the corner of my eye I see Court jerk forward like he wants to argue with me, but he doesn’t. We’ve talked about this, over and over and over. Argued and fought, literally. My cheek still throbs from where Grieves hit me.
But at the end of the day, we’re a pack. Bound by duty—by my duty—and so they’d agreed.
The PA’s mouth tightens. “They want her-”
“I don’t give a fuck what they want,” I growl at him. “She goes first. Do you hear me? If they want to make it look like she goes last, they can edit the footage later.”
The last thing I want is to draw this out.
To have her sitting there full of hope for an hour or more as we go through the motions of accepting or rejecting omegas.
She deserves better, and my alpha wouldn’t be able to handle the stress anyway, knowing that her pain is coming.
Anxiously waiting for the blade to drop, severing my pack from the omega we’ve all come to care about more than we can ever admit.
And me, the executioner.
The architect of our misery.
The PA nods. “I’ll let them know you said as much. Can’t guarantee they’ll agree.”
It's the best I can ask for.
I’m as much at the whims of the production crew as the omegas are. Even more so, since I have to be polite, since I have to stay in control of my instincts and my frustration at all of this. At all of them.
But more so at myself.
I never should have let it get this far. Never should have let Florence stay for as long as she did, knowing it would hurt this much when I was forced to let her go.
It would have hurt after our first real conversation, after my alpha immediately realized what she was to us, but it wouldn’t have been like this. Not for any of us.
This is pure fucking agony.
“This is a mistake,” Court mutters, the same thing he’s been saying all day. “We can’t do this now. Not after last night.”
“You want to wait until after the scent ceremony?” I pinch the bridge of my nose and squeeze my eyes shut. “After we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that she belongs to us, and we still have to reject her? Would that be better, Court?”
“We should have at least warned her,” Grieves growls, no doubt glaring at all of us.
“You know we couldn’t do that.” Thayer sounds like none of this bothers him, but I know him well enough to realize he’s as torn up about this as I am.
As we all are. “We always knew we’d have to cut her eventually.
We did what we could for her, kept her for as long as the queen would allow it. She made as much money as she could.”
I know what he’s saying. We took care of her in the only way we’re allowed to, keeping her for as long as we can, so she can go back with a tidy little sum of money to make her time here worth it.
If I’m honest, I’ve looked into the possibility of giving her even more, a bonus of sorts, from our pack funds, because I need—my alpha needs—to do more for her than this. Empty promises and rejection.
“That’s not why she was here though,” Court protests.
“No,” I agree. “It’s not. She was here to see if she could handle being around unfamiliar alphas long enough for them to become familiar. We helped her-”