Chapter Nineteen – Mercedes
I don’t dress up as nicely as I did for Warren. I wear my old jeans, the ones with the holes in the knees, along with my favorite ankle-high boots. I pair it with a red t-shirt Nic got me; I guess I do like wearing red.
I want to give off a terrible impression tonight. Darius’s first impression of me was negative, so I will do my damnedest to prove him right. The whole thing is made easier, of course, since he’s an ass. If he was nice like Nic, this would be a lot harder for me.
But Darius isn’t like Nic, and he’s not even like Warren. He’s… I don’t know how to describe him.
I purposefully leave my hair greasy and I don’t apply any lipstick or any makeup at all. He’s going to get me as I am, and that’s it—and if he doesn’t like it, he can go fly a kite for all I care. I’m not here for him.
Darius seems like an uptight jerk, so I’m going to do everything I can to get on his nerves. In addition to not showering today, I’m going to be late. Dinner is at six-thirty sharp. I roll out of my bedroom at six-forty-five.
Nic will be isolated in his own room, just like Warren, now that dinner is made. It’s the only reason I take my time in walking down the hall and the stairs. One step at a time, no need to rush. I check my nails, admire the smoothness of the adjacent wall, and pretty much drag my feet as I go.
When I finally make it to the dining room, I find my date is already there, sitting at the head of the table, what must be his spot. Around him are various dishes of food. Some kind of roast with a sweet-smelling, caramelized drizzle on top of it.
Darius doesn’t stand when I appear. He hardly even looks at me, flicking his green-eyed gaze in my direction for only a moment before lowering it to the table. Based on the way he sits in that chair, he’s ready to bolt.
Good. So I’m not the only one who doesn’t want to be here. Tanking this date will be easy.
I choose a seat two down from Darius, purposefully leaving a space between us. I hate that being this near to him makes my inner omega want to purr and offer her neck. Seriously, one whiff of him and I want the man to bend me over and breed me.
It’s not like this with the others. I don’t know why I’m so stupidly attracted to this jerk.
Darius wears all black, his dirty blond hair combed back. He looks like a mafia man or something, radiating danger and cruelty. His square jaw is lined with a thin layer of stubble, and his eyes are more narrowed than Nic’s, his mouth pulled into a near constant frown.
I hate how attractive he is. I hate how good he smells. If only I could pinch myself and snap my inner beast out of it.
He doesn’t say hello. He simply says, “Shall we get this night started? The sooner we begin, the sooner we can conclude.” Though the words he says stings, he mirrors my feelings about this date perfectly.
I don’t say anything back to him. The only thing I do is start filling my plate. I don’t wait until his plate is full before I begin eating, either. No, I dig in immediately—and I’m messy and unladylike as hell as I do it.
I even let out a burp, not something I’m proud of, but the sound does cause Darius’s brows to flicker upward for a split second before his emotionless mask retakes the reins.
Neither of us says a word. We’re both playing the same game, here only because Nic is making us. Neither one of us actually wants to be here, spending time with the other. This whole date is nothing but a waste of time for us both.
I thought I was content with eating in silence, but the more my eyes glance over at him, the more pissed off I become. How can he sit there and act totally unbothered by me? Can he not smell me? Do I not smell good enough to him?
I didn’t think scents worked like that. It’s nature’s way of pulling alphas and omegas together. How the hell can he smell like sex dipped in candy to me when he can’t even be near me without wrinkling his nose and turning away? Honestly, it’s enough to drive me mad.
No, wait. Worse than that. It’s enough to downright piss me off.
With a frown on my face, I swallow my current mouthful and openly glare at him. “What is your problem?”
Those dark emerald orbs of his flick in my direction, and he cocks his head at me ever so slightly. “My problem? I don’t have a problem. You, clearly, do.” His voice is so low it sends a shiver down my spine, so gruff and husky I want to immediately crawl off my chair and slink onto his lap.
I’m about to tell him I don’t have a problem, but you know what? Screw that. I’m not going to lie to him. I’ll tell him exactly what I’m thinking and how I feel.
“Yeah, you know what? I do have a problem. You.” I point my fork at him in what I hope looks like disgust. Frankly, I’m a little concerned my face might say: fuck me now, alpha. “You’re my problem. You’ve been my problem ever since we first met.”
A muscle in his jaw tightens, and I hate hate hate how attractive I find that pulsating tendon. “Ever since I caught you on my personal computer, you mean.”
With a shrug, I say, “Yeah, I was on your computer. Sue me. I didn’t have one of my own at the time, okay? I was in a new house in an area I didn’t even know existed two weeks ago, and I was a little scared. And what’d you do? You waltzed in and instantly got so pissed at me, you used your alpha dominance to make me leave! Do you know how shitty that made me feel? Wait, no, you probably don’t, since I bet you’ve never been forced to do something like that in your life!”
Am I yelling at pack Alabaster’s top alpha?
…I guess I am.
“It’s demeaning. It makes me feel like—” I slam the fork on the table as my nostrils flare. “—like I’m nothing.”
After that outburst of mine, after literally yelling at him, I half expect Darius to yell in return, but throughout it all, he hardly blinks. I can’t read the guy. Whatever his emotions, he keeps them close to his chest, whereas Nic and Warren are more open books.
When the man finally speaks, he is as calm as ever: “Is that all, or is there more you’d like to say?”
“That’s—” I pause, giving it some thought. “I guess that’s pretty much it.” I may lose some gusto there, mostly because I anticipated getting yelled at in return.
“In case it slipped your mind, I apologized for how I reacted before.”
“Only because Nic made you.”
That earns me a half-smirk from Darius. A quick one, one that fades less than five seconds later, but a half-smirk nonetheless. If I wasn’t already sitting down, that half-smirk would have knocked me off my feet. “Nic cannot make me do anything.”
I arch a single brow at him.
“Did Nic highly suggest I do so? Yes, but he didn’t force me to do it. I apologized on my own and I thought the matter was settled.” His gaze narrows in my direction. “Apparently not. Apparently you still hold onto quite a bit of resentment toward me.”
“Can you blame me? This is like the third time I’ve seen you. You clearly don’t want me here.”
“Nic is the one who wanted an omega.”
“Yeah, I know. You don’t want me.” I look away from him with a shake of my head. Staring at him isn’t helping matters. The longer I look at him, the less mad I am; it’s like my body is hardwired to forgive him, for some stupid reason. “I don’t want you, either, so it goes both ways.”
Darius doesn’t say a word to that. He doesn’t try to refute me or reassure me—not like Nic or Warren would. He’s all stony silence, and said stony silence does nothing but piss me off all over again.
“I don’t like you. I wish you weren’t a part of this pack.” I throw the two sentences at him like knives, and when I whip my head in his direction to accompany them with a glare, I find his jaw grinding and his nostrils flaring.
A step too far, maybe, but oh, well.
“You’re the opposite of Nic and Warren,” I add. “I don’t get how you can be so different than them. I just don’t understand why you have their loyalty—”
“I am the pack leader.” He glowers at me, the frown deepening on his face as he runs a hand down along his tie. “I am responsible for the good of the pack. I look out for them in all aspects of our lives, and I will not fail a second time—so, yes, I am different than they are, and I’m not foolish enough to overlook the truth as they are.”
My breath catches in my throat.
“You don’t plan on staying,” Darius mutters. “You never planned on being our omega, so why don’t you just take your money and go? Get it over with now so Nic and Warren can start the healing process—I hope you’re not naive enough to think your rejection won’t hurt them. It will. They’ll be devastated, and I will be left to pick up the shattered pieces of my pack just as I always knew I would.”
I open my mouth, seeking to refute him, but I can’t say a word. He’s right. He’s one hundred and ten percent right about me not wanting to stay, about my ultimate goal always having been to leave.
And yet…
Maybe I don’t want to anymore. Maybe things are just too damned complicated inside my heart to think straight lately.
Instead of refuting him, I settle for deadpanning, “Man, you’ll feel really stupid if I stay, won’t you?”
He doesn’t find that amusing, and he only glowers at me.
“You would,” I go on, letting myself enjoy the prospect. “You’ll be reminded of how wrong you were every single time you see me. I’m not going to lie, I’m petty enough to find it tempting.”
A minute passes, and I add, “I don’t want to hurt them. That was never my goal. I didn’t… I didn’t expect to like them so much.” I chuckle, though it’s the opposite of a joyful sound. “If only they both acted like you, leaving would be easy.”
Something in my chest pangs with a dull ache when I say this next part: “I don’t like you, and you don’t like me, so why don’t we just end the date now, hmm? Let’s just stop all of this pretending.”
A muscle in Darius’s jaw tenses. “Fine with me.”
I don’t know why, but a part of me hoped he would argue with me, try to prove me wrong. But this isn’t a fairytale, and Darius Alabaster isn’t my alpha, regardless of how delicious he smells and how tempting he looks in that fitted suit.
I jerk my chair back, and it scrapes against the floor with an ugly sound. I give Darius one final glare before I storm off, and once I’m out of his sight, I break out into a run. I run upstairs, right to my bedroom, and I only let out my breath once I’m alone. I kick off my boots and pace the length of the room, replaying that short, ill-fated date over and over in my head.
There’s no getting along with that guy. There just isn’t. I can’t. I won’t. He’s just…
How can he drive me so crazy? Why do I feel so hurt that he didn’t even try? I don’t get it. I don’t understand why I feel like this. Did I step into some weird, alternate reality where humans aren’t separated as alphas, betas, and omegas? If only. It must make love lives so much easier.
I don’t know how long I pace the length of my room before I hear a knock, and some stupid part of me hopes it’s Darius in the hall, ready to apologize again. But when the knocker pokes his head into my room, I find it’s Nic, not the über alpha.
“I heard you running,” he said, slow to close the door behind him as he inches forward, approaching me like I’m a wild animal and he’s afraid I’ll bolt. “What happened? Did Darius say something?”
How I wish I could tell him a pretty lie, or even what he wants to hear. Nic really wanted this date to go well, for me and Darius to mend the bridge between us, but it’s not going to happen. Darius and I… my inner omega might mewl at the thought of being bent over by him, but we do not click. We just don’t, and nothing we do will change that.
I shouldn’t care, but the rejection makes my insides hurt in a way I’ve never been hurt before—and that says something, given everything Jay’s done to me. “I’m sorry, Nic, but it’s not going to happen. I don’t like him. I—” I’m about to say I hate him, but the words refuse to surface.
Nic’s easygoing expression falls. “Mercedes, it’s okay. We can try again.”
“No. There’s no more trying with that guy. I can’t—” How can I explain how torn up I am inside at his rejection without sounding like I’m losing my mind? I don’t know the guy. He doesn’t owe me his affection.
And yet… yet it feels like he should. It feels like his affection, his desire, his knot; it should all be mine .
“How can he smell so good?” I ask even though there’s no way Nic will be able to answer me. “How the hell can he smell so good I can’t think straight? How can he smell so fucking good to me, but he acts like he can’t stand to be within five feet of me? It feels like my heart is tearing itself apart over it, and I don’t even know why!”
The more I say, the more Nic’s expression changes. He goes from shocked to confused to something else, and his brows furrow. He takes another step toward me and, before I know what he’s doing, he’s reaching for me and pulling me into his chest.
I lean my cheek against his chest and hear a low, purring sound emanating from him. The primal sound instantly soothes me, calming me down as he runs a hand along my head. My eyes close, and I surrender to that purr of his, to the wordless comfort his body offers mine.
I really do feel like I’m going insane when it comes to Darius. I shouldn’t care, and I shouldn’t let myself get so worked up, but it’s like whenever I’m near him, whenever I think about him, I lose all sense of self and become a caricature of an omega. It’s maddening.
Nic holds me for a while, absentmindedly running his hand down the back of my head, petting me while his other arm remains locked around my back. He is solid, stable, calming in the way I need. Before long, I am relaxed and that other alpha is the last thing on my mind.
“Let me handle it,” he whispers. “You just relax, okay? Don’t stress about anything.” Obviously, us omegas don’t handle stress too well. We tend to freak out over every little thing—it’s why having an alpha to calm us down makes life so much easier.
I never knew… my entire life, I never knew what I was missing. To think, I used to think every alpha in the world was just like Jay.
Now, I’m beginning to see I was wrong.