10. Conor
CONOR
I should have known just because Lark opened up a little didn’t mean she’d forgiven us for kidnapping her.
She swapped the sugar out for salt.
Added vinegar to our body wash.
Stole the batteries from every remote and hid them.
Sliced through the pockets in all our pants.
Peeled the labels off all our spices.
Renamed our wi-fi “Fucking fucking fuck.”
Set all the clocks in the house to a slightly different time.
Where did she find the time to pull all this shit? I fucking loved it, loved that even while furious with us, she took care not to hurt us, no matter how pissed she got. The pranks were annoying, but they weren’t cruel.
It told me we had a fighting chance.
“I hate this,” Emile snarled, the day before we planned to move on the alpha pimp.
We both stared at Lark’s closed bedroom door.
She’d disappeared an hour ago after a preheat spike hit her at dinner.
One moment, she’d been arguing with us about the plan for tomorrow, fierce and focused, then her scent had flooded the room, thick and sweet with need.
We’d both moved toward her instinctively, and she’d backed away like we’d burned her.
Now, I paced in front of her door, my hands clenching and unclenching at my sides.
“I fucking hate that she’s unhappy,” I said. “I hate that she won’t let us in her room, and that she disappeared instead of letting us work her through her preheat spike.”
I pressed my palm flat against her door, fighting the urge to break it down. “She's suffering, Emile. I can smell her need, her frustration, her fucking misery, and we're out here like idiots because we're trying to be good alphas, trying not to be the monsters she thinks we are.”
“We kidnapped her,” Emile said quietly, calmly, rationally, flooding our bond with comfort. “Twice.”
“To keep her safe!”
“Don’t lie to yourself, and don’t lie to me,” he snapped. “We kidnapped her to keep her. There's a difference, mon coeur, and she knows it. And now with her heat coming, her body—her instincts—are reminding her exactly what we're capable of.”
I whirled on him, my eyes blazing. “We would never—”
“She doesn't know that,” Emile cut me off, his deep brown eyes steady and sad. “All she knows is we drugged her and used her hormones against her. Why wouldn't we do it again when she's even more vulnerable?”
A soft whimper from behind the door cut through my denial, and we both froze. The sound was pure omega in distress, and every instinct in my body screamed to go to her, to gather her in my arms, to purr until the world made sense again.
I scrubbed my face. “I don’t know how to make her trust us.”
“Trust has to be earned,” Emile reminded me softly.
“After the job,” I said finally. “We have to let her go.”
“And if she doesn’t come back?”
I looked up at him. His eyes were bright with emotion.
“Then we live with it,” I said. “Because the alternative is keeping her prisoner. And I can’t do that to her. Even if it kills me.”
“I love her,” he said quietly.
“I know.”
We sat there in the dark, holding each other, mourning an omega who was twenty feet away but might as well have been on the other side of the world.