Chapter 17
Chapter Seventeen
SOREN
The next morning began the same way as always.
I’d lie quietly in the nest listening to the familiar sounds of the house waking around me.
The coffee grinder, the scrape of a mug on the counter, the back door opening, then closing again.
Cassian was usually gone for a couple of hours, patrolling the property every morning, checking the fences, the cameras, and the woods around the house before I’d managed to get down to the kitchen and drink less than half a cup of tea.
Food and drink weren’t moving through me fast enough.
I felt blocked and lethargic, and, goddess, my back ached.
When he returned, he always smelled of snow and pine and cold air, with the deeper familiar scent of wolf threaded underneath, frost in his hair, mud on his bare feet from where the snow had thinned under the trees, and my cat stretched with a lazy satisfaction that felt far too close to relief the moment I saw him.
I hated how quickly I’d learned the scent.
Before Center 14, I’d never paid attention to how another shifter smelled.
Now I knew the difference between Cassian after chopping wood, after patrolling, after standing outside in fresh snowfall, and I couldn’t decide whether that comforted or frightened me more because I was aching and exhausted.
The books helped for a while. I’d read the romance twice and the thriller once, and I’d opened a wilderness medicine book upside down and stared at a diagram of a splinted ankle for several minutes before realizing the labels were the wrong way up.
He made eggs and toast, set my tea beside my plate, and passed me the radio when I asked about the bridge.
Delia or the sheriff gave the same answer as every other morning: that the bridge was still closed, and Cassian took the radio back after I thanked whoever I spoke to, set it on the counter, and went on cooking as though he hadn’t watched my shoulders drop at the news.
“Where would we go?” my cat demanded, irritated by my thoughts.
He was awake now. More alert than he’d been since the day I’d presented as an omega. Since then, he’d been little more than a sleepy presence curled up somewhere deep inside me, barely lifting his head, always so tired.
So sleepy, he’d always whispered.
I’d thought it was fear or not shifting all these years.
Trauma. Pregnancy. But I could feel more of him with every passing day.
My family, then the Daltons, then Center 14 hadn’t just imprisoned my body; they’d medicated the hell out of my cat too, keeping him sedated, dulling his instincts, muffling the part of me that should have been pacing and watching and fighting to keep us alive.
The omegas who weren’t pregnant were kept on heat suppressants until the doctors decided otherwise.
Then the drugs stopped, the heat came, and someone had already decided what would happen next.
Nothing about our bodies belonged to us.
They’d stolen years of my life, and they’d stolen him too.
I’m here now. Our baby is safe. We are safe.
“We should leave.”
No. Safe here.
He was right. If I managed to leave here, how was I going to flee over the border, let alone get off the mountain?
After Cassian settled me in the armchair on the landing with herbal tea and a plate of cookies, he took his phone into the hall to call Brec and ask if there’d been any sign of Ronan.
From what I could hear, there hadn’t been.
I stared down at the steam curling from my mug, trying to make sense of what that meant.
I’d seen Ronan take the bullet. I’d seen him fall.
I’d watched him shift through the pain, so he’d survive long enough to get away.
After that… nothing, though I know he and Cassian talked, so he was alive.
He’d rescued me by accident. Not because he knew me.
Not because he owed me anything. He’d fought to get me out because I was the only omega he could get to, pressed his keys into my hand, and given me Cassian’s name and address.
Who had he been there for, really? The way he reacted to seeing Yannick, the way he’d recognized him, it had to be Yannick he was trying to rescue.
But he could have left after that. Why did he make himself a target for me?
The questions stayed with me. I wrapped both hands around the mug, grateful enough that my chest ached with it.
Grateful to Ronan for refusing to leave me behind.
Grateful to Cassian for opening his home without asking for anything in return.
Grateful that, for the first time since I’d presented, I was waking up somewhere I didn’t have to be afraid.
By mid-afternoon, I was restless and aching, and I’d rebuilt my nest twice. My cat had strong opinions about the left side that he refused to explain, and apparently, I was getting it wrong. I was alone. Pregnant. No future. No bonded alpha.
Of course I’m doing things wrong.
Everything is wrong.
Which was why I sat in the middle of the nest and cried for the better part of an hour, self-pity and self-condemnation as familiar to me as breathing, until my cat crept closer inside my head, nudging me with quiet, guilty affection.
Not you, he whispered, the apology clear even without the words. Not your fault. He pressed himself against me as though trying to purr away years of hurt he hadn’t been awake enough to protect me from, and somehow that only made me cry harder.
I dragged Cassian’s hoodie from under my head to the back of the nest, then back again, then folded one of the softer blankets beneath my knees because the pressure in my hips had become a constant low ache that didn’t ease even when I lay down.
But finally, I stopped crying.
I was halfway through pretending to read the same page for the fourth time when I heard banging in whatever room was above me—likely an attic—and my cat lifted his head with that infuriating satisfaction he’d developed whenever Cassian was near us.
“Don’t.”
He hugged us.
“I forced him to,” I muttered.
Twice.
I heard Cassian moving around outside my room: the thud of something heavy being dragged across the floor, followed by a curse muffled by distance but still understandable.
A cupboard opened, then closed. Something scraped.
Another curse, quieter this time, as though he’d remembered I could hear him.
Then, he appeared in the doorway carrying a television under one arm and a cardboard box balanced against his chest. It was not a small television, and Cassian had to turn sideways to get it through the door without catching it on the frame.
I stared at him, then at the television, then back at him.
“Thought you might be bored,” he said, and carried it to the dresser opposite the nest and set it down with care, then lowered the box beside it and straightened, rubbing one hand over the back of his neck.
“This could help.” He frowned at the cables in his hand.
“Although I’m not sure which cable is which, so I brought them all down. ”
“Don’t do it if it’s going to cause an issue,” I said.
I’d seen alphas get irritated before. A sharp word.
A clenched jaw. An expression warning everyone nearby to stay out of the way.
Too often it didn’t stop there. Temper became shouting.
Shouting became broken furniture, bruises, and fear.
I’d spent enough of my life learning how quickly an alpha’s mood could turn and how little warning there was before it happened.
My body tensed before I could stop it, old instincts surfacing hard and fast. If Cassian was angry, if I’d pushed too far, I needed to know before I made things worse. He shot me a confused glance.
“Are you doubting my abilities?” he teased.
I was horrified. “No. I wouldn’t… I didn’t…”
“I’m joking,” he said, then tapped his chest. “I’ve handled armed extractions, hostile terrain, and political disasters, and managed them all, but none of those involved six identical black cables and a remote with no batteries.
” He crouched behind the dresser, disappearing from the waist up, and I heard him mutter something about manufacturers and sadism before one arm reached back into view.
“Can you pass me the cable with the silver end?”
I hesitated, staring at the tangle of cables spread across the floor.
My pulse had already started climbing. It was a stupid thing to get anxious about.
What if I chose the wrong one? What if I broke whatever Cassian was trying to do?
My fingers tightened around the first cable as I tried to work out which answer was the safest before finally holding one up.
I picked up the nearest cable and examined it.
“I’m sorry… I don’t… they all have silver ends. ”
“Okay, we’ll try them in turn.”
It took longer than either of us expected, but Cassian was patient and talked to the TV as if it wasn’t an inanimate object, and at one point had a heated debate with his wolf, although of course I could only hear one side.
He found batteries in a drawer, lost them under the instruction leaflet, found them again, and spent several minutes trying to make the television recognize a little black box.
Eventually, the screen lit up, and Cassian sat back on his heels with quiet satisfaction, nodding when the menu appeared slowly, and he handed me the remote without standing.
“What do you want to watch?”
The question shouldn’t have been difficult, but it stopped me. I stared at the menu, at the rows of programs, films, and things with bright thumbnails and titles that meant nothing to me, and unease moved through my chest.
“I don’t know,” I said, and shrugged.
Cassian took the remote back without comment. “Then I’ll choose something I love, but which is highly embarrassing, so you have to be sworn to secrecy first.”