12. Cas #2
I wasn’t aware someone so large could look so small. Nathan manages it, though, folding in on himself like a collapsed house of cards. “We lost control,” he amends quietly.
“I’m sorry, Cas,” Kato says, his hazel eyes capturing mine. “After we were pulled into rut, I just…I needed. And I took. Both of us did, I guess. We fucked up.”
Their accountability doesn’t make me feel much better. Though the bond, of course, feels frazzled with the discord. It wants to soothe things over, keep all three of us happy. I touch both marks on my neck.
“Cas, if you could explain—maybe we could help,” Nathan says. “Why will breeding you kill you?”
“Because I’m not really an omega,” I whisper.
Kato blinks a few times, hard, and Nathan just stares at me blankly.
“What?” Kato asks into the silence. “Cas, I can smell it on you. I felt your womb.”
I press a hand to my stomach, where the foreign entity sits. I swear I can sense its wrongness even from the outside. I’m surprised Kato and Nathan couldn’t do the same from the inside. “It’s fake.”
“You got a designation change?” Nathan asks cautiously. “I’ve never heard of—”
I cut in. “No. I didn’t choose it.” The statement punches out of me, its effect so tangible that Nathan’s head whips back.
“Who?” he demands. “How?”
Kato’s breaths have grown louder. He raises a hand towards me, palm up. “Can I touch you right now? I can’t stand you being all the way over there.”
I look down at my feet, not having noticed that I’d almost drifted right outside the door.
I’d been so mad at them both, ready to run right out of the cabin.
The sight of Kato beckoning me keeps me rooted, however.
He wants me to stay, even after I’ve told him the truth.
So I shuffle cautiously towards him until I’m standing next to the bed, between his spread legs.
His hands hover around my waist, eyes big as he looks up at me, seeking permission.
I don’t give him it. Instead I crash onto his lap, throwing my arms around his neck and holding on tight.
Kato’s arms band around me, but I don’t feel restrained.
It’s the comfort I never knew I needed till I’m all wrapped up in him.
I draw in a deep breath, hold it, and let it go. The words spill from me haltingly. “There was this alpha I worked for, while I was in uni,” I say quietly. “His name is Sebastian—Bash. I took care of his racehorses for a while.”
“Fitting.” Nathan’s warm, broad hand skims my back in a soothing rub.
I smile a little, in spite of myself. “Yeah. I loved it. He owns a breeding operation. I was a stablehand working over the summer, waiting for courses to start back up again. He took notice of me and asked me on a date. Flattering for a beta, I suppose. Being asked out by a rich, handsome alpha.”
“Beta?” Kato echoes.
“That’s what I am. Was.” Neither alpha says anything.
I forge on ahead. “It was a disaster. He took me to this expensive restaurant, but I had nothing to wear, didn’t know what fork to use, that sort of thing.
He seemed—not disgusted, I suppose, but he certainly wasn’t impressed.
After he dropped me off that night, I didn’t expect to see him ever again—not in that capacity.
“I did, though. I saw him a lot. I’d see him watching me while I was turning out horses or catch him scenting me in the barns.
He never spoke to me again, but he was always just there.
Whenever he caught me noticing, he’d slip away.
I started getting paranoid, but I loved my job too much to quit.
Besides, he wasn’t doing anything, just…
hanging around. And anyway, it was only for the summer. In the autumn I was going back to uni.”
Kato’s arms tighten around me almost reflexively. He presses his cheek to my hair. “What a fucking creep,” he mutters.
I turn my head to look at Nathan. He’s simply watching me with quiet intensity. The kind that can turn, quite easily, to violence. Not towards me—but towards whoever hurt me.
I gulp and start again. “Most of the summer was just work, sleep, repeat. But the whole time he was…planning something. I didn’t get a clue of that till he caught me on my way to the bus at the end of the workday.
I don’t remember what he did. Only catching sight of him one moment, then—nothing. I was out.”
Do remember the throbbing at my skull though, as I woke up in that abandoned barn at the back corner of the property, limbs bound to a gurney, lights and sound bleeding around me.
Bash arguing with the vet, a man I had seen so many times tending to the horses over the summer.
Me crying-asking-begging to know what was going on, until the vet approached with the largest needle I’d ever seen, then knowing oblivion once more.
The last blissful taste of it I would get for a while.
I swallow again before the taste of bile can burn my mouth.
“They changed me. Him and his vet, James—they put it in me. The fake uterus and ovaries and all. ‘Bio-engineered to be just like the real thing’ is what they told me. And they injected me full of hormones to hasten the process. I was locked up for weeks on constant IV drips and injections after the surgery, and Bash was just…waiting. Until I was perfect.”
I pull back to look at them both. Kato’s staring at me in abject horror. Nathan says, in a low voice, “Perfect for what?”
“To be mated,” I say.
“Jesus.” Kato rubs his face in my hair.
“But you escaped,” Nathan says.
“One night the vet gave me the usual round of injections, but I guess he forgot the sedatives,” I say.
“It was the clearest I’d been since they’d locked me up.
I got out of the restraints, grabbed a bunch of suppressors they had stashed, swallowed a few and bailed out. I shifted and I ran and ran and—”
“You wound up with us,” Kato says softly.
I feel like crying again. “Yeah.”
He folds me into his embrace again, and Nathan tucks one of my curls behind my ear. “So if your whole system’s fake—”
“It can’t handle a pregnancy,” I say. “That’s what I heard the vet telling Bash.
That I can’t be bred for real. If I were, the baby would tear it apart as it grew.
” My mouth twitches. “It really pissed off Bash, hearing that. I guess he was hoping somehow this would make me a real omega, not just one for play.”
“All those hormones and pheromones they’d been pumping you with…and I guess when the suppressors wore off, your heat hit like a freight train,” Kato muses. “And that affected all of us.”
Nathan shrugs. “As good a theory as any.”
“Is abortion an option?”
Panic, choking and immediate, crawls up my throat. “If someone else found out—they might go to the council, and then Bash would find out where I am, and if he wanted to come get me—”
“We wouldn’t let him take you,” Nathan says, fierce but quiet.
“He’s got money and connections. Allies on the high council. Nobody here can find out it was him. It’ll get back to him somehow; I just know it.” Fear snatches my breath, leaving me light-headed.
Nathan nods. “We won’t say anything to anyone unless we have your permission.”
“Not a word,” Kato agrees. I bury my face in his shoulder. Perhaps sensing my disintegrating mood, he adds, “And we don’t have to keep talking about this. It’s a lot.”
“Yeah,” I whisper.
“More sleep,” Nathan suggests. “It’s not like we got a whole lot.”
“Fucking amen to that.”
I wedge my head beneath Kato’s chin and breathe them in, the comforting scent of alphas—my alphas—and for a fleeting moment I feel like I’m going to be okay.
I’m not, of course. But I feel like I will.
In the moment, it’s enough.