Epilogue
ADRIAN
I miss him. Niall. I miss him so fucking much.
In another life, if things had been different, he would’ve been my mate. Who, in spirit if not in reality, was anyway. To me, if to no one else.
Because the hole he’s left in my heart gapes as ragged and raw as any bullet wound, the pain constant and sharp.
There is a sense of bleeding out, slowly and surely, as the weeks wear on, nothing to alleviate or staunch the flow.
Part of me wishes I’d died along with him, or maybe instead of him, because being without him is nearly more than I can bear.
What good’s an omega without an alpha, anyway? What good’s an omega who has no interest in any alpha or breeding at all?
Declan’s words, not mine. But the bastard’s not wrong, is he?
I wish I could say that things are better, now that I’ve left Declan’s pack for Nathan’s.
In some ways I guess they are. There’s no pressure for me to find a mate now, at least. No one’s desperate for me to pair up the way Declan was, though some of the new alphas have expressed some interest in me.
The feeling isn’t mutual, but at least there’s no urgency, no timer constantly winding down, no exchanging of glances and wondering when and how and why.
There’s no one at all to exchange glances with anymore.
Because he’s gone.
And if I said I didn’t blame Cas in some small way, I’d be lying. I know it’s awful, but there it is. It’s not his fault, not strictly; I know he never asked for this. Never asked for all the terrible things that happened to him and everyone around him. To me. To Niall.
But the simple truth remains: if he’d never come, Niall would still be alive.
We would still be together. We’d still be happy.
We’d still be devising ways to be together, long into the night as the sweat cooled on our skin and our fingertips traced patterns in ribs and musculature.
Knowing, deep down, that our relationship had an expiration date, just not precisely when.
When I think of those afternoons and evenings I’ll never get with him again, my throat thickens like it’s wadded with dry cotton.
I feel like I’m suffocating. Like I’m dying.
And beneath that soul-sucking-crushing despair, fury.
The urge to lash out. The urge to grab Cas by the shoulders and scream in his pale face that I wish he’d never come here, that I wish he didn’t exist.
I don’t.
I just keep to myself instead.
I think he knows, though, in that intuitive way of his.
After all, it’s his idea that I take a year to myself in Glasgow and see if I might not want to go to college or do something with my life.
My first instinct is to say hell no and fuck off, but after a minute of deliberation I decide yes, actually, that’s a brilliant idea.
I need to get out of here before I lose my fucking mind.
Guess I’ll miss Nathan, though. And Kato too, the fuck-up.
Maybe if I stay away long enough, I’ll even miss Cas.
Before I leave for the city, I visit Niall one last time.
In the clearing by the cabin, where we used to spend so much time together, I kneel before his grave. I leave a crown of heather on the small marker Nathan carved for him, the kind I used to weave and set atop Niall’s head in the summer that would set off the red in his dark auburn hair.
I know he wouldn’t want me to be sad. He would never want me to mope around, forever carrying a torch for him. So many times he was plagued with doubt, reckoning he was dragging me down, stopping me from fulfilling some esoteric potential of mine.
He wasn’t. Of course he wasn’t. He was the best part of me, always. Without him, I don’t know what I am other than completely and utterly lost.
“I love you first and best,” I whisper fiercely. “That will always be true.”
Niall doesn’t answer.
That’s something else I’m still getting used to.