28. Fixing The Past

28

FIXING THE PAST

Emmy showed up with the police.

Niall wasn’t completely sure how it happened. One moment, police cars were pulling up in front of their houses. The next moment, he had his arms stuffed full of brightly-colored paper squares, each with a terrible drawing of a cock and balls.

Niall gaped at the small omega in front of him. “Why’re you here?”

“Oh!” Emmy hugged his wriggling baby, then slung his arm around an alpha policeman who was taking down Jag’s statement. “I tagged along with my banana muffin!”

From their mixed scents—strong notes of snapdragon and juniper on both of them—it was clear that the policeman was Emmy’s alpha.

Niall looked at Emmy’s alpha. “Is that allowed?”

Emmy’s smile turned sneaky. “He drove by the Wine Shack and left the cruiser door open! I can’t be responsible for where my bouncy feet take me.”

Emmy’s alpha snorted. “Yes, you can. I’m Varrick.”

Only to have Emmy beam and pet his head fondly. “He is house-trained.”

Niall stared. Jag coughed.

“It’s a curse,” Varrick said, looking amused.

“Pfft! I’m a blessing! A butt blessing!” Emmy hip-checked Varrick’s thigh. “Show me the dead bodies!”

“I don’t think I’m allowed.” Niall looked behind them at his house. “I don’t even know if I want to go back in there. People died in my house!”

“Burn some sage,” Varrick said. “Doesn’t work on human ghosts, but it should work on dead ghosts.”

“Human ghosts?”

Emmy cackled. “Did I tell you? I haunted our house before my banana muffin knew I was there. He thought I was a ghost!”

Niall tried to get his phone out, only to have his armful of butt blessings scatter all over the ground. Several with their cock drawings facing up. “Oh, no. I wanted to write down that idea.”

Jag scooped up the drawings for him. “I’ll retrieve the things from your house, sweetheart. You don’t have to live there anymore if you don’t want to.”

“You... don’t mind if I move in?” Niall’s heart fluttered. He’d been spending his after-work hours at Jag’s, eating and sleeping there, but he still returned to his office next door while Jag worked on his house.

Jag raised an eyebrow. “Why do you think I gave you paint swatches for the walls? Repainted the rooms you didn’t like? Left a room completely empty?”

“Weren’t you going to turn it into something else? A home gym?”

“I already have a home gym. It’s for your office,” Jag huffed. “I can get you new furniture, or move in your existing ones.”

Niall’s heart swelled. “Oh.”

Jag ruffled his hair and smiled warmly. “I’m ready for you to move in officially.”

“But what about—” Niall glanced at Varrick. In a small voice, he said, “Bonding marks?”

Maybe he shouldn’t have said it. Just because Niall loved Jag, didn’t mean Jag returned those same feelings.

“Sweetheart.” Jag’s gaze intensified as he tipped Niall’s face up to look into his eyes. “I was waiting for you to be ready.”

Niall’s stomach flipped. “Y-you’re ready? To mark me?”

“Yes. I’ve been ready for a long time.”

“But I don’t even know if you love me!” Vaguely, Niall registered that this was the wrong way to reveal his feelings. He was an author; no one ever said that in a love confession! It figured that he’d mess up something this important in reality. “Um. I mean.”

Jag raised an eyebrow. But he was still smiling, rubbing his thumb across Niall’s lips. “I love you.”

Just like that.

“Um. Do you love me in the friends way, or the family way, or...?”

If a stranger was listening in, they would never believe that Niall wrote love stories for a living.

His alpha laughed, leaning in to press their foreheads together. “I love you in all the ways, sweetheart. I love you as my best friend. We talk every day about everything, and I tell you things that I don’t even tell my other friends. I love you as my family, because you’re carrying our baby and we’re going to raise a family together. I love you as my omega. The one person who completes me, who makes such pretty sounds when I touch him, and the person I want to wake up with every morning.”

Niall’s throat tightened. “That... That’s... All for me?”

“Yes.” Jag kissed him gently on the lips. “All for you.”

Maybe Niall cried a little. “That’s a lot. For just me.”

“Not just you. You’re worth more than ‘just you’, sweetheart. You’re worth everything.”

Niall’s breath hitched. Jag’s gaze told him all he needed to know: That he was being serious, that he would never take back those words.

“I love you.” The words fell out of Niall’s mouth without warning. Niall thought he should say more, because Jag was amazing, and because at the back of his mind, he had all the words to describe love.

But when it came down to it, words didn’t seem enough to contain everything he felt. Because Jag was his everything. Jag filled up all the cracks in his soul and made him whole again. Jag’s acceptance strengthened him, made him less vulnerable. He didn’t care as much about how his hands looked, because Jag touched them without even batting an eyelid, and he made Niall believe that he could be worthy of love.

Niall understood then, how Nico had been so confident with his short arm. Because he had his alpha’s love, and he didn’t need anything else to be strong.

“I know,” Jag murmured, kissing him again.

“Y-you know?” Niall squeaked. “Am I that obvious?”

Jag grinned. “It’s in the way you look at me, sweetheart. Like you can’t believe I’m still here. Like you never want me to leave your side.”

“Oh. I had no idea.” He tucked his face against Jag’s throat, his ears burning.

“You’re absolutely adorable.”

Niall clung to his alpha, feeling so safe when Jag wrapped his arms around him. “Does that mean you’ll bond with me?”

Jag drew a slow breath. “I will. But I want you to think carefully about it first. It’s for life, you know.”

Niall nodded, then froze. “I—I don’t know if you heard. Gruyere said he put implants in my scent glands.”

How would Jag bite his scent glands if there was something inside them?

Jag’s arms tensed around him. He pressed his fingertips gingerly to the crook of Niall’s neck. “I think I feel something in there.”

Niall shuddered with revulsion. “Can we take it out?”

“I’m sure we can. We’ll have to ask someone about it.”

“There’s a doctor in Meadowfall who specializes in that,” Varrick said from the side.

Niall jumped; he’d forgotten that the policeman was still there. Crap, Varrick had been in the middle of taking Jag’s statement!

“Are we in trouble with the police?” Niall yelped.

“No? Any reason why you would be?” Varrick asked. Emmy was watching them gleefully.

“We don’t have bonding marks. Are you going to send Jag to jail?” Niall immediately regretted the words falling out of his mouth. What if Varrick had forgotten to check them for markings and Niall had just cursed Jag back into prison?

Varrick laughed. “No. I think we have enough proof that you’re alpha and omega.”

Jag rumbled, pleased. Niall flushed.

“You’ll want to look up Dr. Elliot Rutherford,” Varrick added. “His clinic deals with alpha-omega hormone therapy.”

Niall hadn’t even known something like that existed. “How did you find out about it?”

“I happen to know a firefighter and an ex-agent who are neighbors with Rutherford.” Varrick shrugged. “Nate and Taylor.”

Jag made a sound of surprise. “Small world. I hired Taylor to track down these guys. They attacked us before we could locate them.”

Niall stared at Jag, things clicking into place. “ That’s what you were hiding.”

Jag stared back. “Would you rather have known?”

Niall shook his head quickly. “No. Really, no. Not if there’s nothing I could’ve done to stop them.”

“I thought as much.” Jag hugged Niall again. “Sorry. If it was something that would’ve made you feel better, I would’ve told you.”

“I understand,” Niall said, burying his face against his alpha. “Can we go? To Rutherford’s clinic.”

“Right after this,” Jag promised.

“Oh, oh! Is he an omega? You have to bring him some butt blessings,” Emmy cried, pulling out a stack of colorful paper from somewhere.

“No,” Niall groaned.

Emmy was already drawing a whole new set of dicks.

“What was your scent before?” Jag asked as they parked at Changing Biologies, a small clinic on the outskirts of Meadowfall.

“I don’t know,” Niall admitted. “They captured me before I presented.”

Jag growled. “Should’ve beaten his skull in a bit more.”

According to its website, Changing Biologies was a place that specialized in giving alphas omega traits, and omegas, alpha traits. It had been around for a number of years, and its most popular procedure was to give alphas mammary glands, so they could breastfeed just like omegas.

“Would you like me to breastfeed our baby, too?” Jag asked.

Niall blinked, surprised. “You would?”

“I don’t see why not. Seems to me that our brothers might benefit from a procedure like that, with them having three babies at the same time.”

That actually made sense. “I’ll tell Evan about it.”

They hadn’t been sitting long in the waiting area when a nurse called Niall’s name. Niall startled. Even though the clinic’s website had stated that Dr. Rutherford was an omega, Niall was still jumpy around this place.

Jag squeezed his shoulders and stood with him. At a measuring station, the nurse took Niall’s height, weight, and blood pressure. She led them to another door and knocked. “Doctor, Niall’s ready.”

Elliot Rutherford was an older man with graying hair and a kind smile. As they walked into his office, he rose to his feet, his eyebrows shooting up. “Oh. You must be Niall.”

Niall nodded.

Rutherford hesitated and seemed to consider his words. Then he smiled, waving to the chairs next to his desk. “How may I help you today?”

“Why were you surprised by me?” Niall blurted.

The doctor blinked. He opened his mouth and paused, his gaze dropping to the scarred skin of Niall’s neck. Then he scanned the rest of Niall, lingering on his hands. “Your scent. It’s... not common, and very unusual for it to be this strong.”

“I didn’t ask for it,” Niall said.

Rutherford’s face crumpled. “I’m sorry.”

Niall was relieved that he didn’t have to explain; the doctor seemed to know what Niall had been through. “You weren’t the one who did this. You don’t have to be sorry.”

Rutherford sighed. “I suspect that I was in a facility similar to yours. I was a doctor performing the procedures.”

One look at his face told Niall that Rutherford hadn’t wanted to do any of it.

“I invented the technology,” Rutherford said quietly. “It was meant to allow alphas to breastfeed. But I was kidnapped and forced to use my invention against my will. On prisoners.”

Niall sucked in a slow breath. “That really sucks, too.”

“It does.” Rutherford opened his arms. “Would you like a hug?”

Niall walked into his embrace—warm, but not too tight. Just some comfort between two omegas who had suffered.

When they pulled apart, Rutherford asked kindly, “What would you like me to do today?”

“I just found out that there’s... implants in my scent glands,” Niall mumbled. “They’re what’s causing my scent. “I want them out.”

Rutherford nodded, glancing at Niall’s neck and wrists. “We’ll have to do a couple of X-rays first, on your neck and wrists, to see how they’ve been embedded. Do you happen to be pregnant?”

Niall flushed, glancing at Jag.

“Yes,” Jag rumbled.

“Oh! Congrats.” Rutherford smiled. “Not to worry. We’ll wrap a lead apron around your belly to make sure we don’t harm the baby.”

He had a technician prepare the X-ray; Jag accompanied Niall to get the imaging done.

Once they were back in Rutherford’s office, the doctor clicked his mouse. “Would you like to see the X-rays?”

Niall shook his head immediately. “Just tell me when they can be removed.”

“It’s a simple implant,” Rutherford said thoughtfully. “But we’ll have to do the removal in stages so your body doesn’t go into shock from having all the hormones gone at the same time.”

Niall sighed. “I guess it’s better than nothing.”

“How long between each stage?” Jag asked.

“I’d say maybe two to four weeks, since I don’t know the chemical cocktail in your implants. We’ll have appointments to follow up on how you’re doing, and to decide if we can proceed.”

“Okay,” Niall said. “How soon can I have the first one out?”

“Today, if you’d like.”

Niall’s heart leaped. He looked at Jag, who squeezed his hand.

“Whenever you want,” Jag murmured.

“Now,” Niall decided.

It was starting to be a good day.