13

aurelie

THINGS TO KNOW about Corentin:

We were almost exactly the same age. His birthday was two weeks before mine, and when we were little kids, his mother would make us cakes, one for him and one for me, and I would always ask for whatever kind of cake Corentin was having, because I kind of hero-worshiped him.

Corentin as a little boy was very tough and very cool. Once, I remember that we knocked over a vase and broke it. He got cut on accident when we were picking up the pieces. He just put his finger in his mouth and sucked on the wound, nonchalant, like it didn't even really hurt, and when I asked if he wanted a bandage for it, he shrugged and said, "I mean, if it's no trouble."

No trouble? He was bleeding .

He had dark wavy hair, and when he was a kid, the waves were long enough to hang into his eyes, and he was always shoving them out of the way. When he did, this always made him look tough and cool, too.

Corentin could do all these things that I didn't know how to do because he'd spent a bunch of time on his own, even though my parents didn't think I was old enough to be left alone. Corentin knew how to cook macaroni and cheese from the box. On the stove and everything. I thought that was really impressive.

The other thing to know about Corentin was that he found me impressive, for no reason that really made any sense to me. He would always give me his entire attention, however, his dark, expressive eyes unblinking as I would tell him whatever it was I was thinking.

For other people, he didn't have a lot of patience. This was part of what made him cool, how dismissive he was.

But he was never dismissive of me.

Even when I said stupid things, he was gentle as he corrected me. No, Aurelie, people who are poor can't just get servants to do things for them. They don't have money to pay them. They have to cook for themselves. But it's cool. How would you know that? You've never seen anything different. Just don't say something like that in front of someone who's not me, okay? They might be a jerk about it .

When we got to be teenagers, he started doing all kinds of things to make money, like working for the local pool store to go out and clean people's pools. He also ended up selling drugs. ("Nothing hard, don't worry, Aurelie," he would say. "Just mushrooms, weed, and maybe a little coke. Nothing scary. Nothing people get shot over.") This made him seem even tougher and even cooler.

He cut his wavy dark hair real short, so that it lay against his head, and he was lean and muscular and sharp in this way. When I looked at him, I would get this jolt at how he seemed sort of dangerous, and this made me even more attracted to him.

When we were sixteen, he showed up with this tattoo, of a serpent, peering out from the collar of his t-shirt. The serpent crawled up over his neck and was sticking out a forked tongue just under his ear. Sometimes, when he was cleaning the pool, he would strip off his shirt and I would see how the serpent was coiled all the way down over his pecks and his rib cage and ultimately disappeared into his pants.

I didn't see the bottom of that snake until I went into heat, didn't see that it curled around his thigh. It was a long tattoo.

Right before the incident when I went into heat, we kissed for the first time. It happened because I went out to this abandoned house where people hung out sometimes. Not people that I knew, not people whose parents had titles and property and money, not people like that. Other people.

Kids partied there. There was graffiti on all the walls, most of it containing swear words, and there were ratty mattresses covered in ratty blankets and there were piles of beer bottles and cigarette butts and bottles that had been broken and littered all over the floors of the place.

I went with Gina. We thought of it as if it were some big adventure, something akin to crossing the ocean to a completely different country where people spoke a different language.

The guys there smirked at us. They gave us beer and offered us cigarettes. They were coarse but they weren't rude. We intrigued them.

Corentin stalked in and saw me, sitting there, coughing my way through some other guy's cigarette, and he gave me this look, like I was insane. He beckoned me, with two fingers, two dirty fingers, his fingernails stained like he'd been doing some filthy kind of manual labor, and maybe he'd been fixing cars on the side for extra cash, because he did that sometimes, too.

I remember how it felt for him to motion me like that with his two fingers, how I felt like I was somehow utterly connected to him, like I would do anything for him.

We went outside. He folded his arms over his chest. He looked dangerous and sleek and beautiful. "We can't do this, and we both know it."

"I'm not doing anything, just hanging out," I said.

"This doesn't work, Aurelie." His voice was caustic. "Doesn't matter how we feel. Doesn't matter what we want."

What we wanted? He felt it, too? I hadn't been sure of that, sure of him.

That was when he kissed me. He snatched my chin between his forefinger and thumb of his dirty fingers and held me in place and kissed me hard, his tongue in my mouth like electric sparks.

Then I went into heat, but I didn't know it was heat. I thought it was just being "ready." On all the TV shows, they talked about this idea of readiness for sexual activity as if it was an actual thing, as if you'd—at some point—get some feeling of certainty that you were definitely ready to have sex and this would be identifiable and real.

I went into heat, and I thought, Oh, this is being ready.

I went to him.

To his house where he lived with his mother, but he said we couldn't stay there. I was in heat and getting worse and worse off. I was peeling off my clothes at this point.

He made us get in his car, and he drove us off somewhere private.

I had my top off. I was wriggling out of my bra. I was straddling him.

He whispered into my skin that he'd find some way to make it work, to get enough money that he could take care of me the way I wanted to be taken care of, in the way that I was accustomed.

I said it didn't matter; he swore it to me.

I don't know at what point he knew I was an omega.

I didn't figure it out, didn't really understand it, until it was over, until he'd taken me home to get help from my parents—I'd screamed at him until I was hoarse not to do that, because I was mortified.

Even after that, after the injection, after finding out what I was, after knowing it was impossible, I still…

It hurt that he disappeared without ever saying goodbye.

It hurt that he just left me.

I never got over that.

corentin

SHE WAS GETTING married the next day. Talk about cutting it close.

It wasn't that I hadn't been trying to get to her already, though. I'd just been, well, failing.

My first plan had been to sneak in and climb up a trestle or some shit to her window. I don't know what I imagined, like, swinging out on a rope that was fastened to the top of some turret or something? Swashbuckling, like I was some romantic hero come to save the love of my life from this life she'd been sold into by her family?

Anyway, I couldn't get past security, and then they knew what I looked like, so it all took some doing.

But eventually, I managed to get hired working in the castle, because they needed extra help for the wedding. Getting a job as security would been ideal because I would have had more access to the castle. But since I'd already been caught trying to sneak into the castle, that was out.

So, I ended up getting a job in the kitchens.

I did prep cook all day for the wedding, and then I hid in the pantry when everyone was leaving for the day. I waited until the lights went out, and then I was able to sneak out into the kitchen and make my way through the castle, looking for her.

I'd heard some gossip, bad gossip, gossip that had made me feel devastated.

That he'd already bitten her.

That he was keeping her captive in his bedchamber, basically never letting her out of his sight, that he was guarding her like some dragon guarding a hoard.

But it didn't matter. I didn't care. The way I understood it, omegas could have multiple bites from multiple alphas, and he was a stuffy, stupid prince who thought of her like property anyway. He'd negotiated for her. He'd made her sign contracts, like she was a plot of land.

He'd give her up easily enough, I thought.

If not, well, maybe I'd just kill him.

That was really a B plan, because it limited our options once I was a wanted murderer, of a crown prince, no less. We'd have to go somewhere far, far away, somewhere that didn't have an extradition treaty with Valhn, but the good news was that those sorts of countries tended not to be expensive to live in and have temperate climates. Sure, some of them were ruled by fascist dictators, which was less than ideal, but…

Well, maybe it wouldn't come to that.

I went to her room, anyway, because it was the night before the wedding, and I was hoping there was some kind of tradition in place, that a bride-to-be can't spend the night with her husband-to-be or something?

She wasn't there.

So, I had to go to his room.

The whole way there I was psyching myself up to fight him. Hopefully not kill him, but maybe knock him out or tie him up or subdue him in some other way. I was positive I could take him in a fight. I'd seen him, and he looked huge and strong, but I knew about that kind of strength.

I actually read an article about it once, about how muscles that are honed from lifting weights in gyms might look impressive, but in terms of actual feats of strength, people who got muscles from doing functional labor tended to be stronger. Why that was, I didn't even know, but when I read it, I sensed its truth.

I hated this Prince Dmitri.

I would have hated him regardless, even if he hadn't treated Aurelie like this.

I hated people like him on principle.

I got to the door of his room and debated between knocking or forcing the door open, maybe breaking it down.

But I never made a decision, because I caught the scent coming from within. It was her—I remembered her scent, even if I hadn't had the heightened sense of smell that I had now when I knew her. She smelled amazing, and it practically made my knees buckle.

My own scent rose, involuntarily, twining in with hers.

And then the door opened, and there was his scent, and, uh, it was weird, because he smelled good .

Truth was, I'd always been a little bit attracted to men, something I hadn't exactly advertised when I was young. It was the kind of thing that other men found threatening, so I was careful only to let it show in places where I knew it would be welcomed.

And yeah, I'd recognized this Prince Dmitri guy was objectively attractive, but, um, wow .

Had I ever reacted to a man like that before? I had a knot, boom, like that.

It's from Aurelie, I told myself. Yeah, definitely. Had to be from her, not from him. I hated him.

"I scented you through the door," said the prince. "Who are you?"

Aurelie appeared next to him, holding her shirt closed, because it was unbuttoned. I got a little hint of it, though, of the bite mark, there, on her chest.

My heart squeezed painfully. I'd been hoping it was gossip. I'd been hoping it wasn't true.

"Corentin?" she said in a wondering voice.

"Hey," I whispered.

Her face twisted as tears came to her eyes, and then she flung herself at me, hugging me tightly, pressing her face into my neck.

I hugged her back.

"I thought I would never see you again," she murmured into my skin.

I just held her. She felt so good in my arms.