Chapter Eighteen

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Now Playing: The Love You Want- Sleep Token

Returning from a therapy appointment with Nebula, my heart races when I see the empty guest bedroom. The bitter scent of Omen’s distress is suffocating in the small space. I hate that I caused her this pain, that I can’t come up with some magical means to rewind time and change my decision to leave her in Boston.

Nebula appears at the end of the hallway, his head tilted in question when he sees me standing in her doorway. “She isn’t in there.”

Closing my eyes, I let the pull between me and my omega guide me to the third floor. She’s collapsed in one of the chairs in the pack bedroom. Hearing us approach, her stunning sea green eyes turn our way, filled with a resignation that threatens to make my heart cease its rapid beating.

Without thought I’m closing the space between us. The hardwood floors bite into my knees as I drop to the floor beside her, but I ignore the small pinch of pain.

“Where is Titan?” she asks, glancing at me out of the corner of her eyes for the barest hint of a second.

“He was in the garage,” Nebula tells her. “I’ll grab him.”

My hand grips her ankle tenderly, my thumb moving in small circles over the top of her foot to soothe her. The distress in her scent is driving me mad. I want to rip her from the chair and drag her into the nest to cuddle the shit out of her, but I don’t imagine any caveman behavior would go over well.

“I’m here firefly,” Tee drawls as he leans against the wall beside us. I can feel Cal and Neb gathered around us too. We’re all waiting to hear what our girl has to say.

I take a second to send up a prayer to whatever gods are listening that she isn’t going to deliver a blow we can’t come back from.

“I–I wish we could go back to that day at the beach,” she whispers. “Before everything went to hell.”

“We all wish that too, sweet girl.”

Omen offers me a tight smile before refocusing on some spot on the ceiling. “The medicine Doctor Russell gave me to combat the effects of the chemical rejection aren’t working the way they should. My body is now trying to force a heat, which is causing the strain in my immune system to counteract the medicine.”

“So you are going to go into heat soon?” Callisto questions.

Our girl pales drastically, her head shaking back and forth. “I can’t.”

“Little omega, you won’t have to suffer through this heat the way you did the last one–”

“No. Not ‘I can’t’ like I don’t want to. My body physically cannot handle a heat. It…” she trails off. Her lips purse. It’s clear she is fighting some internal war with herself.

“Whatever it is, you can tell us,” Callisto reminds her softly.

Her teeth sink into her bottom lip as she looks at him. The pain in her wide eyes slices another deep mark into my rib cage, right above my heart. Yet another invisible scar I will bear as a reminder of the wrongs we’ve committed against her.

“When I confronted my father, after the FCDA cut the video feed, my heart stopped beating.”

A buzzing sound fills my ears and my lungs won’t seem to work. I must have misheard her, surely she didn’t say–

“If Lex had chased after Doctor Harrison instead of staying in the church with me, I never would have walked out of that horrid place.”

A choked sound fills the room. It takes me several seconds to realize it is coming from me. We all saw how close to death she looked when they placed her on the table, but to hear she died, for even a second… My heart shatters into a million tiny pieces as the true weight of our sins is laid bare before us.

What kind of pack are we to be standing here asking for her forgiveness when our actions nearly killed her?

“I’m not telling you this to make you feel guilty. I need you to understand why being here is so difficult for me. There is a part of me terrified I will make some misstep and you’ll reject me for real this time. Even with your apologies, the doubt still lingers. I barely survived this time, I can’t–” She chokes out a sob that wrecks me.

I don’t hesitate this time. I grab her from the chair and pull her against me, letting her cling to me while she breaks. The guttural sobs wracking her body shake me with their violence. Each tear falling down her cheeks lands like a punch from an MMA fighter against my body.

Let Fate take aim and strike me down if I ever even think about hurting my omega this deeply again.

My mates kneel around us, frozen by the raw pain in her voice as she falls apart. The bonds between us echo with the same torment rattling inside of my head. Whatever it takes we will fix this. She can steal the life from my body and use it to heal the wounds we’ve caused her if she has to.

When her sobs turn to sniffles, I sway us back and forth. A purr rattles to life in my chest, startling all of us. The calming motion and soft vibration help to quell her sadness and fear, though its presence still fills the air around us.

“What does your doctor recommend happen next? Is there another medicine you can try?” Cal asks her with a shaky voice. Tears line his eyes, but with the way he is blinking rapidly, I don’t think he will allow them to fall. She doesn’t deserve to be inundated with the evidence of our grief when our actions are the root of her pain.

“Um, a bond,” she chokes on the word, like even speaking it hurts her in some way. “A bond is the only way to stop the rejection, and... it would be most effective coming from you.”

Green eyes peek up at me before dropping to my chest again. I splutter in shock, nearly knocked to my ass. “Y–You want us to bond you? After everything you just admitted? We don’t deserve you gorgeous, why would you offer us the thing we want most?”

“It’s because we are your Fate matched mates, isn’t it?” Nebula asks, his voice resigned.

“Yes.” She stops, then shakes her head. “No.”

Omen pushes away from me and stumbles to her feet. She angrily wipes the tears from her cheeks as she looks down at me. So many emotions swirl in her green eyes I can’t begin to name them.

We watch in confusion as she turns to the side and pulls down her sweatpants. She wants us to bond her here? Now?!

When the material slips past the bottom of her ass, the world stops spinning. There on her beautiful, pale skin, is a gray, decaying half-bite mark. “It has to be a bond with you, Nexus, because it was your abandoned partial bond mark that caused the worst of the chemical rejection.”

I shuffle forward on my knees until my head rests against her hip. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. So fucking sorry.” Apologies fall from my lips in quick succession. It’s like those are the only words my brain can process.

I did this.

It is my fault my omega has been suffering through this hell for months.

It’s all my fault.

“A bond with you could save me,” she admits, “but I–I need time to think. I needed you to know what Doctor Russell suggested, so you have time to think too–”

“There is nothing to think about, sweet girl. I should have bonded you the minute I walked into the nest during your heat. You’ve always been mine, and I’ll never be able to express how fucking sorry I am for ever making you feel like you weren’t. If you need my bond, it’s yours. I’m yours. Take the heart from my chest if it will take your pain away.”

Rivers flow down my girl’s cheeks as she stares at me, her lips parted in shock, but I can see the doubt and confusion swirling in her green orbs. She’s still uncertain about our pack. “I’ll show you.” I breathe the words. “Earn back your trust and prove myself to you.”

My fists clench at my sides to stop from pulling her back into my lap. The alpha inside of me demands we sink our teeth into her pretty throat and give her the bond she so desperately needs.

I won’t take the choice away from her though. Even if every fiber of my being fights against it, I let her walk away.

As soon as she slips down the stairs, I collapse to the floor. My head thuds against the wood, but I can barely feel it. Hopelessness and despair rage so fiercely in my heart I feel like the emotions are pummeling me from all sides.

I know we fucked up. She almost died because of us. Her heart literally stopped. But damn does it gut me to hear her say she needs time to think when the only choices she has are bonding with us or death.

I knew from the moment we met I wanted this omega to be mine. I also knew I would never be good enough for her, now I’m out here proving it by constantly ruining her in ways she doesn’t know if she can bounce back from.

What are we supposed to do if she decides she’d rather die than be with us?

Nebula must feel my thoughts in our bond, or maybe he’s thinking the same thing because he grips my shoulder tight enough to hurt. “No. We aren’t going to let her choose anything but life. Even if we have to force her to take our bond. I won’t let her die the same way Liz did.”

“We can’t–” Callisto starts to protest but Nebula cuts him off.

“You can’t, but I can. I will . She can spend the rest of her life hating us, as long as she’s alive that is all that matters.”

As fucked up as it is, I agree with my alpha mate. I’m not letting our girl go so easily. She’s mine and I’m hers, from now until eternity.

Omen Powell is stuck with me, whether she accepts us as her mates or not.

“Perhaps we need outside help,” Titan murmurs from where he’s sitting beside me. His arms are folded across his knees, head hung in defeat.

“Her doctor was already here, who else could help us?” Callisto asks.

Raising his dark eyes to us, the best solution falls from his lips. I feel silly for not thinking of it myself, but that’s why being in a pack is so awesome. When one of us falters, the others can pick up our slack.

“Let’s call her sister. If anyone can make Omen see sense, it’s going to be Hannah.”

Being hard all the time fucking sucks. I don’t deserve to feel the pleasure of a release when my omega is downstairs falling apart, but the urgent desire pulsing through my veins could put us both in danger. The insistent need to bite, to fuck, to claim is almost impossible to ignore.

Shit, the last thing Omen needs is for one of us to go into a rut when she’s nearby.

The bathroom door clicks open and Nebula’s musky scent fills the room, mixing with my woodsy notes. His arms wrap around my waist, and he buries his nose against my back. Our bodies sing with the small contact.

Things haven’t been the same between us since I left after Omen’s heat. Part of me blames him for pushing her away. I know he alone isn’t at fault–we all made shitty choices when it comes to handling our girl’s secrets–but it didn’t make it easier to forgive him when every word out of his mouth was trashing her in some way.

“I’m sorry, Nex,” he whispers. “For everything. Not seeing what the separation from Omen was doing to you. Getting pissed at you for choosing her. The fighting. I’ve made a grand mess of things between us, and I need to own that.”

Letting my head fall back against his shoulder, I blow out a long breath. “You are already making up for everything by putting in the effort to manage your grief.”

“And my feelings for Omen,” he adds gently.

I turn to look at him, mouth parted in surprise. When he first started seeing his therapist again, he had been adamant about avoiding discussing Omen. He wanted to focus on finding ways to deal with his anger over Elizabeth’s death.

“You’ve been talking to Mia about Omen?”

“Yeah,” he nods. “I think… I was scared. Learning she was born into the Montgomery family and knowing the horrific things her brother said to Liz, my brain was convinced she would be like him. That she also would have been brainwashed into rejecting us. I didn’t want our pack to have to suffer through the same misery I watched my sister experience.”

“But she isn’t like them.”

“No, she is not.” He admits, his tone a little bitter, but I know it is directed at himself. “My misplaced fear led her down the same path Liz went. I don’t know what is going to happen between the five of us next, all I can do is take things one step at a time and try to show her how sorry I am for how I reacted back then.” He shrugs, but it is tense. Filled with his regrets and worries for the future.

“We all are going to do our best to save her,” I remind him. “Teamwork makes the orgy work after all.”

The right side of his mouth turns up in a half smile. I can’t resist pressing my lips to his for a short, sweet kiss that quickly turns dirty. His tongue sweeps into my mouth, his body backing me against the counter as he loses himself in me.

My cock jerks in my jeans, impossibly hard and leaking pre-cum across my thigh. It’s been so long since I’ve felt up to being touched or touching one of them, not since–my thoughts grind to a halt, and guilt douses the burning flame of my desire.

“Shhh, don’t think,” Nebula whispers against my lips. His hand slips between us, gripping me hard enough to tear a needy moan from my lungs. “Just feel.”

Scrambling to grip the counter, my head connects with the mirror behind me as he tugs my jeans open and pushes them down my hips, taking my boxers with them. I nearly fall to the floor when his tongue darts out to swipe the pre-cum from my tip. “Fuck.”

“Mmmm, you taste so fucking good, baby,” he groans. The sound of his knees hitting the floor is loud in the quiet room, and the sight of him kneeling before me nearly has me exploding.

One large palm squeezes my knot, holding me steady as I slip into his mouth. The warm, wet heat wrapped around me has my eyes rolling up into my skull. My hips jerk involuntarily, making Nebula gag. He doesn’t stop me from sinking further, slowly entering his throat.

“Damn, Nebula, you look so good swallowing my cock.”

He narrows his eyes up at me, a silent threat warning me to watch my bratty mouth. I don’t bother hiding the grin that spreads across my lips as I take a handful of his short hair and start to thrust myself between his lips. He hollows his cheeks, pulsing his hand in time with my thrusts to tease my rapidly expanding knot. I’m not going to last much longer.

“Alpha,” I whine. I’m so close, my orgasm is right there but I need more.

Nebula grips my thighs and lifts them over his shoulders, forcing me to slide down the counter until my ass is hanging over the edge. The change in angle allows him to swallow me deeper, and when he presses two fingers into my ass I shatter. Breaking into a million pieces as waves of pleasure blast their way through my body, reforging me until I’m able to regain control of my instinctive desire to bite, to claim.

“That’s it,” Nebula growls, popping off of my length and using his hand to help me ride out the rest of my release. “Drown your Alpha in your cum. Smother me in your scent and claim me all over again.”

My lungs heave as he pulls his fingers out and helps slide me back onto the counter. I slam my lips to his when he leans in close, pushing my tongue into his mouth and whimpering at the taste of me lingering in his mouth.

“Thank you,” I pant, watching through sleep-heavy eyes as he washes his hands.

Nebula offers me a boyish smile, his midnight blue eyes sparkling with love. “I’ve got you, baby, always. Let’s go check in with the others before Omen’s sister gets here.”