Obsessed With An Omega

CHAPTER FOUR-Because I Want You

I found him at the horses.

It had taken me the better part of the hour to stop shaking long enough to be angry, and by the time I did, the anger was a clean and useful thing. I crossed the yard to where Caden stood checking the girth on a tall grey, and I planted myself in front of him with my meagre bundle of belongings under one arm and my chin up.

"No," I said.

"No?"

"I'm not a sack of grain to be traded across the yard because you've taken a fancy. I'm not going anywhere until someone tells me why. The Alpha looked at me like I'd sprouted a second head and then handed me to you like he couldn't be rid of me fast enough, and you—" I jabbed a finger at his chest, which was like jabbing a wall, "—you are enjoying this far too much. So. Why. Tell me the real reason, or I will make leaving me behind more trouble than keeping me."

He set down the strap. He gave me his full attention, and his full attention was a heavy thing to stand inside.

"The real reason," he said.

"The real reason."

"Because I want you."

He said it simply, without heat, the way he had told me the night before that other women would trade years of their lives for him. As though it were not a confession but a fact of the world, like the tide, like the moon. "I saw you in a window looking down at everything I'm supposed to want, like it was beneath you. And then you told me no. Do you understand how long it has been since anyone told me no?" A short breath that was almost a laugh. "I have spent my whole life being handed things. You're the first thing in years I'd actually have to earn. So yes. I want you. It's as simple and as stupid as that."

I should have been flattered. Some part of me, the part I did not trust, was. I crushed it.

"Then you've wasted a horse," I said. "Because I will tell you exactly what I told you last night, and I will keep telling you until you're grey. I will not lie with any man who is not my mate. Not you. Not anyone. The moon promised each of us one person, and I would sooner die whole than give myself away in pieces. You cannot want me into your bed, Caden Wolfe. It isn't a lock you have the key to."

I waited for the anger. I had wanted the anger; it would have made him easy to hate.

Instead his eyes kindled, bright and fascinated, and he leaned in close enough that I could feel the warmth coming off him.

"A challenge," he said softly, as though I had offered him a gift.

"A refusal."

"I heard a challenge." He straightened, and swung up onto the grey in one clean motion, and looked down at me with the whole insufferable confidence of a man who has never lost anything he decided to win. "You can walk or you can ride, Vera. But you're leaving this place today, and I'll tell you why, since you asked so nicely. Because whatever your Alpha saw in that yard frightened him badly enough to give away the only thing of value he had. And I would rather that frightened, greedy man not have time to reconsider what he might do with you instead." The humour left his voice for just a moment. "You're safer with me than you are here. That much is simply true. The rest you can keep fighting me on for as long as you like. I find I'm looking forward to it."

* * *

I rode. I want it on record that I chose the horse only because the road to the Apex lands was long, and not for any other reason.

Theo saw us off at the gate. He looked at me for a long moment with those quiet eyes, and I thought he might finally, at the very end, say something. He did not. But he pressed a small wrapped parcel of dried meat and hard bread into my hands, the kind of food you give someone for a real journey, and he said, low enough that only I could hear it, "There was talk in this house, after the raid. Talk they hushed fast. About why they took you and not the others." His jaw worked. "I never knew what it meant. But I don't think you were kept alive out of mercy, Vera. Watch yourself."

Then he stepped back, and the gates of the only home I had known for two years swung shut, and I turned my face toward a pack I had never seen, at the side of a man who wanted me and could not have me, carrying a warning I did not understand and a heat under my ribs that would not go back to sleep.

****

The Apex pack did not look like a place that produced men like Caden Wolfe. I had expected grimness, I think. Iron and scars. Instead we came down out of the pass at dusk into a wide green valley strung with warm lights, orchards heavy with late fruit, a training ground where young wolves sparred and laughed and picked one another up out of the dust. It was prosperous and it was proud, and for the first time in two years I saw a pack that had not been built on someone else's ashes.

They came out to meet him the way people come out to meet the sun. I understood, watching it, exactly who Caden Wolfe was here. Not a guest. Not a favourite. The future of the entire place, walking home. And he had brought a strange girl on the back half of his horse, and I felt every eye in the valley find me and wonder.

I braced for the whispers. Trophy. Omega. Charity case. I had worn those words so long they had shaped me.

They never came.

* * *

"You'll train," Caden said the next morning, as though it were the most ordinary thing in the world.

I stared at him across the practice yard. "Train."

"I saw what you did to four of Taylor's little coven with your bare hands and no room to move. That isn't an omega's work. That's a warrior's, and a well-taught one." He tossed me a wooden training blade, which I caught out of the air without thinking, which made him grin. "In this pack we don't waste people. You were a beta's daughter. Here you'll be what your hands already are. A warrior. You'll eat at the fires with the rest and answer to no one but your training master, and if anyone in this valley calls you trophy I'll want their name."

I did not have words for what that did to me. Two years of eating at the end of the table, of being the thing that survived, of shrinking myself so small that no one would think me worth the trouble of hurting. And here was this arrogant, impossible man handing me back a piece of myself I had buried in the smoke of my father's house, and doing it as though it cost him nothing at all.

"Why," I managed. "And don't say because you want me."

He was quiet for a moment. When he answered, the usual ease had gone out of his voice, and what was underneath it was almost gentle.

"Because a person should be what they are," he said. "You've been made small by people who were frightened of you. I'd like to see what you look like when you're not." Then the grin came back, insufferable as ever, and he lifted his own blade. "Also because you'll be far more interesting to lose to. Now. Show me."

I showed him.

I lost, that first morning, and the second, and the third. He was better than me, genuinely and infuriatingly better, faster than a man his size had any right to be. But I got closer each day, and each day he laughed that surprised low laugh when I did something he had not expected, and I began, against every wall I had built, to look forward to the mornings.

* * *

It went on like that as the season turned. He courted me the way he did everything, without shame and without hurry. He learned that I took my milk warm and left a cup of it outside the warriors' quarters some nights, which was ridiculous, and which I drank anyway. He rebuilt my whole world with one hand and pretended it was nothing. And I told him no, and no, and no, and meant it a little less each time, and hated myself for the softening even as it went on happening.

I did not love him. I told myself that firmly and often. What I felt was gratitude, and the wary comfort of a person who has finally stopped waiting to be struck. That was all. It could only be all, because I had promised the moon and the smoke that I would wait for my mate, and Caden Wolfe was many things but he had never once claimed to be that.

The heat under my ribs did not go back to sleep. If anything, in that green and peaceful valley, it grew. Some nights I woke with my hands aching and my gums sore and the taste of a storm in my mouth, and I would lie still until it passed and tell no one, because who would I tell, and what would I even say.

I might have gone on ignoring it forever. I was good at ignoring things. But near the end of that season, a rider came into the valley at a hard gallop with a message that pulled Caden into a closed council with the pack elders for half a day, and when he came out his face had changed, and he found me at the training fires and drew me aside where no one could hear.

"Vera," he said. "Those packs that went to war two years ago. The ones that came down on your home." He was watching me very carefully now, the way you watch something you have just realised might be more than you thought. "They didn't do it for land. Someone in that council today knew the real reason, and I need you to think, hard, before you answer me."

The heat behind my ribs went very still, as though it, too, were listening.

"Your pack," he said quietly. "Did anyone ever speak of a prophecy?"