Obsessed With An Omega

Chapter Two-A Man Who Is Never Told No

He did not leave.

That was the first surprise. Men like Caden Wolfe did not linger in cold kitchens with girls who had just insulted them. They collected their pride and went looking for softer company, of which the courtyard held a great and willing supply. Instead he pulled out a chair, turned it, and sat astride it with his forearms folded along the back, watching me pour my milk into a chipped clay cup as though it were the most fascinating thing he had witnessed in years.

"You should go back to your party," I said.

"I'd rather stay at yours."

"This isn't a party. This is a girl trying to sleep."

"Then I'm keeping you from your bed. How rude of me." He did not move. "Tell me something, Vera-with-no-family-name. Every other female in this pack came out tonight scrubbed and scented and hoping. You came down in your nightclothes to boil milk and glare at the moon. Why?"

I could have lied. It would have been easier. But I was tired, and he had the kind of face that made you want to say something true just to watch it change.

"Because I know what I'm worth," I said. "And it isn't one night with a stranger who'll forget me by dawn."

The amusement went out of his eyes. Something steadier took its place. He opened his mouth, and that was the moment the kitchen door banged open and the night got a great deal worse.

* * *

Taylor arrived the way weather arrives. She came in on a gust of perfume and grievance, three of her friends fanning out behind her, and she had clearly been searching, because the instant she saw Caden folded over that chair her painted face performed a small miracle of transformation, from fury to sweetness, in less than a breath.

"There you are," she cooed. "We've been looking everywhere. And you found the—" her gaze slid to me, and the sweetness curdled, "—help."

Everyone in the Orion pack knew Taylor. She was the sort of girl who had been beautiful since birth and had decided, somewhere along the way, that beauty was a kind of law that others were obliged to obey. She had wanted Caden Wolfe from the moment his name reached the pack, the way she wanted all rare and expensive things, and she was looking now at the space between us and doing arithmetic she did not like.

"You'll have to forgive her," Taylor said to him, gliding closer. "She isn't really one of us. She's the trophy my Alpha keeps. Half-feral. We found her in the woods after the raid, filthy little thing, and honestly it was charity to take her in at all. You shouldn't waste your evening on—"

"Stop."

He did not raise his voice. He did not need to. The single word dropped into the room like a stone into a still pond, and Taylor stopped as though a hand had closed around her throat.

Caden rose from the chair. Unhurried, always unhurried, but the temperature of the room had changed entirely. "I've been listening to you for exactly a quarter of a minute," he said, "and in that time you've told me she isn't one of you, that she's beneath your notice, and that I should ignore her. And yet here you are, chasing me through a dark house to say all three." He tilted his head. "If she's nothing, why are you so frightened of her?"

Taylor's mouth opened. Nothing came out.

"Go back to the courtyard," he said. "There are men out there who'll be flattered by your attention. I'm not one of them."

I have watched a great many people be humiliated in my life, and I had never once enjoyed it. I enjoyed this. It was not kind of me, and I did not care. Taylor turned the deep, blotchy red of a girl who has never in her life been dismissed, gathered her friends with a jerk of her chin, and swept out. At the door she threw me a look of such pure venom that I understood, quite clearly, that whatever peace I had managed to build in this house had just ended.

I would pay for tonight. I knew it the way you know a bruise is coming.

* * *

The kitchen settled back into quiet. Caden turned to me as though nothing had happened.

"Where are you from," he said. Not a question. A door he intended to walk through.

"Nowhere that exists anymore."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one I have." I set the cup down. "There was a pack. Small. Well behind the eastern ridge, if you know the country. Two years ago several packs decided it should stop existing, and it stopped. I'm what was left over. That's the entire story, and none of it is any of your concern."

He was very still. For a moment something moved behind those pale eyes that I could not read, something almost like calculation, and then it was gone.

"You owe them nothing," he said slowly. "This pack. You wear their collar but there's no allegiance in you at all, is there? None."

"They killed everyone I loved and made me pour their wine," I said. "No. There is no allegiance in me."

I expected him to press. To bargain. To do what powerful men do when they have decided they want a thing. Instead he studied me for a long, unhurried moment, and then he stepped back and inclined his head, almost formally, the way you might to an equal.

"Then go and sleep, Vera," he said. "You have my word no one will trouble you tonight."

He was true to it. He turned and left, and I stood alone in the cooling kitchen with my milk gone cold, and I told myself I was relieved.

It was only later, lying awake in the attic with the party still roaring below, that the shape of it began to bother me. He had asked where my pack had stood. He had asked how many were left. He had asked, twice, whether anyone else had survived the raid, and he had gone very still both times waiting for the answer. At the time it had felt like nothing, the idle questions of a bored man. Now, in the dark, they did not feel idle at all. They felt like a man checking a list.

I did not yet understand that a man like Caden Wolfe letting you walk away is not the same as a man like Caden Wolfe giving you up. He had simply seen something he wanted, and decided, with the patience of someone who has never in his life failed to get it, that he could afford to wait. And I did not yet understand the other thing, the worse thing, that he had come to that kitchen already knowing more about the girl making milk in it than she knew about herself.