Kneel Alpha: The Surgeon Omega's Revenge

Chapter 4

Damien’s POV

I had a daughter.

I turned it over and over in my head like a stone you keep finding in your pocket, surprised each time that it’s still there. Real and heavy and sharp at the edges.

A daughter. Two and a half, by my guess — Nora had left six weeks after the wedding, which meant she’d been three weeks pregnant when she watched me say my vows, and the math from there was—

I pressed the back of my hand against my mouth and stared at the ceiling.

I thought about what that must have looked like, from where she was standing. All those people. The whole pack. The elders in their formal robes. Selara in white.

And Nora in the crowd. Already pregnant. Already done.

I hadn’t known. I hadn’t even known she was gone for three days — I’d been fielding post-ceremony obligations, territorial paperwork, the long handshake line that is Alpha politics in practice, and by the time I went looking she was already a ghost. No pack trace, no forwarding address. Her brother had vanished too. It was like she’d never been there at all, except for the mark on my wolf that had gone hot and wrong the moment she crossed out of my range and hadn’t cooled down since.

Selara had said she’d heard Nora chose to leave. That omegas from minor packs did that sometimes when the Alpha made his formal choice. She said it so smoothly that I’d believed it, because it fit, because it was the easiest story, because I had been a coward who chose the easy story.

I was beginning to understand that there were a lot of things Selara had said smoothly.

The door opened in the afternoon. I was doing the hall walk Nora had ordered — slow, IV pole as a walking stick, trying to look less pathetic than I felt — and I turned at the sound of the door and found myself looking down at a small person.

She was very small. Dark curls everywhere, a purple shirt with a wolf on it — not stylized, a real wolf, a nature documentary kind — and huge, serious, silver-gray eyes that I recognized the way I recognized my face in the mirror.

She looked at me.

I looked at her.

“You have an IV pole,” she said.

“I do,” I said.

“My mom uses those.” She pointed, very specifically, at the bag on the pole. “That one is for making silver go away. She told me.”

My throat was extremely tight.

“That’s right,” I said.

She seemed to be evaluating this. Kids that age are unsettling — they look at you like they have all the time in the world and zero tolerance for nonsense.

“Are you sick?” she said.

“Getting better.”

“My mom fixes people,” she said. Matter-of-fact. Proud, I realized. She was saying it the way you say something you’ve been saying since you could form the sentence. My mom fixes people. My mom is the one who does that.

“She does,” I said.

“She’s really good.”

“I know.”

The child — Iris — looked at me a moment longer. Then she said, very quietly: “You have eyes like Dammy.”

My chest cracked straight down the middle.

“Who’s Dammy?” I managed.

She scrunched her nose, which was exactly like Nora’s nose.

“My wolf,” she said. “My stuffed wolf. He sleeps in my bed.” She reached out and, very deliberately, touched the hem of my hospital shirt. Just for a second. “He has silver eyes too.”

I couldn’t speak.

“Iris.” Nora’s voice came from the end of the hall, controlled and fast. She appeared from around the corner with the expression of a woman who had done the math on this moment two seconds too late and was now locked into getting through it without showing any of it. “There you are. I told you to wait in the break room.”

“The break room has the boring chairs,” Iris said reasonably.

“We’re going back there now.” Nora scooped her up in one arm, smooth and practiced. She looked at me only once, very briefly, over the top of Iris’s curls.

Her eyes said: This is not happening on your terms.

I held her gaze. I didn’t argue. I didn’t say anything.

Iris looked back at me over her mother’s shoulder as they walked away.

She waved.

I lifted my hand, barely, and waved back.

I stood there in the hallway for a long time after they turned the corner. The IV pole was the only thing I was holding onto, and I was holding onto it harder than was strictly necessary.

My wolf had gone so quiet he was barely a sound. Just present. Just aching.

I had spent three years being angry at the wrong person.

Three years being sure that I had done the honorable thing, the duty-bound thing, and telling myself that whatever I’d had with Nora was something I hadn’t been allowed to keep. I had not let myself grieve it properly because grief would have meant admitting it was real. That she was real.

And she had spent those three years building something I didn’t deserve to touch.

I turned around and walked slowly back to my room.

The night nurse came in at ten. She was a quiet woman, efficient.

“Can I make a call?” I said. “Pack line.”

“Sure.” She handed me a landline from the side cabinet.

I dialed my second, Rhen.

“Alpha.” He picked up on two rings.

“Find everything you can on the Voss compact,” I said. “The original council agreement. The prophecy document the elders used to push the marriage through. I want the source.”

Silence on the line. Then, carefully: “What are we looking for?”

“Something that doesn’t hold up,” I said. “Find it.”

I hung up.

I lay back against the pillow and closed my eyes.

Somewhere on this floor, my daughter was eating dinner with her mother. They had a routine, a life, a whole world I wasn’t part of.

I was going to have to earn every single inch of it.