Just an Omega? Think Again, Alpha

CHAPTER 3

CAIUS POV

I was staring at the same page of the same document for the third time when Penelope... when Serena came back into the office and sat on the edge of my desk.

"You're doing it again," she said.

"Doing what."

"Looking at something and not seeing it." She leaned over and closed the folder. "I'm right here."

"I know." I picked the folder back up.

She put her hand over mine.

I had to stop myself from pulling away.

Something had broken open in me since this morning. Since Zara Cole walked through that door and said the one word I had spent six years preparing myself not to hear said out loud.

I had known she was my mate since I was eighteen years old. I had managed it. I had been deliberate about keeping my distance. I had run a pack, built alliances, done everything a new Alpha needed to do, and I had kept that one fact locked tight in the back of everything.

Then she walked in and grabbed the back of that chair to keep herself standing and six years of managing it came apart in thirty seconds.

"Luca," my wolf said, low and steady.

"Not now," I said back.

"She is our mate."

"I know what she is."

"Then what is that thing doing on your desk?"

He meant Serena.

I pushed him back.

Serena talked. I caught enough to respond. Her uncle wanted a meeting. Alliance talks. I said yes. She seemed satisfied and moved on to lunch plans. I looked at the window behind her.

The hill below the Manor was grey and wet.

Somewhere on the other side of town, Zara Cole was walking back to school in those worn-out boots.

She had walked into my office with a cut above her eye and blood on her jaw and she had looked at me without any fear at all. I hadn't expected that. I had expected the usual reaction from low-ranked wolves, deference, nervousness, a bared neck.

She grabbed the back of that chair and looked me straight in the eye.

I had been cruel to her. I knew it even as I was doing it. I don't know why it was easier than the alternative.

"Alpha."

Ronan's voice came sharp through the mind-link.

"What."

"Zara Cole. She's been taken to Thornfield General. Someone found her in the alley behind Main Street." A pause. "She was beaten, Alpha. Bad."

The chair scraped back before I had decided to stand.

"Caius," Serena started.

"Pack business. Go home." I was already at the door.

I cut every speed limit between the Manor and the hospital. Thornfield General had a pack ward on the second floor and a reception desk staffed by people who knew exactly who I was.

When I walked into the emergency department a nurse at the front desk saw me and went pale.

"Where is she," I said.

"Sir, the patient was only just..."

"Where."

She pointed down the corridor. I walked past her and found the room by scent.

Zara's smell was there underneath blood and concrete. And underneath that, a young man's scent. Fresh. Recent. All over her.

Inside the room a young man in a diner apron was leaning over her, checking her pulse, talking to her quietly. No doctor. No nurses. Nobody doing anything useful.

"Who are you," I said from the doorway.

He spun around. Young, dark eyes, still in his work clothes.

"I found her in the alley," he said. "I work at the diner next door. The staff haven't gone in since she arrived."

I turned and looked down the corridor. The nurse was still at her desk.

"Why haven't you treated her?" My voice came out flat.

The nurse turned around.

"The patient is..."

"Treat her." One sentence, no room in it for anything. "Now. All of you. Move."

The doctor behind the nurses' station picked up his clipboard and moved. Two nurses followed him into the room. The diner worker stepped back against the wall.

"You found her," I said.

"I was taking bins out to the alley. I saw five wolves on one person on the ground." He reached into his apron pocket. "She wasn't fighting back. She was already down. I got them to stop and they left this on her." He held it out.

A watch. Silver casing, worn leather strap, a small c***k across the face.

I knew that watch. My father gave it to Seth Cole the week before he was deployed north. I had seen it on Seth's wrist at every pack meeting for years before that.

She still had it.

"Leave," I said. "Don't talk about this."

He left without arguing.

Inside the room the doctor was running through assessments. I stood in the doorway and watched. He said something about head swelling and IV antibiotics and I stopped processing the words because the words were not going to help.

They moved her to a private room and I followed.

I sat in the chair beside the bed.

The room was quiet. Machines beeped. Rain on the window.

My phone buzzed constantly in my pocket. Serena. The council. Two allied pack leaders. I ignored all of it.

I looked at my mate.

She was smaller like this. Not the way she had been small when she was twelve, just smaller the way people become when they are not fighting. The jaw unclenched. The silver-white hair loose from its braid across the pillow. She had her mother's cheekbones and her father's mouth.

I leaned forward and picked up her hand.

The sparks hit me the moment I touched her. They ran up my palm, through my arm, and my whole chest contracted around something I had been refusing to feel for a very long time.

I held on.

I did not put the phone back in my pocket. I left it on the bedside table face-down.

Luca had gone completely quiet inside me. Not gone, just still. The way he went still when he finally had what he had been asking for.

I don't know how long I sat there. Long enough that the nurse came in twice and looked at my hand over Zara's and said nothing because she had been ordered to say nothing.

Long enough that the light in the room changed.

Then Zara's fingers tightened around mine.

Her eyes opened. She looked at the ceiling. Then at me. She blinked twice. Her voice came out rough.

"What happened."

I let go of her hand. Leaned back. Got my face where it was supposed to be.

"You were beaten," I said. "A worker from the diner next to the alley brought you in." I felt it rise in my chest, irrational, hot, not something I could fully control, and it came out before I could stop it. "He had his hands all over you the whole time he was in that room."

She stared at me.

Something moved across her face.

"So the first thing you say to me when I wake up in a hospital bed," she said, voice still rough as bark, "is that you're angry about who carried me here."