Just an Omega? Think Again, Alpha

CHAPTER 5

Caius stood in the middle of my trailer and said nothing long enough that I started to think I had said something wrong.

Then he stepped back.

"It's the mate bond," he said. Back to flat. "When a wolf is injured their mate's presence accelerates healing. Basic biology. The pack hospital beds are wider for that reason."

"So that's why you stayed at the hospital."

"I was managing the situation."

"Right," I said.

He picked up his jacket from the kitchen chair and moved it.

And I caught the smell of it.

Pine. Something warm underneath. And below that, something sweet and wrong. Serena's perfume, still on his clothes from before he came here.

Storm pushed forward inside me and I pressed her back down.

"Get out," I said.

He stopped.

"What?"

"I can smell her on you." I looked out the window over the kitchen counter. The rain had come back. "Did you see her after the hospital?"

"I don't answer to you."

"I know." I kept looking at the window. "I'm not asking you to. I'm asking you to leave my home so I don't have to keep smelling your girlfriend on your jacket while you stand here demanding I account for every person who's been near me."

He crossed his arms.

"I've been with Serena two years," he said. "She deserves..."

"An explanation. Yes. You've said that twice today." I turned to look at him. "If you're keeping her, keep her. But then don't come here. Don't look at me like that. Don't ask who else is in my life." I turned back to the window. "You said we mean nothing to each other. Fine. I can do nothing. I am very good at nothing. But you have to let me do it."

"What if I can't," he said.

I turned around.

His hands were in his pockets and his jaw was tight and he was looking at me with something on his face I did not know what to do with.

Then he looked away.

"Ronan will be in touch," he said.

"Fine," I said.

He walked to the door and left.

I stood in the trailer and listened to his car pull away down the dirt road.

Then Storm let out a long, low sound inside me and I sat on the edge of the couch and pressed my palms into my knees.

"He loves us," Storm said.

"He loves his girlfriend," I said.

"That's not what his eyes were doing."

"Storm. Don't."

She went quiet.

It was almost midnight when my mother came home. Black diner polo, black pants, non-slip shoes, white hair pulled back. She moved like every step cost something.

She looked up and saw my face and went still.

"What happened to you?" She crossed the room fast and put both hands on my jaw, turning my head gently.

"Fell down the stairs at school," I said.

"Zara."

"I wasn't watching where I was going. The arm is braced, the ankle is wrapped. It looks worse than it is."

She looked at me for a long time. She was my mother. She knew what fell down the stairs looked like. But she also knew I would not tell her if I didn't want to, and pushing me had never worked.

She sat beside me on the couch.

"Are you sure?" she said.

"I'm sure," I said.

She put her arm around me and I let her. We sat like that for a minute.

"Mom," I said. "I want to talk to you about something."

"Talk."

"I've been accepted to three colleges outside pack territory. Silver Ridge College is two hours from here." I paused and then just said it. "I want you to come with me. When I graduate. Both of us."

She was quiet.

"Diner work in Silver Ridge pays more than what you make from all three jobs here combined. I looked it up. I checked the route back to Dad's grave. Two hours. We could come every weekend if you wanted. I won't go without you, Mom. So if I go, we go together."

"Your father loved this territory," she said softly.

"Dad would have hated what's happened to us. You know that."

She looked at her hands for a long time.

"Let me think about it," she said finally.

"Okay."

She kissed the top of my head and went to shower. I heard the water run. Then I heard her getting into bed.

I lay down on the couch and pulled my blanket over me and stared at the ceiling.

I had not told her about Caius. I would not tell her. Her mate died because of Hector Drake. The last thing she needed was to know that Hector's son was mine.

The trailer went completely still.

Then I heard it, soft and muffled through the thin wall. My mother, crying. She cried every night. She had cried every night for five years. It was the one thing I had never been able to fix and the one thing I had never gotten used to.

It stopped after a while.

I lay in the dark and waited for sleep.

I don't know how long I had been there when it happened.

Not pain. The opposite of pain.

Something in my chest went cold. Not the cold of the rain or the cold of the trailer floor. Something inside, deep behind my ribs, like a light being switched off in a room I didn't know I had been living in.

I sat up.

I pressed my hand flat against my sternum and held it there.

The warmth that had been there when he touched me in the hospital, the warmth I had spent all evening trying not to think about, was gone. Not fading. Gone. Like a door closing on the other side of a wall I couldn't see through.

Storm curled up inside me and stopped moving.

She didn't fight or push or howl. She just went still, the way something goes still when it already knows.

I sat on the couch in the dark with my hand over my chest and I waited for it to come back.

It didn't come back.

I don't know how long I sat there. Long enough for the rain to stop. Long enough for the road outside to go completely quiet.

Then Storm made one sound. Low and slow and small, a sound I had never heard from her before. Not anger. Not fear.

Grief.

I laid back down and stared at the ceiling and said nothing, because there was nothing to say. I didn't have a name for what was happening inside me.

But somewhere on the other side of this town, in a house on a hill, something was happening.

And my body already knew what it was.