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She pouts up at me with her perfectly painted lips. “Wow. You really don’t sound happy to see me after I came all this way.”
My jaw clenches, but I make myself to play the part, forcing my lips into a smile. I know Yasmin sees the strain behind it. We lived with her for two years after all. Not in our pack house, the one we’re in now. No. We moved into a rental with her, big enough for her to have her own wing, far away from the rest of us. We hardly saw her beyond the required public appearances.
She was too young to have a heat, so we never had to tackle how to handle that. And whenever Maxim or my mother questioned why we hadn’t solidified the pack bond, we told them it was because we wanted to do it during her heat, to make sure the bonds were strong.
It was never going to happen, even if she’d had her first heat immediately after we signed the contracts. Yasmin wouldn’t have wanted us to help her. We wouldn’t have touched her with a ten-foot pole.
But we still lived together. Getting to know each other was inevitable.
She pats my arm and turns me to face Maxim, smiling like the good omega she is.
I’m fucking surprised as hell he brought her here. And I’m not sure what exactly he’s hoping to accomplish, since Yasmin is happily mated to a pack of alphas.
A pack of all female alphas.
Because although Yasmin is an omega, she can’t stand the thought of a real knot or dick anywhere near her. It was her biggest secret and the reason she went along with the entire scheme. Not to be malicious to Vee. Not because she wanted us.
No, she needed to stay the perfect omega princess, so her family didn’t try to re-educate her into being straight. Which the Forsyths one hundred percent would have done. Of course we didn’t know any of that until the hour before the announcement, when she dragged us into a storage room and laid out in no uncertain terms that she would never, ever want to actually be with us, but she would go along with it so we could buy time until my trust came in, and that would buy her time to find a pack she actually wanted to be with.
“Dad,” I say, tipping my head to him but not offering a handshake like I normally would. If he notices, he doesn’t say anything.
Maxim looks at me with a faint whiff of disdain in his eyes. There are times I wish I didn’t look so much like him, that it wasn’t so painfully obvious that he is my father. Davis looks enough like our mother—a bigger, more masculine version—that any of the other dads could be his. But me? I look like a replica of the man in front of me.
“Jackson.” He picks at an invisible piece of lint on his jacket sleeve. “Why am I only now hearing that Sylvie Benson is in town and apparently you’ve been spending time with her? Connor Bilkes informed me of her arrival this morning.”
Fucking Connor. Still sniffing around where he doesn’t belong.
I wonder if he called Maxim as soon as I warned him away from Sylvie. Running to the prime alpha of a pack he’ll never be a part of.
I flick my gaze to my brother, whose jaw is tight at the obvious disdain in Maxim’s voice for the woman we love. He’s fighting words, biting them back.
I guide Yasmin back to her chair and lean against Davis’s desk, keeping the illusion of power by towering over them. I know it’s not real, but I’ll take any edge I can get.
“I wasn’t aware it was any of your business.” He opens his mouth like he’s going to say something, but I cut him off. “I’m glad you’re here though, because I have a few questions I’d like answered.”
He arches his brows and settles back in his chair. “Oh? Please ask your questions.”
“Did you pay Gladys Benson to keep Sylvie away from Granton? To tell her granddaughter lies about how happy we were, how we’d bonded Yasmin and were starting a family with her?”
Behind me, I hear Davis curse. He knows as well as I do that it’s a rhetorical question. It’s exactly the sort of thing he would do, in the guise of ‘protecting’ us.
My father doesn’t smile, doesn’t seem smug or worried or guilty. He doesn’t seem anything at all. His face is a blank canvas as his mind calculates the best angle to take. Finally he nods. “Yes. I did. She would have destroyed you, is destroying you without even being in town. You needed to move on from this, from her. You needed time and distance. Look at what you’ve accomplished! You built this company that rivals my own. You have a solid pack. Now you just need an omega and everything will fall into place.”
Davis pushes his chair back, standing, his hands fisted at his sides. “You kept her away from us on purpose? Made her feel like she’s not good enough for us?”
Our father levels him with a look. “She is not good enough for you. I took the necessary measures to ensure she wouldn’t get her gold digging hands on you.”
I don’t point out how he gave into Gladys’s money hungry hands instead. How he gave one woman what she wanted, while denying the one who is infinitely more worthy what she deserved: us. A pack.
“We aren’t going to argue over whether or not Vee is worthy of us. We are the ones who get to decide that, not you.”
Davis rounds the desk and stands next to me, shoulder to shoulder. “And we know she’s ours. Our omega. And you can do fuck all to stop us from claiming her.”
Maxim’s brows rise, but it’s Yasmin that blurts out, “Vee’s an omega? Not a beta?”
I don’t look away from my father. “Yes. An omega. Our omega, like Davis said. If we’d just waited a week, we would have known. She presented shortly after her grandmother forced her to leave, because you, daddy dearest, paid Gladys to. Isn’t that right?”
“What?” Davis snarls.
