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“I am the omega,” I whisper, my resolve hardening further. “I’m their omega. You’re the imposter. The fake.” My brain filters to the pills I stopped taking a year ago, how I felt better than I ever had before, and then I think about how that first wave of cherry pie had curled in my nostrils at Le Bonheur after I met Swift. Meeting my scent match alpha unlocked my omega designation, the one medication had hidden from me for fucking years.
They put me on suppressants. Ones strong enough to keep my omega completely buried to avoid this happening. To let Claudia be the omega that smells like cherry pie and the scent match to The Falcone pack.
I have no doubt that my mother, the one person in the world who is supposed to protect and love me, let them do all of that. I’m sure they paid her for it.
Claudia nods, like this revelation didn’t just rock my world entirely. “You’re right. I was a beta. I knew I was going to stay a beta. My father knew it too, and he was so fucking disappointed in me. For me. But there is very little that billions of dollars can’t fix. You are an omega. The original omega. But now I’m one too. I deserve to be revered like one. I deserve to have a pack that fucking worships me. And they won’t do that while you’re here.” Alarm blares through me and I send a frantic plea to Luca and Swift, trying to tell them what’s going on with pure emotion, but I’m not sure I’m able.
Claudia stalks toward me, and on instinct I stumble back, away. “I’ll give you the choice one more time. You can have Luca. You can have Ethan. But the rest are mine.”
My spine straightens and fury roars through me. My omega rears up, claws and teeth gnashing, ready to fight. “They are mine.” I snarl at her. “You will never have them. They don’t want you, Claudia. They are my alphas. My pack. My fucking family.”
The blond woman tsks and shakes her head. “I was worried you might feel that way…” A slow smile curls over her face. “No, actually, I hoped you’d feel that way. This way, the pack will stay together and you’ll be fucking gone.”
I frown, the alarms blaring louder and louder. She looks over my shoulder and her eyes widen, like she’s shocked or scared or something. Her mouth parts on a scream, just as a set of arms wrap around me from behind. I don’t have time to fight back before a rough voice commands, “Both of you stay still and quiet.” The alpha bark washes over me and any fight that had been building flees. Claudia does the same, even though her eyes are still wide with terror.
A hand strokes over the side of my head. “Good girl.” The unknown alpha fists my hair in one hand and tilts my head at an uncomfortable angle until my neck and my mating bite are exposed. Claudia stands there, her eyes glinting with pleasure as the alpha lowers his head, runs his nose over my bond mark, making me shiver and not how I normally do when one of my alphas touches me there. No. This is wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
A whine pulls from my chest, battling against the hold his bark has on me. “Shh,” he murmurs, lips brushing against my skin. “This is going to hurt.”
He sinks his teeth into my flesh, obliterating Luca’s mating mark, snapping the bond.
I scream, blood swells and drips down my throat. Claudia watches that gleam growing in her eye and then… he detaches himself from me, laps at it once. It’s followed by a faint prick of pain in my arm.
And darkness rushes in.
Chapter 31: In which I break
“Well, this is a fucking bust,” Swift says, kicking an empty beer can across the abandoned warehouse.
Maddox frowns, not arguing with him, but still peering around. “I don’t understand. The intel was good.”
I snort a laugh. “It obviously wasn’t. This place hasn’t been used by anyone but teenagers getting drunk and making out for months.”
Our prime shakes his head. “No, there were pictures of him coming here, surveillance shots. He was here this fucking morning.”
Ethan looks up from where he’s typing on his phone. “That’s true. I saw the footage myself. Dr. Jason Funkle definitely was here.”
Swift kicks another can. “Well, he’s not fucking here now, so we don’t need to be either.”
He’s not wrong. I look around the space, taking in the makeshift fire pit in the center of the building, the broken bottles, the mattresses, beanbags and sagging couches. Someone has turned it into the ultimate teenage dirtbag hangout pad. When we were kids, we probably would have loved to have a place like this. But it’s not what we’re looking for now.
We thought for sure that we would find the warehouse full of medical equipment, or at the very least, a back room with an exam table meant to do testing on unsuspecting omegas. But there really is nothing.
Which is frustrating as hell, because we drove for an hour to get here and watched the place for fucking two hours to verify that it was where we needed to be and then… well, then we lost patience and decided to just go for it. All of us are eager to get back to Sadie, especially now that Claudia will be gone and we can move our girl into her nest, like we should have fucking done that first night.
I seek my connection with our girl and find her content and calm, more than I’ve ever felt. She’s been antsy in our bond since Claudia showed up, so I can only imagine how good it feels to know that the omega is going to be out of the picture for good. I feel fucking phenomenal about it.
If I have anything to say about it, Sadie will never see the other woman again. None of us will.
Maddox scans the building one more time, like he might find something different this time. I don’t blame him. Sadie wants answers. She needs them. And as her pack, we want to give them to her. It’s programmed into us to make her happy. That we can’t do this one thing for her, that we haven’t been able to find the truth of what was done to her, and who ultimately did it, is hard for all of us to swallow.
Finally, our prime sighs. “Yeah, you’re right. There’s no reason for us to stay here and leave Sadie alone. Let’s roll out.”
I clap a hand on his shoulder as we walk the few blocks to where we parked the car. “Don’t worry about it, Dox. Sadie will understand. She might be disappointed at first, but we’ll just have to make it up to her.”
My tone makes it clear what I mean. We’ll make it up to her with sex. With orgasms. With presents. With the best fucking nest she could ever want.
He flashes me a grin before it falls. “It just doesn’t make sense. He was here.”
