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“Yours,” Luca echos, sounding like he means it with every ounce of his soul.
“Yours,” I agree when she looks at me with those shimmering silver eyes. A shiver moves through her and I can’t tell if she’s happy about our claiming, but she must be right? “I’m sorry I fucked up, trouble. It’s not because we don’t want you. Fuck, you’re our scent match, the missing piece of our pack. Of course we want you. But,” I shake my head and drop my eyes to the floor. “I always thought when we found our match we’d be settled, secure. Better able to keep them—you—safe. What happened today is a prime example of why we agreed we weren’t ready to find an omega, Sadie.”
Our omega blows an audible breath out of her nose and nods. “Okay, I understand where you’re coming from, but… from what I understand of omegas—which is admittedly very little—I need you, need my pack to be close to me. I need the comfort of your presence and your scents in order to feel settled. And while I appreciate you wanting to give me time and space to adjust, I also fucking hate it. So much.” Tears shimmer on her lower lashes and it makes my alpha want to tear the world apart to remedy what’s wrong with her, to destroy whatever made her cry.
Which is a problem because at the moment that’s me.
“I feel better when you’re with me,” she whispers. “Safer.”
Swift lets out a noise that’s a cross between a purr and a growl and then he reaches one hand over his head to grasp the back of his hoodie. A quick move and he’s pulled it off and thrust it over Sadie’s head. I reach out to help her get her hands into the arms and when her head pops out of the neck hole, she gives Swift a wide-eyed stare. “What the hell was that?”
He leans down and rubs his cheek along the uninjured side of her face, painting her in his scent even more. “You like having our scents around you. This is one of the easiest ways to do it. Dress you in our clothes.”
Sadie gives him a small shy smile and dips her nose to the fabric of her shoulder, inhaling deeply. “Better, trouble?” I ask, smoothing the loose strands of hair back from her face.
She nibbles on her lower lip and nods. “Better.”
“Alright, now that we have that settled, can you please sit down, mo chuisle? You have a concussion.” Logan pushes between me and Swift to guide her back to the couch, where Ethan and Luca are waiting. She settles into the small space between their bodies and I note how she melts against them, like warm wax, molding into their hard angles.
Logan drops to his knees in front of her, hands resting on her thighs. “How are you feeling?”
“My head hurts and I think I have some bruising you can’t see, but I should be okay.”
Luca tucks her closer into his side, his lips carefully brushing her hair. “Will this in any way affect her…” He pulls back and looks down at her. “What were you sick with, vixen?”
A teasing smile curls our omega’s lips. “Still no luck breaking into secure databases, huh?”
Ethan shifts, turning to face her. His expression tells me that whatever he’s going to say next is going to be a shock to her. “Actually, I had no trouble breaking into them, heartbreaker. But I couldn’t find any information on you.”
Chapter 17: In which I find out much of my life has been a lie
I blink at Ethan’s pronouncement. “I’m sorry, what?”
“You don’t have any medical records. At least, not that I could find. Not in Dr. Schwab’s office. Not in any hospital in the area.”
I blink again and shake my head, ignoring the way it makes my brain feel like it’s in a slushy machine. “No, that’s not right. I’ve been going to see him since I was eight. I have to have records. They don’t just get rid of those, right?”
Ethan cuddles me closer. “I couldn’t find any electronic files regarding you.”
I shift to face him more fully. “Sadie Marie Pierce? Nothing for that name.”
He gives me a soft smile and smooths a hand down the side of my head. “No, heartbreaker.”
“And it was Dr. Gerald Schwab on Havershine that you looked at?”
He nods. “He’s the only Dr. Schwab in the area, Sadie.”
My brow furrows, and it makes my headache worse, so I force it to relax. “But… I… I saw him twice a month for years. I had treatments and blood transfusions and medications. Twelve years of that and there’s no record?” I’m trying really hard not to panic, trying really fucking hard to be logical about this, because there must be a reason. The file got corrupted or something. That’s got to be it.
“Hey, vixen,” Luca says softly, a purr rumbling from his chest and a soft flow of calming energy hitting me from his side of the bond. “It’s okay. There’s gotta be an explanation.”
Logan’s big hands remain wrapped around my thighs. “It’s not that big of a deal because you can just tell us what you know. We can do the research on what treatment for it would have looked like. Are you ready to share?”
I blink at him, the truth slamming into me so fucking hard it steals the breath from my lungs. Because I have no clue what was wrong with me. I know the treatments. I know about the medications that they pumped into my veins that made them burn and the way I had a fever after. I know about the blood draws and the bags of blood that they replaced it with. I know about countless fucking hours spent feeling sick after, feverish and exhausted, barely able to open my eyes, but I don’t know what was wrong with me.
The panic in my chest grows. How can I not know? How did I just ignore it? How was I so fucking desperate to move on from being sick all the time that I didn’t make them tell me what they had cured me of? Why was I so goddamn apathetic about what was probably the most important thing in my life?
A whine spools out of me that I’m helpless to stop, even with my pack around me, even with Swift’s scent on my skin and Luca’s purr rumbling through me. All of them move closer, eager to soothe me.
