My heart stuttered in my chest. Was he choosing her over me? Was that what was happening right now?
My face must have displayed the pain in my chest, because Corvin was across the room immediately, pulling me into his chest, and thrumming hard only seconds later. “No, Darius. Whatever you’re thinking is wrong, I swear it. I love you with everything I am.” He paused. “I’ll explain everything when Beckett gets here, but I promise, you’re my very soul, Darius. There’s no choice for me but you.”
I nodded, because I could feel through our connection that he was telling the truth. There was no doubt in my mind that he loved me.
But he obviously knew this woman. And he’d kept her a secret.
Beckett came in, leaving the door open just a crack so we could hear the rest of the house. Cooper frowned in the corner, but I saw how often his eyes slid back to the woman, this Kitten, in the bed.
“One of you better start talking,” I muttered, keeping my voice lowered.
Corvin sucked in a deep breath. “We met Kitten years before you looked our way. We actually trapped her in the forest hunting for rabbits one day. She was a tiny, hissing, wild child, an unknown Beta Manix. I would have been less surprised if we’d caught a damn dragon. She was dirty and skinny, and it sounded like she just babbled incomprehensibly, but Beckett worked out she was speaking Latin. We convinced her to take us to where she lived. We met her guardian, Lorso. She looked like a small child back then, but she was thirteen.”
I frowned. Lorso? Like the ancient fucking Manix who everyone thought was dead?
“How long ago was this?”
“Eleven years.”
“Hold up...Lorso?Of the Raku-Lorso-Niles Pack?” Cooper asked incredulously. “Isn’t he a myth? Or long dead, anyway?”
Beckett snorted. “Well, dead now. Back then, I’d never seen someone so ancient who wasn’t an immortal. He died a couple of days after we met them both, like he’d been waiting for us.”
I shook my head. Okay, mystery girl and an urban legend who was, in fact, real.
Corvin picked back up. “We started going out there, making sure she was okay. It was obvious that she and Lorso had been living in the old ways, catching and killing their food, hunting from the woods. But you know what it's like—after a long winter, there's never quite enough. So we supplemented her food, bought her clothes, taught her to read and speak something that wasn’t a bastardized form of Old Man Latin and wild beast.”
He hesitated, looking over at me. “We loved her. But she was terrified of Maxton, of the Manix. Of civilization in general. I don’t know what she learned about us at Lorso’s knee growing up, but whatever it was, it warped her forever. She wouldn’t move here with us, so we planned to move to her, one day. Once we had good jobs, and saved up enough money to do the upgrades to her cabin. Always something else and something else, but we were never ready.” He smiled sadly at me. “Turns out you were the something else we’d been waiting for. You and Coop. You completed our Pack, and for the first time, we had something in our life that rivaled what we felt for Kitten.” He trailed off, his eyes still filled with an old pain. I recognized the expression on his face, that wistful longing, but I’d never registered that maybe he was longing for something he’d lost.
Beckett sighed. “We begged her to come with us, to let us introduce her to you guys, but she said no. She was adamant. She shut us out and never let us back in again. We chose you. And we’ve never regretted that choice,” he said quickly.
“But a part of you still longed for her,” I said softly.
He nodded. “Don’t get me wrong, Omega. I have been happy every single day since the moment you walked into our life.”
But he would have been happier if she’d been here too?
Yes. I wasn’t a jealous man, despite my earlier worries. I sat in silence for a moment, digesting everything I’d just learned. The guys finally showed good sense and didn’t interrupt as I rethought every moment in our relationship under this new lense. Could the happiest moments have been better with her here? The hardships have been weathered better with a Beta beside me, helping me soothe the wild Alpha emotions?
A Beta may have helped me care for these three stubborn, bullheaded Alphas over the years, and I would have been glad for it. But right now, she was just a shining neon sign, pointing to a betrayal by two of the men I loved more than any other beings that walked the earth.
I wasn’t sure if it was the silence, or the scent of the Omega that got too much for Cooper, but he left, mumbling something about checking on the Sanctum kids.
I stepped forward, brushing the hair from the forehead of the woman on the bed. She was going to be so scared when she woke up. I traced my finger along a scar that curved around her forehead. What kind of life must she have lived, up there all alone?
I pulled back my hand, but with lightning-fast reflexes, there were fingers around my wrist, gripping me tightly and scaring the living shit out of me.
“Ah!”
“Help me,” came the whimpered words as I looked down at her wide brown eyes. “Please. I hurt. Everything… hurts.” She writhed on the bed in pain, like she couldn’t escape the sensations under her skin. I knew that feeling, knew it intimately, the blissful torture of it.
Something inside me snapped, like a rubber band pulled too tight, and the ends wrapped around this ethereal creature clutching my arm. The Omega inside me recognized the fear and pain, tempered with lust, staring up at me from the depths of her soul.
“It’s okay, Kitten. I’ll make all the pain go away.” I clamped my lips shut. That hadn’t been me, the man, making that promise. Oh, shit. The Beast was out to play, and I had a feeling that he wasn’t going to let me hold the wheel again anytime soon.
3
KITTEN
