A smile touches my lips as I stretch my arms above my head, arching my back and pointing my toes before I quickly curl up into a ball while I roll to my side.
I reach out beside me, my smile growing before it falls completely, my eyes popping open when my hand slides over the empty space and cold sheet I find there instead.
I shouldn’t be surprised.
Or hurt.
But I can’t help the fact that I feel a little sting of both as I push up on my elbow and look at the side of the bed that’s clearly been vacant for at least a couple of hours. It’s been slept in, that much is clear. The sheets are rumpled and creased, the pillows are barely hanging onto the edge of the mattress, and it smells like butterscotch and bourbon.
He was here, he was with me almost all the way until the end, and I can rest assured in knowing that despite the sadness that is now sitting in my stomach like a boulder.
Even without those things, I’d know he didn’t leave until this morning.
When I finally fell asleep last night, it was in my nest.
In my nest, covered in slick and cum, happy but far too exhausted to move on my own. Which means he was the one who cleaned me up, and he’s how I got into my bed after I inevitably succumbed to that same exhaustion. There was no way I was doing anything but sleeping after the last few days, and he knew that.
I’ve never gone into heat before. Not once, not even by accident.
As soon as I presented as an omega, my mother made sure no expense was spared when it came to making sure I didn’t have to go through that until I was ready to make the choice on my own. She never had a choice, and she didn’t want that for me.
So, I’ve always been isolated, medicated, and looked after by the best doctors and nurses her money could buy when the time came, and we’ve tracked my cycle like we were being paid to do it for just as long.
That’s how I knew it was coming this time.
It’s how I knew, and it’s how I was able to plan a trip to my cottage during that exact two-week stretch while lying my ass off about having a doctor meet me here.
I’m not a very good liar, I never have been, and Mia Kozlov can smell my bullshit from miles away, but she didn’t argue with me. She looked over my travel plans, demanded regular updates and phone calls, then let me go to the Adirondacks all alone. My mother trusted me and what I told her enough to let me go away for two weeks without a bodyguard or anything else.
I felt guilty at first. For a few days, anyway. It was all I could do to keep myself from spilling my entire plan to her, ask for forgiveness, then hide in that giant house until she decided to grant it.
But I’ve never given her a reason to doubt me, let alone not believe what I said, not on that kind of scale. Fibs and white lies, tall tales of a child, but I’ve never looked my mother in the eye and lied about what I was doing. I’ve never had a reason to.
She’s always known all of my plans, all of the people I was with, everything I was doing while I was with them. It didn’t matter what it was, she knew. Mia Kozlov even participated, directly or indirectly, in a lot of it, illegal activities included, and I suppose that’s why she didn’t put up a fight. That and my step-father probably told her to get off my back.
I can hear the conversation as if I was sitting in the room with them.Give him space,milaya. He’s a twenty-six-year-old man, not a six-year-old boy. Let him live a little, and in the safety he creates for himself.
Boris Volkov is good for that.
Then again, he was treating me like an adult by the time I graduated from high school and while he pushed for me to go to college and get a degree, he didn’t hesitate to remind me I was a man, therefore, had responsibilities to match. Usually illegal ones, but still. The sentiment was there, it still is, and my step-father unknowingly aided in my gigantic lie because of it. One he’d be just as pissed off to discover the truth of.
But I’ve never given him a reason to doubt me, either, and I didn’t have to worry about anything but omitting the truth with either of them until now.
Because this truly is the exception.
I guess omitting the truth is different in some ways.
It’s just leaving things out and making sure to avoid bringing them to the surface. Some of it was easy considering our family dynamic, other things were harder for the same reason. I haven’t been caught, though, and I was sure this little trip was going to make that happen.
Nothing good lasts forever, not in the world I’ve lived in the last twenty-three years. Why would this be any different?
That’s how I felt right up until the knock on my cottage door a day and a half after I arrived. As soon as I heard it, as soon as I saw his face and breathed in his scent, my worries and fears melted away. Just like the softest snow stretching for miles under the intensity of the winter sun.
He does that for me.
For as long as I’ve known him, he has made my anxiety disappear, he’s calmed my nerves and his presence has always been a balm on my very guarded heart. That’s how I knew he was different, how I knew he was special, and as I got older and felt myself drawn to him in a different way, I couldn’t deny it. We’d connected on a deep level, an emotional level I’d never experienced before, and soon that became an attraction I couldn’t fight.
One he didn’t fight, either.
