Olive aggressively tears open her snack, digs through the bag then tosses a handful of the tiny candies into her mouth. “That’s exactly the problem.”
The collective shot of tension with anouch, that hurtchaser that rockets through our bond makes our girl physically cringe.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” she mumbles around another mouthful of the chewy sweets. “Who would have thought you five would be so damn sensitive after…”
All that.
She doesn’t say the words but we can hear them, and it’s the only way Olive has been referring to bonding with us during her heat since it happened.
It’s almost as if?—
“You can’t even say the words, can you?” Niko shakes his head and sighs. “Do you even want?—”
“Don’t you fucking ask me that,” she growls. “Don’t ever ask me something like that when you know damn well I want you,allof you. You’re mine, nothing is going to change that but the last time I was in a situation like this, everyone died and my entire world burned to the ground.”
She’s not wrong, I watched that literally happen, but there is a very large, very obvious difference between then and now.Five of them, actually, and each one is still pink and healing on various parts of her body.
I don’t dare say that. I know it bothered Olive more than she let on that her previous pack’s bites didn’t take, but that’s why this is different.
Bonding doesn't suddenly make us immortal, and it won’t protect us when we’re inevitably faced with terrible people wielding dangerous weapons, but it is a fact. It did happen. Our marks are permanent, they will last as long as our bodies do, and until she can acknowledge that without fear, or allow us to help her in whatever way we can, the sting of our teeth will never go away for any of us, either.
“Here’s the thing,” Leon says as he sits down on the grass, leaning back on his elbows as he crosses his legs at the ankles. “That shit isn’t going to fly anymore, little bird. We know they died, we can feel how that still affects you and we hate it, but the buck stops there. You’ve never fully explained why you feel so strongly about avenging three men you couldn’t bond with.” Olive opens her mouth to snap back, but he holds up a hand. “Not for lack of trying, I understand, but thereisa reason for that, for why it couldn’t happen the same way there’s a reason you won’t allow yourself to move on from it.”
“Pushing us away only makes it worse,” I say softly as I watch Olive’s shoulders tense up toward her ears. “You’re carrying around the guilt of two packs when you shouldn’t have any at all.”
The wall our girl built between us crumbles almost immediately, her posture reflecting the change as her shoulders drop and she tilts her face toward the sky.
“You’re right,” she whispers after a few moments. “You’re absolutely right. I was trying to keep you all separate, trying to keep my past from fucking up our future, and instead I’ve donenothing but hurt all of us. I don’t want to keep doing that. Ican’tkeep doing that.”
“Then tell us everything,” Niko says with a sigh of relief. “Even if it’s something you’ve already told one of us, or all of us, tell us everythingnow.”
And with an apologetic smile and sigh, our girl finally does.
“My life, it was never good and I know you all know that but… I was born into something called the Heart of Gospel.”
“That cult?” Styx asks as he takes her soda, opens it and hands it back to her. “Religious zealots, right?”
Olive nods as she takes a drink. “It was awful. Beatings and hard labor, endlessworshipand abusive doctrines, but the worst part was being one of two omegas out of ten kids.”
“Jesus.” Dimitri chokes on his cigarette smoke and coughs. “There are nine more of you out there somewhere?”
“No,” she says sarcastically. “I had eight older brothers, all alphas, and bigger assholes than even you could ever dream to be. Which was exactly the problem. My father didn’t want daughters, or omegas, and he got both when I was born. Throw in the fact that Mav turned out to be an omega, too, and that our mother is the first one he ever beat into submission, we were kind of fucked.”
Pain, sharp and hot, stabs through our bond. A pain I’m not familiar with, one laced in guilt and dripping in regret, and I swear I can almost see the little brother Olive feels she betrayed when she left him at her father’s house in order to save herself.
“I tried to save myself, anyway. But that’s not what actually happened.” Our girl sets her candy and drink down then wraps her arms around her waist. “You’re all aware of my time in the foster care system, that’s never been a secret, but what you don’t know is that I was basically adopted.”
Judging by the looks on everyone’s face, they didn’t know, and they have the same bad feeling about it that I do.
“Hayk.” She swallows hard and begins to pace. “That’s what he did. He’d find omegas in the system, foster them for a while and if they made him money, he’d adopt them.”
“Made him money?” Niko asks, his body rigid as he clenches his fists at his side. “Liv, please don’t tell me?—”
“I wasn’t auctioned off if that’s what you were going to ask. I was fifteen when he took me in and it wasn’t long after that when he had me…working…on a regular basis.”
Olive sways as several bolts of rage shoot through our bond like lightning, scorching its way under my skin, and igniting a level of protectiveness that nearly makes me dizzy. I can’t blame any of them for feeling that way, though. The only reason I’m a little more composed than they are is because I already knew this about Olive. It’s how I found her, that man and that place, theworkshe was doing led me to my omega, and it will be something that angers me for the rest of my life, but it isn’t a new feeling for me.
“My pack.” She reaches up and takes her hair down before tying it up again. “They were the ones I worked with if someone paid to watch only. Hayk made the three of them help me when I went into heat, and apparently the combination started pulling in a lot of cash, so it stuck. Eventually, feelings changed, things evolved, and we escaped. I got out of there because of them. They were the reason I survived and was able to start a life in Thief River Falls. I’d be dead?—”
