“Sounds like someone is having a good morning.”
Alric sets down a plate of pastries and fresh fruit on the small glass table next to her.
I jump up and whisper. “I need to speak to you and Zach immediately.”
“Does this information require you to be naked, or can we put on some pants first?”
No time for pants, shitty pack dad news now.
Chapter 14
Zachary
I’m sitting at the dining room table, trying very hard to focus on the email that I need to write, but my attention keeps slipping to my omega.
Physically, she’s so close—her mouth-watering scent lingering in the air —but her refusal to join this pack makes her seem cosmos away. Tempting me with everything I can’t have once this week is over.
Hunter rushes into the space in nothing but a small towel wrapped around his waist. He’s followed by Alric, who only shrugs when I give him a questioning look and sets down a plate of food for us. He sits next to me, popping a loukoumades—crispy fried dough balls covered in honey, topped with cinnamon and toasted walnuts—into his mouth. His mom used to make them for him, and now it’s something he only makes when he’s home.
Hunter, however, paces back and forth, dripping water onto the carpet. “I know why she doesn’t want a pack.”
He shares the story about her photography and his theory that something fucked up was going on with her dads inregards to a scent match. I’m absolutely disgusted by their behavior and I don’t even know all the details.
“We know her mom died around the time she turned eighteen.” Hunter continues his pacing, wearing a path in the carpet. “She’d have lost access to child support. Damn it, I want to ruin their lives!”
Why even have a child if you’re only going to support them with shitty conditions? What kind of parent cuts their kids off the second they reach adulthood?
Alric looks downright murderous. He’s on his phone immediately, no doubt telling his assistant to start a manhunt. “I’m going to have Margaret check all public records, we need to find out if this pack is in our city.”
“What could we do even if they are?” Hunter asks him. “She doesn’t have contact with them.”
“I want to know if they visit any of my restaurants or lounges so I can kick them out publicly and hope that one of them throws the first punch. Plus, if we have their identities, we can put more pieces together. Timelines, registrations, anything that will help us understand if she’s not ready to tell us everything yet.”
“That’s a good point.” A seed of hope begins to sprout in me. Obviously, we would prefer Emilie give us the details, but we want to understand where she’s coming from so we can help her. “We can work with this. If she had unsupportive alpha dads, or downright abusive ones, then we need to show her we won’t be the same. I think she knows that, at least on some level, but trauma runs deep.”
They all nod, and I continue, “We only have a short amount of time to prove to her we can support her. I need to see her again after this week.” Just saying that possibility out loud twists painfully inside of me. “We have to show her thatthere are good alphas out there, that there are packs who would want to see her chase her dreams and thrive.”
“Kind of seems like all she wanted is to not be an omega.” Hunter speaks a lot of truth in that.
“Most sugar babies are younger than her and use this job to find their forever pack.” I add, “She’s in her mid-twenties. If she wanted a pack, she would have had one by now.”
Hunter agrees, “Yeah, she said as much.”
Alphas are taught that omegaswantto be in packs, that they crave our knots and dream of our bonding bites. Was it all bullshit alpha logic because once a year they needed our dicks and we set up our whole society to cater around heats and ruts and scent matches?
Are omegas raised to believe that, too, so alphas always have access to them?
Getting to love and take care of someone meant just for me had been a goal even before I presented as an alpha. I had grown up seeing all the love and support my parents’ pack has, and it always sounded like a dream come true.
My mom was in the middle of medical school when she found her scent matches, and my dads never would have even thought of getting in the way of her becoming an omega specialist.
“I know she’s her own person,” Hunter says carefully, “and what she wants matters most, even if it’s not us. I agree with Alric that we need a better understanding of her. Maybe she’ll be open to sharing why she doesn’t want a pack, but we don’t have time to wait. We’re on a time limit and she has to know that we can be what she needs if she lets us.” Hunter sounds as hopeful as I am.
“Keep being the sweet ones, but I’m going to fight dirtier.”
Hunter and I glare at Alric.
“We have to be gentle with her,” I remind him with agrowl. “If you ruin this for us all on some possessive alpha crap, we’re going to have a problem.”
