Stealing a kiss from those lips, I grinned against her mouth that was still arguing with me.
“I’ve missed fighting with you. But just think, now we get makeup sex. Even if you get angry, no matter what, we’ll work things out. I’ll be damned if there’s ever distance between us again. You’ll be lucky to go to the bathroom in peace.”
“I’m not the same girl you lost, Nikolai. I’ve been independent for a long fucking time, and I don’t plan to just roll over and give you complete control because you stole me away and rutted me.”
Anger flared.
“Excuse me?” I growled. “Don’t act like you didn’t need that as much as I did. That you didn’t let this happen.”
“Yet I’m not ruining a perfectly good wake-up with bullshit,” she argued.
I gritted my teeth to stop myself from saying something that would set her off again.
“Okay, baby. I’ll do my best to try to remember that you’re an independent omega. I’m not here to fucking control you, though. I was here to claim you,” I stated pointedly. “Twelve years is a long fucking time. They told me you died, Aries. I searched for you, hired people, did everything I could to find you. The police in that town were fucking useless.”
“They were,” she agreed. “And I’m so happy that you tried to find me. I knew you would.”
“What happened that day?” I asked.
She laid back down against me like she couldn’t bear to face the story quite yet. I gave her time to think it over.
Finally, she started speaking.
“A man named Gideon took us. Not personally, of course. He had a whole mess of guards that worked for him and did the dirty work. They drugged me and I woke up in that place. There were others there, but we were put in groups and couldn’t talk to anyone else. It was me and the other widows here. We trainedtogether and were taught to be obedient, perfect omegas. The kind that he could sell for the top price.”
“Did he—?” he dragged it out, unable to form the words.
“No, they saved that for after the sale,” she said in a hollow voice. “They tried to tell us that we were lucky. Explained that Gideon gave us a good life. It was a nice home, not some concrete cell. That they saved us from a life like my mother led.”
She hesitated and I tried to push reassurance through the bond.
“Sometimes I try to tell myself that it could’ve been so much worse, but they stole years from me, Nik. Hell, a whole life.”
“He did,” I agreed, wanting nothing more than to hunt this Gideon down and cut off his knot.
She wasn’t done yet, though, and this wasn’t about me, this was about her and her story.
“The last night there, he dressed us up like his little princesses, trying to sell us off to alphas paying insane money. Lucky my ass. They would have broken us further. So, we escaped. One of our girls is a hacker and had contacts on the outside. She arranged everything. They got us out, and we ran. We made it here to Widow’s Peak, creating a place that was safe.”
“He didn’t try to come back for you?”
She let out a small, sharp laugh.
“He did. We knew we had to have a backup plan, so when they came knocking, we were ready. Blackmail is a strong motivator to back off. When that wasn’t enough, we made sure to solve the problem.”
“So, this bastard’s already dead?” I questioned. My alpha was barely holding on. I needed to hear it, but that didn’t make it easy.
“Yes,” she admitted. “It was slow and gruesome, and he deserved it. Told you… I’m not the omega that you lost.”
“Did you ever look up your mom?” I hedged, figuring if we were airing out our skeletons then mine should be out there, too.
“Do I know that my mom’s dead?” she asked with a small chuckle. “Yes. Good fucking riddance. I looked her up once and found out that she had burned in that godforsaken place.”
“I couldn’t let her live,” I admitted.
She bolted upright, looking at me with wide eyes. “You did it?”
I nodded, not bothering to deny it. “The night you were taken, I went to talk to her.”
