Page 57 of Omega’s Fealty

I turn.

He’s already coming.

He’s big. Not my size but big, and old, sixty maybe, in a dark overcoat over a gray suit. He comes straight at me over the wall with his weight low. I get my good arm up but it doesn’t matter.

He hits me in the chest with his shoulder and puts me back into the tree.

The bark takes the back of my skull. My bad arm goes into the trunk and the whole left side of me lights up white.

My hat’s gone. His forearm’s across my throat. He has me pinned with his weight and one hand in the front of my coat. He’s stronger than a man his age has any right to be, and his face is six inches from mine.

I don’t know him. He’s an alpha with cropped gray hair, but there’s no scent on him at all, not a trace. He smells of a kind of dead-air nothing. There’s a bond mark above his collar, on the left, so old it’s gone silver.

“Kessler,” he hisses, low. It’s not a question.

His eyes go over my face. A month of beard doesn’t slow him down for a second.

His other hand comes up. There’s something in it. I don’t get a look at what.

Then he stops.

His eyes have gone to my neck. My collar’s been dragged open in the shove and the coat’s pulled sideways. The streetlight is on the join of my neck and shoulder, on the place where a month ago a crown prince put his teeth.

He stares at it. The forearm on my throat doesn’t ease up, but the other hand stops where it is.

“Who bit you?” he says.

He already knows. I can see that he knows. I think it’s the only reason I’m still breathing.

15. Aurelio

It’s been days and I’ve seen no one.

No doctors. It seems that peeing on a stick once was enough. When meals arrive, the door opens and someone pushes the cart through and then they close it again.

The cart leaves the same way. I leave it at the door, it opens and maybe I’ll see a flash of hands or a pant leg. At first, I tried not leaving it by the door to see if someone would come in and get it, but the cart just sat there.

When I leave it at the door, it opens almost straight away, as soon as I am at least ten feet away. I grew up with cameras watching my every move. I thought I was used to them.

I used to be.

Now, I hate it. If it weren’t for the staggering boredom that would result, I’d get under the blanket on the bed and stay there forever, hiding like a child so they can’t see me.

Isolation is making me petulant.

I have nothing to do but wait and watch TV.

I know what I am waiting for. Reinhardt has the result of my test. He is planning something for me. That something is almost certainly a marriage.

The bite mark and my pregnancy make that more complicated. Not many alphas are willing to take on an already pregnant bonded omega. Even if that omega is a prince.

I am less worried about the bonding mark than I am about my child. Abortions are illegal under Monteverran law but that doesn’t mean that they don’t happen. I have never had a choice about anything.

If they decide that they don’t want me pregnant, I’m not going to be given a choice about that either.

There are vitamins on the cart every morning. That’s not new. They’ve always given them to me. I’m no longer taking them. I don’t trust them not to put something else in there. Instead, I’ve been carefully palming them when I swallow and then flushing them down the toilet when I get the chance.

Isolation is making me paranoid and petulant.