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BEATRICE
Polly was flickingthrough the evening post when I came down a week into my stay. After another fitful night without my alphas, I’d spent the afternoon napping. To think I had ever wanted to sleep on my own.
“You can go home tonight,” my sister said without looking up. “I… I am sorry to have kept you so isolated here. But I can’t have people knowing too much. And some of my omegas are afraid of alphas.”
“You are astounding,” I told her. “I felt a fraction of…”
“My freakish curse?” She asked, a carefully darkened brow rising skeptically.
“Your power. When I went back, I was going to kill him. Clarity. I felt clarity.”
She frowned. “I’ve never thought of it as clarity, but I suppose clarity works. For me the world slows and only I move.”
“All the time?” I asked.
“Goddess, no! That would be exhausting. Only when my emotions are strong. When everything moves at once… I feel dislocated. I’ve asked Jude to take you home. He is my most trusted guard.”
“Your lover.”
“One of my lovers.”
I shook my head in amusement. Polly had never been shy about the fact she took lovers, but we’d never talked about it before. “Have you loved any of them?”
“Love! Sister,” she snorted. “Of course. I’ve loved and lost and loved again. But who wants an apex omega? The thought of an alpha touching me makes my skin crawl… I’ll not take a mate who won’t follow my lead. What alpha wants to defer on any point?”
“You’ve got it wrong, Polly. There is give and take with a mate.”
“Says the omega who dared to storm the Royal Academy and called alphas pigs? Where is that Beatrice?”
“She…” I poured myself a cup of tea and added an extra spoon of sugar into it. “There is compromise. It just might not be so obvious.”
“Snort! Snort! Bea! Come. You’ve been seduced by a pair of knots. I don’t blame you…”
“Enough,” I snapped. “I’ll not have you talk like that. One day, you will understand what the—Never mind. I’m sorry. I’ve not been sleeping well.”
“You’re not…”
“Pregnant? No.”
“Do you want children?” Hippolyta asked. Hippolyta, who never asked a pointless question.
“You’ve not asked before—”
“I remember that day. They wanted to protect you and I wanted to protect you,” she replied, her eyes focused on me with the feral intensity that sometimes gripped her. A feral omega… I remembered when she presented her eyes mirrored gold during her first heat. Far too young to have an alpha or beta help her. Our parents had waited until she was eighteen… five heats of agony as she suffered through heats that combined the mindless lust of an omega and an alpha’s aggression. “He wanted me to take care of you.”
“Polly, you shouldn’t have had to carry that burden.”
“It was not a burden, sister. You are not a burden. No omega is a burden.”
“Polly…” I reached out but saw the look in her eyes, which told me she would not appreciate whatever comfort I wished to give.
“You are to go back to your mates. Can’t you be happy? Must you harass me?” she snapped. “Jude will be here at eight.”
“Polly!”
“I have letters to write. When it is eight, the carriage will be at the gate.”
I felt like a child watching the clock, waiting for lessons to be over. And the two hours between the news and the arrival of the carriage could have been ten for all that they crept so slowly by.
