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“Sarah?”
“Why must you ask?” I growled.
“Because you loved her.” He cracked his knuckles and rapped them on the desktop. It was his one tell in cards revealing he disliked his hand. He’d had a complicated relationship with Sarah, for he hated to share my love with anyone.
“She’s…” I licked my lips. “She’s sleeping in the temple. Nothing but an ugly bruise and a smudge of dried blood to let you know what might have happened to her.”
The unfairness of it all gnawed at me. The alpha who’d been on the boat with them would pay for her crimes. Slowly. Painfully. Drowning wasn’t a pretty way to go.
“Tell me what happened. Everything.”
“Arrived on board the ship. Beatrice was leaving. Said Sarah was below. The omega had killed Stimpson, a bloody scene. Sarah just lay there though. She looked like she was sleeping. I tried to wake her. Told her Polly will have my balls if I didn’t bring her home.”
Our eyes held. He hated when I closed off from him. But revealing more than those facts would send me spiralling. He knew as much. The tenderness he could touch when he let himself had him reaching out to me. I came close and pressed our foreheads together.
“Go. Tell the omega, schatz. Then come to bed. We need sleep.”
When I entered the room Oberon had prepared for Polly years ago, I couldn’t escape her scent or the way it worked on my nerves. A fresh, yet soothing smell filling my lungs. Omega. My alpha responded, wanting to bury my face in her lap and stay there until my mind had settled. And along there a more possessive, darker need to ensure she’d never leave the safety of this nesting room. That her gilded cage would prevent the world from ever touching a hair on her head.
“Beatrice! Sarah!” Polly rushed the bars of her cage when swung the door open—so much for a sleeping omega. “Please. Whatever the truth is…”
“Beatrice is with her mates.” I couldn’t find the words to tell her the rest.
Her face lost all its colour. Her soul knew before I’d said a word.
“Do not tell me a lie,” she barked. My spine straightened as if Oberon had been the one to issue the order. Goddess, I loved her bark, craved it when I felt so at sea. “I’ll know if you do.”
“I won’t lie to you.” My chest tightened. “Our girl is sleeping in the temple.”
“Our girl,” she whispered. She blinked away tears. I wanted her to cry them that I might wipe them away. I would let my own fall when I returned to my bed. Not because I thought tears a weakness. But I’d not compound her grief when she needed me. “She was good to the end?”
Oh goddess, I hadn’t thought about that. “She was loyal to you ’til the end. Beatrice said Sarah stole a gun. Your sister killed Stimpson with it.”
Polly banged the bars with a soundless scream. At last she tired herself out and slumped against the pillows. “I… I would like some laudanum. Just enough to bring a dreamless sleep.”
By the blood of my ancestors I wanted to help her but Oberon had strict rules against all drugs and spirits in the residence. “I can’t.”
“Please. I must have a way to wipe tonight from my memory long enough that I might sleep. You do not understand—”
“Of course I understand your grief,” I snapped. Did she think me so heartless? Or in her eyes were alphas incapable of love and grief? “We are more alike than you would like to admit.”
“Did I deny you anything?” Her eyes flashed in the candlelight. “No, I didn’t. I… Please, Puck. Something.”
I had to relent. She was an omega. The omega. The only one I’d ever wanted for myself. Seeing her fighting to repress her pain hurt worse than any physical wound. And unlike her and Oberon, I caught flies with honey. “Give me a moment.”
Oberon was bent over his books and didn’t look up when I passed him on my way to the Hell’s kitchen. Cook was sitting by the fire, their feet up and a pipe between a pair of thin lips.
“Puck, what can I do for you?” Their casual question revealed that the news from tonight had not travelled to all corners of the Hell.
“Juice of the poppy. Sore tooth.” I waited for them to object—Oberon despised drugs of any type but looked the other way with Cook—but the white-haired beta just nodded and disappeared for a short while. They reappeared with a small bottle and a scrap of cheese cloth.
“A few drops on the cloth and suck it. If the pain gets worse, go see a dentist,” they advised.
When I returned, I found Polly resting against the bars of her cage. We didn’t speak as I followed cook’s directions. She kept watching me while she sucked away the drug. “Thank you.”
The temptation to treat myself crept in and was as quickly dismissed when I caught Polly staring at my hands. I pocketed the vial like a guilty schoolboy. “Don’t tell Oberon for he don’t approve.”
“Leave,” she said firmly. “I—”
