AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Perhaps, you ought to tell her your tale. Now, before I am left to hear some sad song,” Oberon said with a deadly smoothness.
“There is no place to start,” I protested.
“How ‘bout the beginning?” Puck’s mocking suggestion inspired Polly to step between us, a low grumble in her throat. “Tell her, pretty boy.”
She rounded on me. The face that had looked on me with tenderness now masked. Her posture too had set into more rigid lines. “Tell me what?”
“When I was young.” I pulled at my hair as the story came back to me. “Barely seventeen, I fell in love with the daughter of a lord, who was liberal enough to consider the suit of a farmer’s son. She was beautiful and sweet and presented as an omega late.”
I watched the change of emotion on her face. Those sharp eyes narrowed, but she didn’t protest. For the first time since I’d known her, she did not understand me. This woman with her subtle mind just looked confused.
“On the eve of her eighteenth birthday we planned to tell her father of our engagement. However, I had no money to pay her omega price. I went to a man—”
“Me,” Oberon interruption saved me from my desperate hunt for the words.
“I bargained for a loan.”
“How much?” Polly asked.
“Ten thousand.”
“And what did you give the devil in collateral?”
“My body.” My cheeks heated. “I did not consider the cost too deeply. Instead, I rode home to find she’d accepted an alpha, fifteen years her senior, who could give her more.”
“You returned the money,” she said.
“But the interest, little bird,” Oberon reminded her. “I do not give ten thousand for no profit.”
“Interest from what?” She rolled her eyes. “Less than a week?”
Oberon shrugged. “I always advise people to read the contracts carefully.”
“He made you a whore?”
“A spy. He asked me to spy on you.”
Her body stiffened and the look on her face I’d seen many times in the moments before she gutted someone with words or one of the knives she kept on her person. “Hold a moment. How could you, a beta expect… Alpha? Impossible.”
Goddess, I’d wanted to hear her call me that from the moment I’d allowed myself to touch her. “Yes, an alpha. Your alpha. I am… I am your alpha.”
“You are not an alpha.” Her eyes flashed. “I have seen your cock. You have no knot. I have seen every inch of your body. You have no mate stain. I have shared my heats with you. You have not gone into rut. Your eyes have never shone like mirrored gold. I cannot believe it.”
“Alpha’s bane.” The poison I’d ingested for five years suppressed every physiological marker that proved me to be an alpha. “I have no excuse but that I love you. I would do anything in my power to stay at your side. Even—”
“How dare you!” Her bark had me stepping back, baring my neck for her.
“Alpha’s bane is a poison, Hippolyta. Think, Jude here has been poisoning himself for five years that he might stay by your side.” Oberon almost made my betrayal sound romantic. Like I’d given up what made me me so that I could be near the woman I loved. But there is nothing romantic about such cowardice or the betrayal of my lover and leader.
“You gave it to him?” she asked, turning her back on me. Cutting me out completely. “You supplied him.”
“For a year while he was my spy. By your eyes, I can see you did not know. He paid off his debt but begged me on his knees to buy alpha’s bane from me so that he could continue to fuck you. Is your cunt so wonderful an alpha would destroy himself for a taste?”
Each degrading word he uttered washed over her. Perhaps he thought to humiliate her but Polly was above that because Oberon was an alpha and therefore beneath her contempt. I was beneath even an alpha because I had betrayed her. “Polly—”
She turned on me then. Eyes feral and full of unholy fury, she launched herself at me. Fingers bent like talons, she scratched at my face and screamed and called me every name under the sun. Protecting myself was out of the question. And it took Puck to pull her off me and drag her away, restraining her with an arm banded around her waist to trap her arms to her sides. She kicked and spat and struggled against him but it was useless. Puck was too strong.
“Omega,” came three voices each with a different meaning in the potent word.
