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Raising her head, she pinned him with a wary look that melted his heart all over again. “The Old Ones?”
“Folks like you, who survived through TheEnd and keep on living. Some became Alphas, some Omegas. Some stayed unchanged Betas, though I don’t suspect many of them are around anymore.”
Her head assumed a quizzical tilt. “Hunter calls themtransformedAlphas. I haven’t met anytransformedOmegas. If that’s even what I am.”
Cal raked his gaze over her face, a primitive warning sounding in his brain. Their sex had shifted something in her. Even without a bond, he felt it. The barrier between them crumbled as she’d joined with him, in bodyandspirit. No woman could fake something like that, and no reasonable woman could deny it. Yet that’s what she appeared to be doing.
“I’ve known transformed Omegas,” he said carefully. Uninvited memories pushed forward in his mind. Faces of family members he hadn’t allowed himself to recall in decades: his father, his half sister, his cousin. Still more faces crowded to the surface behind those: his desolate mother, his furious brother-in-law, the rest of his formerly tight-knit Pack, all angry and mourning and accusatory, all aligned against him for tearing the Pack apart.
“Like me, you mean?” she asked, jarring him from his dark reverie.
“No one’s like you.” Emotion added a gruffness to his tone. Shoving the invasive memories away, he returned to the puzzle of his stubborn mate. Sleep called to him, but apprehension held him back. With his knot tight in her body, the time to clear things up was now.
Della refused to believe she was Omega, and as far as he could reckon, he needed to find a way to bridge the gap between what she believed and what he knew to be true. That meant finding out who shedidbelieve herself to be. Cal brushed a curtain of hair off her forehead. “So, who were you, Della, Who Takes Care Of Herself?” he asked softly.
Her sharp eyes, usually so focused and steady, went hazy with pain or memory or some combination of the two. “Adeline,” she replied, her voice flat. “State Senator Adeline Catherine Maria Cabrese-Rao representing senate district thirty-nine in the great state of California.” He stared wordlessly, absorbing every monotone word of her recitation. “Daughter of four-term US Senator Michael Anthony Cabrese and wife to Rakesh Rao, billionaire inventor, sister to Captain Anthony Joseph Cabrese.”
“Holy shit.” Astonishment rolled through him. Born well into the AfterEnd, Cal still understood the power behind such an illustrious family. Beyond her pedigree, his Della had been someone of note in her own right, with her own accomplishments and ambitions.
“Before the bombs fell, I was getting ready to announce my candidacy for US Senate, to run for my father’s seat since he was retiring.” She added bitterly, “Don’t look impressed. None of that shit means anything now. I’m not sure it ever did.”
As his knot began to ebb, Cal cupped her cheeks to prevent her from detaching and rolling away. He didn’t know what she needed right at this moment, but he wasn’t about to let her retreat inside of her nightmares and regrets. He had a feeling she’d spent far too much time there already.
No stranger to regrets, Cal recognized the signs. He could read the blame underneath her controlled countenance, but a few very key differences set them apart. He alone bore responsibility for the deaths of his father, sister, and so many others. They died as a direct result of his poor leadership and decision-making. Yet Della blamed herself for... what, exactly?
Pressed against him, her body went lifeless and cold. Skin to skin, having made explosive love, they were closer than they’d ever been, and yet her spirit dissolved beneath his fingertips. The fiery Omega who’d held a knife to his throat had disappeared and been replaced by this withdrawn shell. She was hiding from him again. Withdrawing deep within herself, retreating behind an unseen wall she erected between them. What the sex had torn down, she rebuilt in an instant.
He hated it. He hated every single invisible, offensive brick of it.
Goosebumps broke out over his skin, a tactile sign of unease. “Tell me,” he said, utilizing the slightest degree of Alpha command. “Tell me what happened.”
She met him with a challenging stare. “How much do you know about the events of TheEnd?”
He drew in a long breath. “My Pa was one of the Old Ones. He made sure we had a grasp on American history, both leading up to and through TheEnd. He’d already been living for many years ‘off the grid,’ as he liked to call it, before TheEnd. Had a ranch, did some farming, so when things fell apart, he took a bunch of his neighbors in, became the start of our Pack.”
Della’s chin jerked in curt understanding. “If he was off the grid, I was forged by it. You might know the coasts were hit first?” Cal nodded, relieved she at least kept talking, even if her words sounded robotic to his ears. “When the first bombs fell, I was in Sacramento with a handful of other legislators and the governor, of course. We organized as much as we could, mobilized emergency services and such, but what do states do in the face of such catastrophe? They reach out to the federal government for backup, but within the week, DC had been leveled, too.”
Contempt sharpened her words. “Even if anyone remained to direct help, who exactly was coming to help?Peopleare help, but by then, the entire population had been affected—if not directly then via fear and panic. We evacuated Sacramento. Partly from civil unrest and partly because no one knew where the next bombs would fall. Satellite systems were sabotaged, communication down everywhere... it was chaos.” She slid her eyes back to his, a cut-glass hardness in their blue depths. “I couldn’t do anything, couldn’t help anyone. Couldn’t make a fuckingphone call. Nothing about my position or who I was mattered in the end. Nothing did.” She paused and wet her lips. “I didn’t drop the bombs. I didn’t cause TheEnd, but the things I believed—about people and government and the essential goodness in the world... I was wrong abouteverything.” She hissed the final word, the betrayal as fresh as the day it happened.
That, he could understand. After the accident, the things Pa espoused about the meaning of Pack evaporated in the snap of a finger. Packs supported and protected each other, no matter what. Except, when Cal’s failure cost the Pack lives, he’d been drummed out and exiled without any consideration for protecting him,as a member of the Pack, from their grief and rage. Those cuts hurt, but they weren’t the deepest ones.
Then, Cal saw it. As clear as the stream that flowed outside the cave, he saw to the bottom of Della’s empty eyes. Despite her claims, she suffered not from the loss of ideals but the loss of something much more profound. The long-buried desperation, abandonment, and pure undiluted grief rang out to him because he’d witnessed it before.
He’dcausedit before.
The muscles in his throat tensed and tightened to the point of discomfort. “Your husband. What happened to him?”
As she parted her lips in genuine surprise, her vacant veneer shattered like ice falling on rocks, replaced by alarm. “Wh—what?”
It all made sense. Her aloofness, her reticence, her steadfast commitment to not taking a mate in the hundred years since the end of the modern world. As pragmatic as she was, Della would comprehend the strategic benefit of being someone’s mate, and he refused to believe no one had ever offered for her. While he hadn’t met all the Alphas at Morris Hill, there were more than a few, with the exception of Silas, who would’ve treated her with kindness and respect, at the very least.
His gut told him Della had undoubtedly rebuked any offers that had come her way. No matter what she said, losing something as abstract and esoteric as her ideals would make one question oneself, but only losingsomeonecaused this sort of desolation.
Deep, forever-seeping wounds she concealed with isolation and irritability. Wounds as flimsily papered over as his own. Wounds he couldn’t protect her from, no matter how ardently he tried, and, horrifically, he recognized that particular impotence of being a bystander as a loved one suffered, knowing there was absolutely nothing he could do.
Unable to have this conversation on his back, Cal sat up, rearranging the soft length of the female till she sat cradled in his lap. His cock slipped free from her silken envelope, but he couldn’t even relish the gush of their co-mingled fluids that spilled over the tops of her thighs. Agitated by this conversational turn, he angled his head, putting his face in her whole field of vision so she couldn’t run away. His pulse battered his ears, telling him how close he edged to something absolutely critical to understanding this woman who’d be his mate.
“Your husband, Della. What happened to him?”
