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“We are betrothed—”
“But she’s not your mate. Not yet,” I reasoned, earning another angry glare. “I’m not asking you to be mine forever. I just want you to give us a chance.”
“And why the hell would I do that?” She fell on the soft ground, gripping the ripped halves of my tunic in her fingers. “Why the hell would I leave a smart, stable,beautifulomega like Cryssa for you? She is perfect for my family.”
“She may be perfect for your family,” I murmured, letting her tug on my tunic without protest. “But she’s not perfect for you.”
Her jaw worked once, twice, as she tried to conceal her surprise.
“That’s not true,” she protested. “We make a wonderful couple.”
I cupped my fingers around her wrists, holding her close.
“Lie to yourself all you want, Olly,” I said. “But just as you know me, I know you as well. I see the way you look at me—hungry, with a hint of desperation. I feel the way your scent thickens when I touch you—the way you quiver and shake. But it’s notjustthat, is it? It’s not just sex. It’s…longing.The longing for something familiar, something too beautiful for words.”
Her grip slackened.
“I know I’m a selfish fuck, and you’re too good for me.” The words tumbled from my lips like a confession. “But I’ve spent the last twenty years wonderingwhat if, and I’m tired, Olly. As stupid as it sounds, I want to know what I already know—that we’d be perfect together.”
“Zoei.”
She breathed my name in a long sigh.
“I won’t lie—I’ve wondered about us as well. But we’re not pups anymore, and we can’t make decisions spontaneously.”
“Why?” I queried. “Why not, if it means our happiness?”
“Because,” she said, folding herself onto the ground next to me. Our shoulders touched, and when we glanced at each other, our noses were only inches apart. “Our lives belong to our people. We cannot change our minds at every whim. We owe them stability, not chaos.”
“Loving you would be chaos?”
Her breath hitched in the silence of the hollow.
“No one said anything about love.”
Frustration surged, and I wished again that I could move about as freely as I wanted to vent the ichorous emotion from my blood.
“Oh, don’t be stupid, Olly!” I groused. “Isn’t it clear by now? What else do I need to do?”
In the expectant silence that followed, my vision began to tunnel. I tried to study Olympia and gauge her reaction to my careless words, but found myself constrained by my narrowing vision. She blurred into a shadow. A ghost. An apparition I longed to mark with my scent.
Without my eyes, I fell back on primal instincts. My nostrils flared, filling my lungs with the scent of her.
Olly’s pheromones gave away very little—shock dominated her usual earthy musk. But could shock be a good thing? Could I have shocked her into admitting that she loved me, too?
A part of me still scoffed at the sentiment.Love.What a silly little word for large, all-consuming emotions.
I’d seen too much carnage because of it. My parents’ marriage had fallen apart, and Sire had pickled in his anger for years because Mama had the audacity to love someone else.
Love had caused nothing but chaos in my life.
I’d vowed never to be like my parents—to hurt another in disastrous, destructive ways.
But it wasn’t the same with Olly. She wasn’t an Alpha like Sire. In fact, she wasn’t like anyone I’d ever known, and I’d looked for her in too many people over too many years, seeking the goodness that shone through like a beacon of sunlight on a gray day.
Everyone had always fallen short, simply because they weren’t Olympia.
“I regret it, you know,” I said quietly, watching the tunic tourniquet darken rapidly with blood. My jaw felt weighted down, impeding speech. “I imagined it for years and years—how you’d feel in my arms. How I would please you until you had no breath. Never once did I think I would force myself on you the way I did.”
