by Kathryn Moon
“It’s not like that.”
“I know,” Leo said, nodding. He sucked in a deep breath and moved us to lean against the padded headboard. “And there’s a relevant bit in all of it, about how I work with the pack—”
“Leo, I know you belong with them,” I said.
“Yeah, I do, and your logic on why you wouldn’t doesn’t hold up,” Leo said, arching an eyebrow at me. “But for now, let’s skim through the Odette saga. Um, let’s see… So, she hired me before I even had my license or anything. She said a lot about me having potential, but I think she just saw something she wanted in me. She’s into young, vulnerable betas. The relationship happened…quickly, probably within my first month working for her. There was a rumor going around the firm that Odette had been rejected by several omegas, but later Matthieu said she wasn’t ever a member of the Omega Center. I think she might’ve circulated the rumor herself as emotional bait. Made us feel like she needed us.”
Leo huffed and rolled his shoulders, brow furrowed, and I turned in his lap to face him. His hands settled on my hips and he continued, eyes watching his own fingers stroke my skin. “She was more careful, but she fed me a lot of the same bullshit that those assholes gave you. She needed me, but I would never be everything she needed, that kind of shit. Enough to make me feel valuable but also worth less than others. When I first met Rake, I kind of hated him, but I was also curious because he was exactly what I was supposed to be. Rake saw right through her shit, knew exactly how she had me pinned, so he kept getting in touch with me.”
“Nothing if not persistent,” I said, and Leo nodded. I dug my fingers into his neck and shoulders, and his eyes fell shut, the tension melting away off of his features.
“The more time I spent around Rake and, you know, his magical ability to just shine on you, the more fractures there were with my relationship with Odette. He was feeding me the self-worth she’d tried to starve out of me. And then Rake started inviting me to the house, and I met Caleb and… I think I was already in love with Rake, but I noticed it right away with Caleb. Rake was only bonded to Cyrus at the time, he and Caleb were friends, but Rake was trying to prove he wouldn’t be Mr. Omega At Home for the pack. Caleb is such a steadying influence, I think he spooked Rake or vice versa.
“I felt like a bridge between them at first. Rake and I started having sex, I broke up with Odette and immediately got fired, and Caleb was just…he was there, but he was careful with me. He knew he and Rake had to cleanse me of all of the bullshit Odette had fed me before I’d really see that I wasn’t a stand-in for Rake.” Leo widened his eyes significantly at me, and I pinched the back of his neck to make him continue. “And while they were helping me, they fell in love too. I would say I knew for certain that Caleb loved me as much as he loved Rake before the three of us bonded, but to be honest I probably still had doubts. The bond eliminated those completely. And before you say anything about bonds, I am cutting you off right now. Neither of us can know how your relationships will develop with anyone in the pack, but you’ve got to stop telling yourself they’re dead in the water just because you’re a beta, or whatever it is you think makes you not good enough for us. If it weren’t for me, Caleb and Rake might never have fallen in love. Without you—”
Leo sucked in another breath, and I stopped him. “You’re right.”
His mouth hung open, words frozen in a pause and his eyes narrowed, making me laugh at his suspicion.
“I’m letting Buzz do the talking in my head, but before all of that, I was still…pretty brutal with myself,” I admitted. “He just confirmed—”
“He did not confirm anything, he twisted—”
“Okay, yes, he preyed on anxieties I’d been cultivating for a long time,” I said, and Leo nodded and sighed. I opened my mouth to tell him about my mother and then changed my mind. “I’m going to start looking for a therapist.”
“I have one I can recommend.”
I resisted the smirk. “I’m going to start looking for one I can afford.”
“But—”
“Leo, you can check in on this with me, but I’m handling it,” I said, firmly.
Leo’s lips quirked. “Yes ma’am. And you’re gonna let this pack thing marinate in your head? I just, I don’t want it to overwhelm you and make you…”
“Fritz?” I suggested, the word I’d used before in a similar situation.
Leo nodded. “No one’s going to toy with you, Lola.”
I could still get hurt, even if it was done innocently. I could hurt them too; there were no guarantees in this. But if that was only anxiety talking, then I owed it to myself to get that shit sorted. There was no one in the world more perfect than Leo and his pack. I needed to know if the dread that beat in my veins—that I would inevitably disappoint them and have to live with that knowledge every day—was more than just my imagination.
“I will work on it,” I said.
Leo patted my hips and grinned. “I’ll take it. Now, what should we do with our last hours in Malta?”
I blew a soft breath out and imagined it was the stress I was carrying. It wasn’t a perfect fix, but it helped a little.
“I think you should tell me you love me again, while we shower. Maybe a few times? And then I think I’m going to need a few more rounds with cannoli,” I said.
Leo laughed, and his arms tightened around my waist, lifting me with him as he got us off the bed and toward the yummy tiled en suite bathroom.
“I love you, Lola,” he said in my ear, nipping the lobe.
“I love you,” I answered, taking a deep breath of his scent on his neck, finding the faintly sweet, clean breath of him twice as soothing. “So much, Leo.”
“I’ve been biting it off for weeks,” Leo said, laughing. “Time to make up for all those times I didn’t say it.”
The words grew soft under the steam of the shower, Leo and I entwined from head to toe. Every repetition of the words, the feeling, brought a little spike of worry in my heart. What if I broke this? What if Leo had to choose between me and his pack? I would walk away just to save him that.
But first, I’d fight to keep hold of him, and of the others. For my own sake.
Thirty-Four
Lola
“This isn’t you running, right?” Leo asked as I moved to slide out of the car that was idling in front of my apartment. We’d gained a little time coming back from Malta, although it was still midnight on a Sunday, and my neighborhood was dead quiet.
“It’s not like that,” I said, shutting the car door again and turning to face him. “I’m not trying to avoid you or the pack. But if I come back to the house tonight, I’m going to fall right back into the cycle of enjoying one moment and panicking about the inevitable end in the next. Also, I really need to do laundry. But I promise I’ll come tomorrow night. I just need to do some thinking, and start looking at therapists.”
“Okay, well now I sound unreasonable,” Leo said, laughing. “Fine, get some rest tonight. Hey, wait!” He caught my hand, and I raised an eyebrow at him until he grinned and said, “I love you.”
I bit my lip and a bubble of warmth rose up in my chest. That feeling definitely hadn’t gotten old yet. “I love you too.”
“See you tomorrow,” Leo said, leaning in for a last kiss.
Wes had given me the key to my new front door lock right before I left for Malta with Leo, and I used it gleefully now. No one in the building would know I was the catalyst for our landlord finding his motivation at last, but at least we now had a functioning lock and buzzer system on our front door.
Desperate to fall into my own bed, even if it was just for a minute before I gathered up my laundry, I raced upstairs and unlocked my door. It wasn’t until I was inside, sliding the chain into place, that I caught the first whiff.
Just a whisper, bitter and sour, but enough to stir a painful onslaught of memories.
Indy.
My brain spun in circles, fingers gripping on the chain as I faced the d
oor and debated running back out into the hall. Was I imagining his scent here? The apartment was dark at my back, street lights glowing from the outside and casting my own shadow on the wall to my right. Was I alone?
My heartbeat pounded in my ears as my hand slid down the door and over to the light switch, fingers trembling as I listened for the slightest shuffling step, waited for the breath on the back of my neck. When it never came, I flipped the switch—eyes wincing at the sudden light—and turned slowly around to face my living room. There was no stirring in the apartment, no sound but my own rushing pulse. The only sign of the disturbance, the only proof, was the scent burning in my nose and the soft scattering of yellow feathers trailing down the hall to my bedroom.
I whimpered behind pinched lips, digging into my purse as my travel bag dropped to the floor. I pulled my phone out and moaned at the dark screen, the room blurring as tears rose to my eyes. My breath hitched as I sucked in a gasp and held it in my chest, trying to gather control again. My phone was dead, of course, and I had barely thought about it for the whole weekend. A weekend that seemed so distant from this moment. So impossibly safe.
I slid down the wall in front of the door, fingers fumbling in my bag for my charger.
He’s not here. He’s not here, I repeated to myself, a steady refrain that failed to soothe me at all. He was here. Indy had been here. He’d not only made it back to the city, but he’d found me.
I crawled down the hall to the nearest outlet, ridiculously and humiliatingly terrified of those stupid yellow feathers. I fumbled the plug into place and hooked up my phone, squeezing my eyes shut and trying to organize my mind.
Lock the door. Call…Leo. Leo was closest.
The phone buzzed to life and I jumped in place, gasping and eyes flying wide as if I expected to see Indy standing in front of me, looming over me, hands reaching with those awful rings on his fingers.
There was a voicemail from UNKNOWN waiting, and I swiped with a shudder, bile rising in my throat.
“Her name was Lola, she was a showgirl…” Indy’s voice droned softly over the phone, the whisper scratching at my skin and dragging another whimper from my lips. My eyes fluttered, but it was too easy to imagine him at my ear if I couldn’t see for sure that I was alone, so I forced them open.
“Hey Showgirl, gotta say I’m disappointed. Came all this way to see you. What’re you doin’, Lola? Avoiding me?”
My hand clapped over my lips as I gagged. Get it together, Lola. Come on. Hang up and call Leo.
“Wanna see you again, Showgirl. Wanna feel you strangling my knot as I…” Indy chuckled, a poisonous sound. “See you soon, babe.”
The phone beeped and I dropped it to the floor, pressing my back to the wall and taking deep breaths, gulps of air to keep down the urge to be sick. Except with every breath came a little taste of Indy on the air, faint and clawing, a single fingernail scratching down the back of my throat. When had he been here? Friday? Or just last night?
“Fuck. Fuck. Come on, Lola,” I whispered. I grabbed my phone with shaking hands and tried Leo first. Straight to voicemail. “Noo,” I whined. “No, come on. Please.”
I puffed little breaths and swallowed the next whine. Call…the police. Or Baby. Or David. Or…
There was really only one person, more than all the others, I wanted to see at this moment. I couldn’t have explained it, only that I knew he would know what to do. That he would be here, with me, as fast as he could. I scrolled through my phone, praying I’d saved the number and then pressed to call right away.
“Please. Please, please, please.”
“Hey, sweetheart. What’s wrong?”
I gasped at the sleep gravel in his voice and sobbed once before putting a stranglehold on my control again. “Wes? Indy was in my apartment. He’s in the city.”
Wes cursed and shuffled over the phone as I swallowed hard, staring into the dark of the bedroom.
“He’s not there now, right?” Wes asked, sleep cleared away to a sharp and efficient tone.
“I…I don’t know. I haven’t gotten farther than the hallway.”
“I’m on my way, sweetheart. You call the police yet?”
“No.”
“Okay. Okay, I want you to stay on the line with me. Can you do that?”
“Yes,” I squeezed out.
“Where’s Leo?” Wes’ pounding footsteps down the stairs matched the still rapid beat of my heart.
“He’s in a car on his way home, but his phone is off. He left a voicemail…he said he’s coming back.”
“Indy? Fu—did you delete it?”
“No.”
“Good girl. Is your door locked?”
I forced myself to stand and finished sliding the chain and bolts in place. “Yes.”
“Okay, you hang tight, and you stay on the—” There was a voice in the background, and Wes answered with my name, the voice rising. “—Stay on the line with me. You’re sure he’s not in there, right?”
“I…his scent is faint but I…don’t want to go into my room.”
“Do you have a weapon, sweetheart?”
I turned the phone onto speaker and let it rest near the charging port. Wes’ voice was doing wonders for me being able to move around, to breathe evenly. I opened my tiny coat closet and pulled the old baseball bat out from the corner.
“Yeah.”
“That’s my girl.”
My shoulders squared at that, and I peered into the kitchen. It looked relatively untouched, but I turned on the lights and found that Indy had helped himself to something, new dishes in the sink.
Fucking asshole.
“I think I’m alone,” I said as an engine roared on Wes’ end.
“I think you are too, but if you wanna wait by the door for me, we’ll both feel fine about it, okay?”
I nodded, even though he couldn’t see me. “Okay.”
“I’m on my way. I freaked Matthieu out on my way out, so the cavalry might be on the way too.”
My couch was what was carrying the heaviest layer of Indy’s scent and I avoided it completely, taking Wes’ advice to sit down by the door, on the floor with my phone in one hand and the baseball bat in the other.
“Talk to me, sweetheart.”
“Leo tried to get me to stay the night at the house, and I wish I had. I would’ve seen the voicemail first and—”
“And passed your phone to me so I could scour it and deal with this mess,” Wes growled softly.
I hummed, and my eyes drifted back to my bedroom. “He sang that stupid song,” I said. “And left feathers on my floor. They go to my bedroom.”
“Wait for me, Lola,” Wes said, more caution in his words, and then added, “It’s gonna be okay. I’m ten minutes away. Less if I get a little liberal with the stoplights, okay?”
The song was stuck in my head, or at least the part of it Indy knew.
…yellow feathers in her hair and her dress cut down to there…
I knew the rest of the song, the lyrics haunting me all through adolescence every time someone thought they were being clever singing it to me, just because it matched my name. There were better choices, but that was always the one they knew. It was those first few lines that haunted me now, in Indy’s almost tuneless hiss in my ear.
“Lola,” Wes said sharply.
“I’m here, I’m okay.” I was calmer now, but it was a kind of drugged calm, the adrenaline wearing off and creating a toxically dreamy effect in combination with the jetlag. I made myself ramble, more for Wes’ sake than my own, about cannoli and my laundry and the elderly Grechs of Malta.
“I’m here, sweetheart. Ready for the buzzer?”
I scrambled to my feet, wavering slightly. “Ready.”
I still jumped at the roaring blare of the buzzer, immediately hitting the button to let him in and fumbling with the locks. His steps thundered up to my door and I hung up as soon as his scent reached my nose, that candied sex smell oddly comforting in the moment. Even more comf
orting was the enormous figure of Wes running up my steps to my open door.
“I’m already to her place. I gotta call the police, okay? Oof,” Wes puffed as I ran into his chest, the baseball bat clattering to the floor and propping my door open. His arm wrapped around me, holding me tight, and I cleared the last remnants of Indy out of my lungs with every breath I took while my nose pressed to his chest. “That’s fine. See you soon. Hey, I got you, sweetheart.”
I wasn’t crying, just shaking a little.
“Look at me.” I tilted my head back, and Wes brushed his hand over my hair, his eyes searching my face. “You wanna wait out here for the others, or go back inside with me?”
I wanted Wes to pick me up off my feet, take me out to his car, and then burn my apartment down to the ground behind us both.
“With you,” I said, settling on the simplest compromise between the two.
Wes frowned and nodded, guiding me back into the apartment as he called in the break-in to 911. “They’re gonna be forever,” Wes said with a sigh as he hung up. “It’ll move things along a bit if we can figure out if he took anything. You’ve got the voicemail to prove he broke the restraining order request at least. Want me to go look?” Wes asked, glaring at the trail of feathers down the hall.
“Can we just…just stand here for a minute?” I asked.
“Of course we can,” Wes murmured, arms open as I turned into his chest again, folding them over my back.
He was warm and solid and purely alpha, and if I’d made one real advancement over the past two months, it was getting over my aversion to alphas. Or at least Rake’s. Wes vibrated with a silent purr, my eyes falling shut and the apartment going distant in my head.
“I think Matthieu and the others caught Leo on their way out,” Wes said.
“Others?”
“Sounded like a full car,” Wes said. “You’re gonna take tomorrow off, okay? And you’re going to stay at the house for a while.”
I slid my hands under Wes’ denim jacket and clutched at his back, planes of muscle thick under my fingers. I could fall asleep like this. I was definitely on some weird kind of high, floating in a hazy middle ground of panic and exhaustion.