A signal from the universe that we were allowed to want more. To be more. Something…meantto be instead of a game of chance.
Her scent was like a dream.
Soft velvet roses and luxurious cocoa, sweet like a Valentine’s Day treat.
But there was still something wrong.
She was afraid, which made sense—except for what it seemed she was afraid of. Not of this place, but of… of our claim, I thought.
The longer we laid there, the more on edge she got until her anxiety had everyone uneasy. Phantom kept shooting me glances, and soon he was going to ask her what was wrong, if I didn’t get to it first.
He was sweet, but none of these alphas would be my first choice at broaching a delicate topic.
So that left me to shatter the silence—and hopefully not shatter the delicate little omega laying against me.
“What are you worried about?” I asked.
“I’m going to break everything,” she whispered. “You have your alphas, and now I’m here, and he’s already?—”
She cut off as I pressed my finger to her lips. “Baby girl,” I said, trying out another nickname, but… didn’t quite fit. I needed to find the perfect one. “You’re not breaking anything.”
Karma, mad as he was, was an alpha with convictions that bled right down to his instincts. If he didn’t, there was no way we wouldn’t have found him rutting her when we got back. Instead, she’d been forced to endure particularly vicious cuddles.
He could go from vicious to teddy bear in the blink of an eye, and when he did, well, I’d never met a more gentle alpha.
Crescent was lucky, just like I was. Karma, Phantom, and Vandle—they were special. There were no alphas in here like them.
I brushed his cheek for a moment, earning a curious, bright eye opening to peer up at me from where he still held us both in his arms. His pupils were still fully dilated.
“See, he’ll be okay,” I murmured. “You want to help?”
She nodded, but it looked like there was a lump in her throat. “Help him come back?” she asked.
“Yup.” He was feral for the moment, but that wasn’t unusual for him, even if it happened less frequently these days.
She lifted her hand, mirroring my comfort and cupping his cheek, to which a low purr rumbled in his chest. Her eyebrows shot up and she looked unsure. Her hand was shaking, though, and I saw such fear in her golden eyes.
“It’s not a rut, he just… got lost. That’s all.”
No one was in this place for no reason. Phantom was the most grounded. But Karma?
We were trying our best, knowing he needed to be more balanced if we wanted a hope of being let out by the time our appeal came. But by the state of his body and hormones, Phantom thought he’d come from illegal rut fighting rings. The New Oxford trafficking ring that pushed alphas to madness by making them fight in competition with one another.
The pack was balancing him, but it was slow progress. Crescent might have sent him into this state, but I read it as a good sign. He had connected with her quicker than I had, and that meant, if managed right, she just might bring him back.
Sure enough, he was already reacting to her proximity, a low purr rumbling to life as he shifted, arms tugging around her and drawing her against him.
I saw a nervous smile on her face for a moment—a flicker of delight, but then it vanished, and she shot me a guilty look as if she knew I’d seen it.
She carefully lowered her hand to his hair and he reacted in an instant, tilting his head and pressing his teeth to her neck again. She laughed, cheeks bright pink as his purr rose, but I didn’t catch any fear from her scent.
It was obvious she’d come from a place with a lot of rules and was touch starved like I’d never seen, but her instincts were bursting from her. The little nip she’d given me when I’d told her that her name was beautiful was testament to that.
She cupped Karma’s cheek, straightening and redirected him back to nuzzling her collarbones.
So, we settled in like that. Phantom stepped out for a short while, and I heard him with the Emerald and Wakefield pack outside. That was good, we needed to start shoring up alliances before anyone could undermine them. The door was cracked open, and I heard the occasional snippets of conversation.
The alphas locked in here with us would never accept a pack claiming two omegas—surviving until our appeal was now all but impossible.