Both men frowned.
“Omega x?” Jermaine said. “No, I can’t say that I have.” He looked to his spouse-mate, who remained quiet, brow furrowed. “Kris?”
“I…I have, actually. When I first started SOS. I’d forgotten about it.”
“Where did you hear it?” Jermaine asked him.
“I saw it written down. Do you recall reading about the first omegas the organization rescued? It was shortly after I joined the group. We’d received an anonymous tip that there was a pickup of registered omegas returning to the capital. Our team intercepted the car, and the driver had a list with him with three names and addresses on it. The wordomega xwas scrawled on the paper.We didn’t know what that meant or if it meant anything at all. We left the driver unconscious in his car and took the three omegas to our facility. Due to the circumstances, they couldn’t return home to their families—the government would just come back for them. So, we put them with foster betas.”
“Were you previously aware of people like Neil Havers and Bart Fothergill, who turned Ben and David, respectively, over to the government?” Maddox asked.
“No, and we don’t know how the government gets the word out so alphas like them can be recruited into turning over unregistered omegas. We did find out that Neil Havers had a lot of debt that his family wasn’t aware of, which explains why he wanted to leave the country.”
I shuddered, remembering how I had agreed to mate with Neil and he’d happily turned me over to a woman affiliated with the government before leaving the country.
“How did you hear the term omega x?” Jermaine asked.
“Elliott is one of the seven omegas who were kidnapped five years ago. He was the one singled out by the captors and whose omega father was also taken that night. Recently, he told us he heard the kidnappers say that his father was an omega x.” Laurawent on to explain the abilities Elliott believed both he and his omega father had, and that they believed Ben had them as well.
I was asked to explain about his dreams, premonitions, and supposed healings, and I did as well as I could.
“Couldn’t the part about Trey be explained by the omega bond?” Kristopher asked. “Alphas and omegas can feel each other over a bond.”
That was something I knew that David and Maddox had experienced.
“Only two of them had the feeling something was wrong, though,” Colt said. “If it was omega bonding, wouldn’t all of them have felt the danger to Trey?”
Looking at Laura, Kristopher said, “Could these abilities be something that all omegas innately have that they just haven’t tapped into?”
“I suppose that’s possible,” she said. “But Elliott overheard the kidnappers refer to his omega birth father as anomega x. And you saw the term written down. It has to mean something.”
“If they truly have the abilities that you’ve told us about, I’m sure there are people out there who want to exploit them,” Jermaine said. His gaze went to me. “Ben tells me he’s only five months along in his pregnancy and that you say, Laura, that he isn’t having multiples. Why is he so large?”
“His body is physically ready to give birth,” Laura said. “I’ve concluded that his gestational period is much shorter, but I have no idea why. Everything seems to be fine with the baby, but he could not have gotten pregnant any earlier.”
“Perhaps it has something to do with being an omega x,” Jermaine said.
“Perhaps.”
“The government has granted at least one other omega to someone in this town,” Colt said. “We’ve wondered if it’s tomake us look bad, in case we’re spewing conspiracies to our neighbors.”
“It could very well be,” Kristopher said.
There was a lull in the conversation, and Jermaine said, “I find your alpha/alpha/omega dynamic quite interesting, Mr. Angel.” He could have been addressing me, Angus, or Colt, since that was all of our names, but when he looked up, it was at Angus.
“I understand that it’s unusual.”
“I would have thought it to be impossible for two alphas to share a mate.”
“We don’t just share one, the three of us are married.”
“But not mated,” Kristopher specified.
“No. We might overcome that someday, though.”
I saw Colt glance at Angus when he said that and had to hide my smile. Angus was determined to get Colt to allow him to mount him one day.
Later that night, when the three of us settled into bed, Colt brought up what Angus had said.