Page 43 of Omega Hunted

“Talk to him, Cass. His brother Emric is the Patriarch, and he’s privately throwing millions at anyone who can find Soren and the baby. I think he’s connected me to the ORT, but I’ve managed to drag him off in the wrong direction for the moment, but that’s all it is, a delay. He’s got unlimited money, unlimited reach, and he’ll burn through anyone who gets in his way. The ORT… there’s a leak… I don’t know where to even start searching, but Raff filed plans on the house okay, so if someone looks hard enough… Fuck I have to go. Whatever you’re imagining…” He paused. “Think bigger. It’s worse.”

It was way worse, and I’d already come to that conclusion myself. Without a legitimate pure-blooded heir, the Kastor empire would begin to rot from the top down. Their claim to leadership would be challenged, rival bloodlines would seize the opportunity, and the power the Kastor family had spent a lifetime consolidating would start slipping through the new Patriarch’s fingers. And Raff had registered the house with ORT? Of course he had, his grand plan was for it to be on the Haven Network, but surely no one would have looked at the plans since he died?

The recording clicked off without a goodbye.

Too many questions, too much to worry about.

Chapter Fifteen

SOREN

Cassian had left earlier as if the hounds of hell were on his tail, and I faced the room knowing that whatever kind of library this space was meant to be had come to nothing. The heat of the fire hadn’t reached the corners of the big bare room yet, and it wasn’t good for sitting in, even if the chair Cassian said I should use was comfortable. I was distracted because Cassian wasn’t here, and I tried everything to refocus my energy. Boxes were stacked along every wall, books shoved sideways on shelves that were mostly empty, floorboards pale in the winter light through the north-facing glass. The two chairs faced the window, and nothing else had ever been arranged around them. Boxes never opened, nothing put away, dust thick enough in the corners to mean years.

As to the chair, I tried a pillow on the right side, then the left, then tucked it behind me and lower. Each time the relief lasted until I shifted or breathed or Asha pressed somewhere new, and no combination of pillows was going to fix it. Thirty-three weeks now, and it wasn’t enough. Every ache convinced me she was coming too soon, and every quiet hour afterward felt borrowed.

Center 14 might have been my prison, but it had a medical suite, emergency operating rooms, and staff who’d spent years training for this. There was nothing like that here, and I had to be honest with myself—I wasn’t going to be able to leave in time to get over the border. Outside, the snow fell so thickly the trees beyond the meadow faded in and out of sight. It was beautiful until I remembered there was no neighbor over the hill, no farmhouse beyond the woods, no road I could reach if I suddenly changed my mind and ran. There was only Cassian’s house and miles of white.

Wasn’t this place just as much my prison as Center 14 and, before it, my family’s home?

Read something, my cat said.

Calm.

“In a minute.” He put his head back down. He wasn’t settled either—I could feel him restless behind my ribs.

To pass the time; I went through some of the boxes. History. Military tactics. A thick paperback on wilderness medicine, spine cracked. I set it aside. Someone had made margin notes in pencil inside the front cover of an omega law book published over eighty years ago, and I closed it without reading. There was no law favoring Omegas and never had been. Near the bottom of one box were two copies of the same novel—one barely touched, one read to pieces—and I held them both for a moment without knowing what to do with them, then put them back. I took three books I thought I might read, the blanket from the chair arm, and went upstairs to the one place I felt safe—my room.

It was warmer, and even though the nest had slipped when I left it, with pillows scattered and the top blanket pulling at the corner, my cat settled the moment I stepped through the door.

Safe, he said.

Rebuilding took a few minutes. Pillows just right, the blanket from the library folded double and laid on top, the rolled duvet wedged at my back to take the pressure off my spine. I eased down into the center of it and felt my body start to relax by slow degrees, the ache still there but bearable now, and I got my hands under my belly and adjusted.

“Better,” I told her when Asha kicked.

Outside, the light was flat and white, and the snow kept coming. I’d been facing the huge floor to ceiling window, watching the tree line east of the house for a while before I realized I was doing it—just watching, tired and unable to settle, tracking the dark line of the pines where Cassian had pointed, thankful I had the same view as from the wannabe library. I didn’t know how long he’d been out there. Long enough that the fire had settled from crackling to a low steady burn, and the room had gone quiet.

Then something moved at the tree line, and I peered over the edge of the nest.

A wolf came out of the pines at a steady lope, big and dark against all that white, and I lay still and watched Cassian cross the open ground, and I rolled out of my little haven so I could see him come to the house. It took a while to get there, but I was in time to watch the shift happen, the bulk of him folding and reconfiguring until Cassian was standing there in the snow on two feet, naked, and breathing hard from the cold. He stood for a moment with his head down, rolled his neck, then came inside.

I’d only shifted fully once, long enough for my designation to be revealed, and then nothing. My father had taken it from me with pills slipped into my food, into my drinks, every day of my life until I’d almost forgotten what freedom felt like. My cat had paced behind walls I couldn’t see, growing quieter with every passing month until I’d started to wonder if he’d died in there.

My throat closed.

I’d mourned him.

Silent tears blurred my vision. All those nights in my room, wondering why I felt so empty, why I couldn’t feel him anymore. I’d thought I was broken. Thought there was something wrong with me. All the while they’d been drugging me, stealing the one part of me that had never belonged to them.

My chest hitched hard enough to hurt.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered, though I didn’t know whether I was speaking to my cat, the boy I’d been, or the years we’d both lost. “I’m so sorry.”

Grief crashed over me, raw and endless. Not for the pregnancy. Nor my family or fear. Not even for the prison I’d escaped. I cried for every sunrise my snow leopard had never seen. Every run through fresh snow we’d never taken. Every choice, every season, every piece of our life that had been stolen before we’d ever had the chance to live it. I stepped back from the window and lay back down, and the number came back. Two million.

I was fourteen when I presented. The examiner came to the house, came to my room, and I stood in the center of the rug while she went about her work, and she didn’t ask my name or whether I was frightened. She poked and prodded and took blood, and my parents watched as I shifted my first and only time. They’d already given up on me as soon as it was obvious I was omega, but at least I had some kind of future—a quiet arranged marriage or a life of service.

My life changed the moment the doctor pronounced the verdict.