Page 58 of Omega Hunted

I didn’t look at him directly.

“It’s okay,” I said.

“I shouldn’t have done that.” He’d turned partly away, elbows on his knees. He stopped. Tried again. “I’m not usually…” That sentence didn’t make it anywhere either, or he gave up. He was hard, and I looked away, and he made it worse by very obviously noticing that I’d noticed, and a muscle jumped in his jaw. “Just the morning. Ignore it.”

“I am,” I said, which wasn’t entirely true, but that wasn’t anything either of us needed to talk about.

He got to his feet, cupping himself, and moved toward the door, then stopped with his back to me. I could see the tension across his shoulders, the set of his neck.

“Do you want to come down for breakfast?”

Was he hoping he’d be able to avoid me? “I’ll come down,” I murmured.

“Sure,” he said, and went.

A shower helped, or at least it gave me something to do, and maybe delayed going down. He’d left so fast, shocked at what his wolf had done in the night, and I’d shamelessly buried myself in his arms. We’d have to deal with the awkwardness like adults, but yeah, I’d slowed down my shower anyway. I stood under the water until the temperature dropped, still running on the emotional residue of the morning, the scent of Cassian slow to wash away, my cat sulking about the loss of it. I’d cried in an alpha’s arms. I’d stolen his warmth while he slept. I’d listened to him say another man’s name. Raff. Of course, he’d say another man’s name—he wasn’t my alpha. I turned my face into the water and didn’t think about it.

A sharp slice of pain across my abdomen drove the breath out of me, and I grabbed the shower rail with both hands and bent over it, waiting. My legs were unsteady. Asha was still. The water kept running, loud against the tiles, and I hung over the rail and counted my heartbeats and told myself to wait, just wait, don’t spiral until there’s something to spiral about.

Nothing followed.

The pain didn’t build. Didn’t repeat. Eased from sharp to a dull pressure and then to nothing at all, and I stayed bent over the rail for another full minute just to be sure, my hair in my face and the water turning cold and Asha apparently unbothered, resuming her usual occupation of pushing steadily into my ribs.

“You terrified me,” I told her. “Not yet, okay?”

I turned the water off, found a towel, and stood in front of the fogged mirror while my heartbeat settled, examining my bruises. Diagonally across my chest, from shoulder to opposite hip in shades that had moved from deep purple to yellow and were now fading. They’d be gone soon, and the car accident would just be a memory.

“I’m not ready for you to come out yet, Asha,” I whispered to my belly.

Soon. My cat answered. I’d learned the biology from books and the detailed intake assessment at Center 14. A cat shifter’s pelvic structure began shifting in the third trimester, cartilage loosening at the joints in a process that ran closer to mid-shift than to human anatomy, enough that birth in human form was possible, messy and hard but possible, and Asha was positioned well for it. My body knew what it was doing even if I didn’t. The pain was probably just a practice run.

“Not yet,” I repeated to Asha.

If it happened now, it wouldn’t be a crisis; it would be a manageable birth. They happened; shifter babies came early all the time and some of them were fine.

“I can do this,” I said, summoning every ounce of bravery and conviction I had, and I breathed until my heart rate dropped to something reasonable, and I reminded myself that the pains hadn’t come back, and I should go downstairs.

My cat was already waiting.

“I don’t want things to be awkward,” I blurted at the kitchen door before I was even properly in the room. Cassian was at the stove with his back to me, and he was wearing sweatpants and nothing else. He was broad, wide across the shoulders and back, and I’d been held against that chest in the dark, and it had felt like heaven. He had a large tattoo on his back, a detailed wolf howling at the moon, with the name in block lettering. Rafferty.

Raff, my cat murmured.

A spike of jealousy and irrational despair carved into me that this beautiful, strong alpha wasn’t mine. It wasn’t fair.

He turned.

“It’s not awkward.” He lied so badly that my cat’s ears went up. “Are you okay?” He was already moving to the table, setting down a plate of toast cut into triangles, and then went back for butter, jelly in two flavors, a jar of chocolate spread, and a dish of honey. There was a halved orange and an apple on a separate plate, along with dried fruit, and then a pot of yogurt.

“I’m okay. I slept well.”

He bit his lip. “I heard your nightmares,” he said, not quite meeting my eyes. “My wolf knew something was wrong.”

“Instinct,” I said. “That’s all.”

“Yeah.”

Cassian ate standing at the counter while I worked through the toast in small pieces and managed most of the orange and tried not to think about what happened upstairs or the name Raff. My cat got there first. He’d been watching Cassian since we came downstairs, quiet and attentive in a way he rarely was, ears up, processing something.