Page 24 of The Omega Princess

“You had to get things prepared?” I said. “What? You said to one person, ‘Get things prepared’?”

“Fuck you,” he said. He came for me.

I stayed where I was, thinking maybe he was going to hug me or pat my chest reassuringly or—

He just pushed past me into the sitting room area. He went over and sat next to his fireplace and fumbled with his remaining buttons.

I turned to face him but stayed in this doorway. Maybe I was staying here because I knew this was the most structural place in the middle of an earthquake.

He was quiet.

I waited.

Finally, I just said it, “So this is over, now.”

He snapped his gaze up to mine. “Don’t be like that.”

I held his gaze.

He looked away. “Come on, Rohan, you’ve always wanted it to be something it never was. It’s not over because it was never anything.”

“We talked, sometimes, about… if we found an omega that we could both knot for—”

“You knot for every omega you’ve ever seen, so don’t act as though you could possibly understand—”

“We talked about sharing,” I said.

He finished buttoning his shirt. He sighed heavily. “We did. I remember. But… she’s…”

“You don’t want to share her.”

“I don’t,” he said in a guttural voice, and I knew that voice, knew it because it was the voice I used when I talked about him.

He’s in love with the omega, I realized. And he’d never been in love with me, because this was Devlin in love. I knew that, I guessed. I always knew I liked him more than he liked me. Shit. Why did this hurt so bad?

“I mean, that’s not even realistic, though,” he said with a sigh. “She’ll go into heat, and she’ll need… omegas always need more. No one alpha is ever enough for an omega in heat. So, you know, don’t despair.” He gave me a shrug. “You’ll get a taste, I think.”

“But she’ll be yours,” I said. “Only one bite for her. Just yours.”

“I feel like we have a bond,” he said.

“You feel like that because she’s the only omega you ever got a knot for,” I said.

“Well, that’s got to mean something, right?” he said. “I mean, you don’t get it. You’re not defective—”

“I hate it when you say that kind of shit about yourself,” I said with a sigh. He angsted over it a lot, of course, and with good reason. We’d traveled all over, to various countries, meeting all the omegas we could, hoping he could mate with one of them, because all alphas craved omegas. I craved one, obviously, but…

Anyway, each time he couldn’t, he got more dejected. It was something all other alphas did, getting a knot in the presence of an omega. He never did.

Maybe I had interpreted it in some shitty way, now that I thought about it. Maybe I’d thought he was sort of… meant for me, because of it? He knotted for alphas. He knotted for me. So, I thought somehow this meant he was mine, and that someday, he was just going to wake up and realize it.

But alphas can’t possess other alphas, not in that way.

We can mate with omegas, and omegas can possess us, but another alpha? He was never going to be mine.

What a fucking idiot I’d been.

“Yeah,” he said. “Maybe I’m not defective at all. Maybe I’ve just been waiting for her.”

---