Page 89 of Cost of Courting

She keeps stirring and then sets it aside and pulls out oven trays and sets them on the table. With amusement, I watch as she starts rolling out balls of cookie dough.

“Yes, there is an ‘us’. As much as you and Bailey would wish there wasn’t.”

“Bonds mean nothing,” Bailey grumbles.

“What he said.”

I shake my head, amused by the pair of them. “My therapist would have a field day with you two.”

Selene whips her head towards me so fast it briefly worries me that she might have hurt herself.

“You have a therapist?”

“I do.”

“For the thing that happened that you won’t tell me?”

I push off the counter and move towards her so that I can feel her warmth. “Yes.”

She opens her mouth, but I put a finger to her lips.

“I will tell you but not right now.”

She frowns. “Fine. But just because you bit us, doesn’t make us a pack.”

“What’s going to make us a pack?” Edric asks.

She glances at him and down at the tray. “Commitment, seeing it through, being reliable, present, truthful, choosing to stay. You know, all the things you threw away last time.”

“When are you going to stop going on about this?”

“When are you going to prove you aren’t going to cut and run the minute another fancy ass omega walks by?”

“You have bonds,” I start to explain, but she cuts me off.

“Yeah, doesn’t mean shit.”

“It means something to me,” Kingston says. “It means I choose you. Forever. I’m not going anywhere. That is my ring, my house, my bank account. It’s my soul and my heart, my friendship and dreams. And they are all riding on you now. So don’t say my bond means nothing. My bond means everything.”

Kingston storms out of the house, his pain making the air in the room thick.

“We’ve said we are sorry, Selene,” Edric says quietly. “We’ve explained that there were mitigating circumstances. We’re the same people you always knew. We’re back home, and we’re not leaving you. You need to trust us.”

Selene stops moving and tenses her shoulders. “You think it’s that easy? You didn’t just leave, you broke me. I am in love with you, and you left. You just walked away. When you left, everything changed. Within a couple of years, the Crimson Cobras were pushing into the neighbourhood. Dad had no one to stop him from his mean ways. Life got harder for everyone here when you left. But you, you took my reason for living away. You made this place unbearable, and then I had to live in it. I had to keep breathing. I had to find something that would get me up and keep me fighting.”

She looks at me.

“I don’t know if you mean it this time. If you’ll stay. But-”

I step into her space, reaching to cup her cheek. She thrashes her head and ducks away from me.

“Do you know that it’s not just people that can break your heart?” she snarls. “Every single day since you left, I have to be reminded of the million memories we have together. Kingston’s house is just there, and my bedroom still mourns the presence of you. Edric bled on this very floor! I didn’t get to live here. I got to learn how to exist through the agony of you being gone and being hers!”

“Except we were never hers!” Edric shouts.

It’s the first time I’ve seen him lose his temper in a very long time. The echoes of his rage hangs in the air, and I am given no choice but to prepare to step into the space and reveal the truth I’ve been containing, to face the shame and pain and broken parts of me again.

“We weren’t hers,” Edric continues, looking at me long and hard.

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