Page 40 of Trust No Alpha
“All right. I’m not offering any.”
At his flat tone, I jerked my head forward and up, but he’d turned away to fiddle with something on the stove. Was he annoyed with me?
My pulse jumped. I hadn’t told him everything. It was none of his business, really. But then again, it was. Thorne was putting himself on the line to help me. Even if he thought it was nothing, that no one would ever know, or trace my new IP to here, he was still taking a risk. Vandergales were powerful. No one stood up to us and won. Ever.
I put my elbows on the countertop and rested my head in my hands. I was determined to begin whether he wanted to hear me or not. He deserved to know the truth.
“A week before my eighteenth birthday.” I kept my voice low, my eyes averted toward the countertop between my elbows. “Father called in the doctor for our six month check ups. I hated it. Every time. I hated it.” I paused to keep myself from giving away any emotion. “But I wasn’t afraid. I felt fine. Healthy. Ready for my final maturity. My first Burn.”
Maybe I didn’t show it, but all the words caught in my throat at that word. Burn. It had always been something to look forward to in the past. A rite of passage so to speak. But now it seemed like something dirty to me. Something awful and wrong. Something I might never experience except on the other end of things, like an Omega.
I could not suppress the shudder that undulated through my body from shoulders to toes.
Forcing myself to dissociate from that, I continued. “The doctor examined me and found something—something inside me. Hidden all this time. Dormant. Atrophied. Omega organs. Useless, but still there. Those organs redefined me to him, to Father, to myself. Staining me forever.”
Thorne did not look at me, but he stood motionless, facing the stove, focused and listening.
I swallowed against a dry throat and continued.
“I’d always been raised to be the perfect Alpha. In my mind I still was. And on the outside, I was perfect. Everything Father could be proud of. I stayed in shape. I got good grades. Nothing had changed in that way. And yet everything changed when the doctor diagnosed me. Even Father’s money could not hide this, I was told. If they surgically remove the organs I would still be marked. If Father paid the doctor off never to file his report on the results of my exam, it wouldn’t work, they said. When I turned eighteen my differences would show up in odd ways. I didn’t know this until I researched it for myself. The doctor was an asshole and no help to me. He seemed more concerned for Father to have to go through this.”
I let out a loud breath. It sounded like a groan.
“It is a lot for an eighteen year old to suddenly be saddled with.” Thorne’s quiet voice stroked its way through me. Strangely calming.
“Anyway, I looked it up. The scent is one of things that is a giveaway. I would not produce an Alpha scent to the world. I might or might not experience a Burn. With people like me, it’s fifty-fifty. And my looks would change a little. I’d grow softer, not harder, no matter how much I exercised or how much muscle I put on. It’s the hormones, you know. Also, people like me? We are usually solitary. We don’t seek mates because we aren’t full Omegas. We don’t have the natural Omega instinct to—um—how to put it—to bottom, or to procreate.”
I glanced out the corner of my eye to see if Thorne had any reaction. He stood over the stove, his hands clutching two hot pads, his head bowed.
I cleared my throat. “So that’s it. That’s my story. Father locked me away. Then he tried to—well, he attacked me because of the Burn. And Mathias, my brother, is an asshole, which I can see much clearer now than ever. He blamed me for Father’s attack on me. I knew I had to get out. If I wasn’t safe there, Father would have me sold to a farm, or have me institutionalized.”
Still no response from Thorne.
“That’s my story.”
Silence.
“Well?”
Thorne turned from the stove and looked at me. As he started to reach for me, I immediately glanced down again at the countertop, swaying away from him.
“It must have been terrible for you,” he said. He grabbed a cloth and began wiping down the top of the stove.
“It was. It is.” My chest felt tight. My eyes hurt.
“It’s interesting, though.”
“Interesting?”
“Fascinating, actually. I don’t mean to insult you, but I was thinking that you may have been hasty deciding something you read online defines you solely and fully. That you are doomed to never mate. That you are alien to this world.”
“But I am!”
“Because of some paragraph on some random website?”
“No. Because of what I told you. And my Omega designation, even though I’m not one. Even though I’m infertile.”
“Who says you’re infertile?”
