Page 44 of Alpha's Embrace
This was crazy. I needed to go home. I need to take some time off.
Misha’s eyelids fluttered. His blond curls slid across his pillow as he moved his head from one side to the other. He moaned and his lips formed a grimace.
As he slowly woke, I pressed my palm to his hand, covering it. I didn’t think about the motion. My hand simply moved.
Our contact made my insides flare up, as if I were in the Burn. But I was not.
“You came back.” Misha smiled through his pain, his pretty blue eyes still glazed.
“I find myself unable to leave your side.”
“That’s a problem, isn’t it?”
The question sounded so innocent. But Misha was not impaired. He was intelligent. Highly intelligent. He knew what was going on as much as I did, perhaps clearer than I did because he would be without my denial.
“It is.” I needed to be honest with him even if I had no answers.
“For the first time in my life, I’m sorry for what I am,” he said.
“You should not be sorry,” I said. Then I heard myself continue as if all the filters had been removed from my brain. And all sense. “You’re the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen. A treasure. Smart, kind, with a bigger heart than anyone. You’re a treasure. Misha, you’re perfect.”
“I’m not. I’m a monster and you shouldn’t have ever touched me. You’re marked by me and it can only harm you. I understand now why you need to stay away. You tried and now you must try harder.”
Misha only wanted to love. He was made of love. He was life itself.
“You might see it that way, but I don’t,” I said.
Sylphs were too sensitive for this world. It was why they went mad. Why they often expressed themselves through violence. They felt everything around them with more sensitivity than the normal Alpha or Omega.
The post-pubescent Sylphs suffered a continual Burn. That meant all their senses were forever on high alert. That was their only crime. Nature had caused them to exist. At some point in our evolution after the females had all died out, they must have had a purpose. They had a place in society. But our history told nothing of it.
Misha gave me a soft smile, as if he’d been watching—and participating—in my thoughts all along. “There’s nothing we can do about this. I know it. But why does it feel like a bond is forming?”
“You shouldn’t worry so. That’s my job.” I couldn’t tell him yet. He didn’t need to know about my blood test and worry even more.
“This, what is happening with us, isn’t your job,” he replied softly. “I will always worry about you. Whatever you’re thinking that you can’t tell me. Whatever you’re feeling.”
“You need to try to think of other things.”
“So do you. But you can’t, can you, any more than I can?”
I shook my head.
“So now what? We suffer?”
I pressed my palm tighter against his hand and made no reply.
Suffering. The future looked to be filled with it. I’d already suffered when Mase was taken away from me. I’d been sixteen. Too young to Burn. Too young to form a real bond. But I’d never stopped feeling the pain of it.
Now this. What had I done to piss off all the gods?
And Misha? He deserved none of this.
My mind cried out with a thousand questions. There was an easy solution. Take Misha. Make him mine in the Burn. Bond with him. Why did it have to be any more complicated than that? I was an Alpha. I should have my way. I should be able to bond with whomever I wanted. Whoever called to my being.Take what is mine!Those words were part of the old oaths, from before modern civilization. From a time when Alphas, maddened by the Burn and the lust for a single Omega, battled in grit and blood and primordial urging to the death. Battled to claim what was theirs by right. No other Alpha could stop him except by death. Combat ended when only one heart was left behind and one Alpha stood amid the carnage of his claim.
If only it were that easy. Combat. Claims. They sounded straight-forward and uncomplicated even if they ended in bloody violence.
I was educated, well-mannered, even-tempered. I’d never had such thoughts!
