Page 136 of Omega's Flight
"If it helps," Quin said. "This changed the path of my life, made me pull my head out of the guilt and the anger long enough to see the omega in front of my eyes. And once I did that, the rest of it fell into place. I'm not saying it won't be work, because I'm still working at it, but it gets better. And we're all here to help you."
"I'm not angry," I retorted, grabbing on the one thing I could refute in his speech.
"No?" He raised his eyebrows and sat back. "Really? No anger in there at all?" His eyes stayed on me, quiet like a hunter stalking, waiting for his prey to come to him.
I wasn't angry. Omegas didn't get angry, I'd been told that all my life... "Oh."
"You probably don't recognize it as anger. Holland said he didn't. I knew what it was, but couldn't bring myself to deal with it, so I shoved it aside. It didn't do me any good." He reached across and tapped something on the computer again. "You've got a lot more reason to be angry and I bet it's been eating at you for years." The screen brightened and then I saw the face of a young woman in nice clothes, a light colored wall and some plants behind her. "Your therapist."
She smiled, though I noticed her eyes flicked over me as if looking for differences between me and the humans she knew. "Hello, Raleigh. My name's Francine. Would you like to talk for a while?"
I glanced over at Quin, and thankfully he understood. "I'll go, but Bax is in the other room if you want company. Or you can just call out to him when you need to and he'll come in."
"Thank you," I said in a voice barely above a whisper. "I think I'd like it, if he could be here. Just for the first part."
"I'll tell him to come in." He smiled and patted me on the hand. "And you're welcome. In every meaning of the word."
C H A P T E R 9 4
I t was October. The air was getting colder and I was huddled in my bedroom with a blanket wrapped around me so I didn't have to turn on the heat yet. "I still don't want to be mated again," I told Francine.
"And you think that Cas will be upset?" She sipped at her coffee, giving me time to collect my thoughts. Not that there were many of them.
In the four months since I'd apparently tried to wish myself to death, the pack had paid for me to speak to this human woman twice a week, sometimes three times if I was feeling shaky. Lately, though, I'd been growing less reliant on her, and I wondered if Holland was still combing through my brain, wiping away the emotions that had driven me to that extreme. I was okay with it and had told him so, but unlike Quin, I didn't want to know when he was doing it.
“He says he isn’t, but he's an alpha, you know?" She didn't really, not like we did, but we spent a lot of time talking about how things worked in the packs and I did my best to explain the way things had worked in my old pack and in Jackson-Jellystone, and how it was different here. A couple of times, I'd even had some of the other omegas sit in, and it turned into a discussion of something Francine called sociology and psychology. Today, we were talking sociology, of a sort. "I mean, some alphas wouldn't care if they ruined an omega's reputation. It wouldn't do them any good with the elders of the pack, but the ones that would do that are usually the ones that wouldn't be rising high in the pack anyway."
"And that's not Cas." It was a statement, not a question. She'd heard enough about Cas from me to know where my heart stood. He was mine, as in I would cry blood on anyone who tried to take him from me, even if that was traditionally more of an alpha thing. But I wasn't ready not to have an escape route, and a mating would close that path to me.
Except I wanted his pup.
Something deep inside craved a pup from him, like I needed to complete that interrupted pregnancy to feel complete in myself. But doing that would tie me to him as tightly as a ceremony and a contract. And I wanted that, I did, I just wanted to be able to run if I needed the space. I hadn't needed it yet, but every time I tried to imagine being mated to him, that heavy smothering feel of my first mating returned.
"No, it's not. I don't think it is. I still don't really understand Mercy Hills. Not like I should."
"Have you talked to Bax or Holland about it?"
"No. I should, huh?"
"They seem to keep your secrets well, and they're fond of your boyfriend and of you. I expect they'd be a good resource."
She was probably right. I nodded and sipped from my mug of tea, still warm despite the chill in the air.
Francine picked up that I was done for now with that topic. She was good at that. "How are you and Degan getting along?"
I shrugged. "'Bout the same." He still thought this was just a phase of mine, this determination not to come home with him. But he was getting comfortable here in Mercy Hills, living in his house, working with Mac. I'd noticed more of the old Degan, the one who'd courted me in Nevada Ashes. "I've started wondering if Jackson-Jellystone was as bad for him as it was for me."
"What do you mean by that?"
I traced the shape of the touchpad beneath my fingertips. "He's different here. Not entirely different, but enough that I wonder if the alpha I was mated to is the alpha he could have been."
"You think he got a little bit of the omega treatment?" She smiled and sipped at her coffee, her eyebrows quirked.
I laughed softly at the joke. "Maybe." It was something to think about. "His family weren't rich. He really wanted to be a success. Taught himself how to work on cars, was pretty good at it as much as I could tell. Took whatever jobs he could in order to save money, paid for that house we lived in. It was old and pretty run-down, but we both worked at it, at least for the first couple of years." When had Degan stopped caring about the house? About the time that Pip had been born, I thought. I hadn't realized it at the time, but looking back with a clearer mind, I could see when it started, when more of the burden of the decaying house had fallen upon me. "I've seen him out working on the house Mercy Hills gave him. Paint, new boards." I sipped my tea. "I've started wondering, if I could convince him to give up on me, would he want to stay here and would we be able to keep this up? Like the pack's human lawyer and his wife, that isn't his wife anymore."
"You mean have a divorce, and shared custody?"
I nodded.
