Page 10 of Omega's Heart
Julius shrugged at my choice and sat down on the couch. “If that’s what you want to watch.” He observed me with narrow, puzzled eyes. “Couldn’t find a mate?” he said finally. The words should have sounded harsh, but somehow they didn’t. It was a statement of fact, and saved me so many hundreds of words of explanation that even if he had been cruel I would have forgiven him for it, simply for not making me rehash the whole situation again. Because it still stung even though I thought I’d come to terms with it and I didn’t want to poison my first few days here wishing for things I could never have.
“Just too darn big,” I agreed and raised my glass to my nose to sniff it. It smelled sharp, like fruit but not. “This is wine!”
“I said it was, didn’t I?” Julius sipped at his glass. “They mostly drink cider here, or beer. I like the cider. The beer, not so much. But I found this in the back of my closet.” He wrinkled his nose, which was cute on him but something that would have looked absolutely ridiculous on me. “I don’t think it’s very good.”
“Me neither.” I tasted it carefully, a larger sip, then put the glass down on the table and sat beside Julius. “What is it like here?” I asked. It wasn’t the greatest question, but I couldn’t quite figure out how to get at what I wanted to know.
“Trying to figure out if you made a mistake?” Julius huffed a breath and glared at the wine before setting it down beside mine. “No, it’s pretty good here. I mean, they’ve been good to me. And my sister. I think it’s expensive, what they’re doing.” He laid his cheek against his forearm and stared off into the distance. “I hope she’s okay. They won’t let her have my letters, though Holland sometimes sneaks a note to her through the pack’s lawyer.”
“Can I ask what happened?” I kept my voice gentle, tried to make it plain that he could say no if he wanted and I wouldn’t get angry. The gentle giant, that’s me.
He sighed again and closed his eyes. “My parents are weird. I mean, I guess all omega parents are, but mine were really bad. They insisted on me doing my coursework at home with Mom teaching me, and I was sixteen before they’d let me go to the dances. I had to have my bedroom door open all the time when people were over, and they locked me in at night. To protect me, you know.”
I didn’t, but I nodded. Given Julius’ appearance, I could see why his parents would be more careful of him than mine had been of me. I could have bent an attacker in half by the time I was twelve. “So, you were pretty sheltered,” I prompted him. “It must have been bad if your sister smuggled you outside walls.”
“She’s great. I love her so much.” He lifted his head but still didn’t meet my eyes, instead watching his own fingers as they picked at the folds of the fabric on the back of the couch. “I’m going to be eighteen this spring. My parents finally started letting me go to Full Moon dances, but I always had to have a chaperone, right?”
“Well, that’s normal,” I began.
“Maybe, but it just seemed weird. Like, you know, when you have questions you can’t ask your parents, so you go to your omega friends?”
I nodded, and a sick feeling started in my stomach as the first inklings of where this story was going began to appear in my mind.
Julius kept talking like it was nothing, and I got the feeling that it wasn’t the second or even the fourth time he’d told this story. “So they wouldn’t even give me alone time with other omegas, but they’d take me around places where there were alphas looking for a mate.” He frowned and picked up his glass, taking a larger drink than maybe he should have. “I thought it was normal, you know? Introduce me to alphas, let me find someone who I might get along with. They were all older but I figured they wanted to make sure I got a dependable mate. I thought they were being nice, looking out for my future.”
He drank another mouthful of the wine and I began to wonder about getting the glass away from him because he was starting to droop a little around the edges. I’d seen it before on Full Moon nights when someone overindulged. Somehow, I didn’t think Julius was going to enjoy tomorrow morning when the aftermath of this obviously cheap wine settled in. But we weren’t friends yet, and I thought this might be my best chance to hear his story, unvarnished and unedited.
“But Minnie wasn’t so sure. I mean, we weren’t rich at all. Neither of my parents had any real skills in the pack. Sometimes they didn’t even have work and we just lived on the stipend, you know? So she kept listening and, eventually, my name came up. She came to me one night and told me about it and we did what we could to find out everything there was to know about him. And then we ran, because it just felt off.” He tilted his head back and drank again, several long swallows, before coming up for air. “I should have just gone out and slept with the first alpha I saw.” He stared moodily at the glass, swirling the wine around in it like a tiny whirlpool.
It was a weird story, with just enough right in it to ring true, except for the timing. “Your parents were planning this for a while, then?” A couple of years at least, from his words.
Julius shook his head. “I don’t know. Maybe? Maybe not? I know they didn’t approve of the new way of raising omegas, the flirting and omegas having a say in their matings. That’s Mercy Hills’ fault, you know.” His words were blurry around the edges and I rescued the glass just before he spilled wine all over himself. “I was fine if they wanted to pick a good alpha, not like I have any idea what makes a good mating or a good mate for that matter. But it creeped me out that he wanted me so...so...” His words stumbled to a halt and he frowned.
“Isolated,” I supplied.
His eyes flew up to meet mine, wide with sudden understanding, and he nodded slowly as if his brain was working too fast to have any speed left over for his body. “Yes. Isolated. That’s a good word for it.” He stared moodily down at his hands. “He was rich, you know. Had a fishing boat and a nice house. My parents didn’t have much and Mom told me at least once a week that my looks were Lysoonka’s gift to them, to make sure they were cared for when they were old. That it was my responsibility to make sure they were taken care of, because they’d taken care of me. My Granpa used to tell stories about omega babies being put in baskets and left to drift away on the tide.” He shivered and took a deep breath, his eyes closed. “I think I’m going to go to bed.”
“That might be a good idea,” I said and helped him down the hall and out of his clothes. I’d seen alphas in this state of inebriation before, though it usually took a lot more to get them drunk than it had with Julius; I didn’t think he was in any danger. Probably have a headache tomorrow, but that would just be a lesson to him.
Just in case, I rolled him over on his side and braced him with his pillows so that if he did get sick it would be easy for him to lean over the edge of the bed and throw up onto the floor. As an afterthought, I spread a towel out on the floor and put the biggest pot I could find on top of it. Then I went back to the living room, dumped out the rest of the wine, washed the glasses and put them away, and made myself comfortable on the couch to watch my cartoon and not think at all.
C H A P T E R 8
I spent my first three weeks at Mercy Hills getting to know the place and some of the other omegas, and taking tests so they could decide whether I had enough schooling. I wasn’t particularly surprised when I passed them all, even if a few of them were just by the skin of my teeth. I was ten years out of school, after all, but I’d never been stupid and back home they’d let me take whatever courses I’d wanted in high school. At the time, I’d wondered if they’d thought of some special role for me in the pack or if they’d realized I was as smart and capable as the alphas. Years later, it had occurred to me that they’d just decided already that I wasn’t likely ever to be mated, so it didn’t matter if I took history classes along with my Pup Welfare ones.
Julius was a puzzle. Cale an even bigger one. I liked both of them but they were just so strange.
With Julius I could kind of understand it. Mercy Hills had to be terrifying for him. Maybe not as terrifying as the prison they’d kept him in or the mating he’d been destined for, but the more we talked, the more I realized how incredibly sheltered he’d been.
And Cale. For just a couple of days, I suspected him of having an unnatural obsession with Julius. That kind that had the young alphas and betas making dirty comments on Full Moon when they didn’t think anyone was around to hear them. I’d quickly discarded the idea myself, but after overhearing the young ones making lewd comments about Cale and Julius, I’d respectfully asked to speak to Holland about it. Even at less than a month’s acquaintance, I could already guess what Cale’s response to hearing what was being said about the two of them would be.
Inappropriate was only the beginning of it.
Holland had invited me to sit next to him on his couch. He listened to me with a grave attention that reminded me a lot of his mate, then leaned back on the couch, stroking his belly thoughtfully while his toddler played at his feet. “Thank you, Felix,” he’d said quietly. “I’ll see that the rumors stop before they come to Julius’s ears. Or Cale’s.” He sighed, then, suddenly less the Alpha’s Mate and more the tired, pregnant omega. “It would serve them right if I marched out there and told Cale about it. But I don’t want to deal with a couple of murders. Not at least until after the baby is born.”
“Would he even know who it was?” I asked, trying to make the point that he didn’t need to worry.
Holland nodded. “I’d tell him.” He leaned awkwardly over to take something from his little boy and hide it behind his back while he distracted the pup with a different toy. “You have to understand that until we can be certain all the ground we’ve gained so far isn’t lost, we have to be careful of how we allow others to view us.”
