Chapter 36
The dinner was bust, probably just used to validate our presence in the private room, but no one felt like eating after that. Ari sat there, completely miserable, tears streaming down her face, until Orion said he would take her home. Back to the shit that caused those tears, back to the people who would hurt her.
“Not long now,” he said, kissing the top of her head, then leading her out of the room. “The meal is paid for. Enjoy.”
“Come to the hotel,” I said, Orion freezing mid step. He frowned, then looked down at us. “After you’ve… If this is goodbye, you owe your mates more than food we can’t eat and a problem we have no role in solving. Ari…”
She turned to look at me, the misery on her face a fucking gut punch, and what the hell could I do? My own mother was alive as long as there was hope of me doing what Benson wanted, another reason for this dinner, I assumed. Like, it made sense, all of it, but fuck…
“I hope Orion makes it hurt, when he turns on Benson,” I said.
The tears stopped momentarily, a hard gleam rising there instead. She just gave me a sharp nod and then walked out with Orion.
And so there we were, staring at the spread before us, the shapes of the food incomprehensible lumps with odd smells now. It wasn’t that they’d changed. Anyone else in the restaurant would have been glad to have this banquet before them, but we weren’t the people that walked in the door not that long ago. Someone had told me that back in the sixties in the States, it was customary to call out the phrase ‘dead man walking’ when a prisoner was being taken to the electric chair. It seemed such a weird thing to do, but the phrase fit now. I looked back at the door where Orion had disappeared, and found the others doing the same.
If Orion did this, he wouldn’t make it out alive. He’d either be locked up, rotting away for the rest of his life, all that was him dying every day there were bars on his window, or… I could see it clearly, him emerging from the same darkened room Benson had led me into, hands bloodied, the security hired for the event raising their guns, shouting at him to get down as he walked closer.
I jolted back to the here and now at the sound of gunshots in my mind.
“Let’s get out of here,” Rhys said. “Bren, grab the envelope. Not leaving shit like that lying around.”
“Let’s go get you that kebab, love,” Brendan said to me, helping me to my feet, escorting me outside.
We did, but it lay in its aluminium foil wrapper on the little table inside the living area. Everyone collapsed onto the couch, clustered close, the TV on, but no one watched. It was the door that had our attention, then the knock came. Rhys got up first, moving to open it, Bren grabbing a gun he had sitting on the table and following him. But there was no Benson, no fucked-up alpha waiting there, just ours. They stood there, my two alphas, looking Orion up and down, and then Rhys nodded, opening the door and letting him in.
This wasn’t the same Orion. His tie was wrenched loose, his shirt unbuttoned, his cuffs rolled up unevenly over his forearms, but his face was the clincher. He stared at us, with eyes phosphorescent green, hungry eyes that stored away every detail. The eyes of a soon to be dead man.
“I wasn’t going to come.” He snorted at that, looking at the ground. “I wasn’t supposed to do so much. I wasn’t going to introduce you to Ari or have dinner. I wanted you to go into this having someone to blame. If you hated me” —his gaze flicked up, meeting each of ours directly— “then you could go forward with a common enemy. I was what got between you. It was my father that fucked things up. I was the problem, and then I would be gone and you would be free. That was the plan. It was a good plan, so why couldn’t I follow it?”
His eyes fell back to the carpet, his hands clenching and releasing, until finally, he shoved them into his pockets.
“I’ve failed at every damn thing I was supposed to do. I was to be the one who would legitimise and protect our pack with my name, and instead, I brought my father’s wrath down on us. When he pushed me towards Cyn, I was meant to keep her at arm’s length, introduce her to potential alphas, find someone with an important enough family to protect her, and then it wouldn’t be my fault when she found someone else.” He smiled, but it was a desperate dark thing. “But that was the first plan to fall by the wayside.”
He looked at Bren, then Rhys, something horribly vulnerable there.
“She saw you, scented you, and she wanted you, like anyone with any fucking sense would. And you wanted her. I thought it was just because she was an omega. Fuck, it would’ve been easier if that were true. That’s when it all went to shit for me—when I met you.”
Now I was on the receiving end of Orion’s gaze, and I had to admire the guys’ restraint, staying by my side as he stared. Orion looked broken, an aching need so intense there in his eyes that everything that had gone before didn’t feel like it mattered.
It did, I knew it did. Letting it go was stupid and potentially harmful to me, but this was part of who and what I was—I saw someone I cared about in pain, and I wanted to go to him.
“Cyn…” He frowned a little, looking down at the fl
oor, then back. “Fuck, Cyn…”
“We know that feeling, love,” Rhys rumbled, but his hand held mine, keeping me where I was.
“I was supposed to protect you, but that fell apart the moment we walked into the club. You felt so small when I wrapped my arm around you, your focus completely on me when I explained the BDSM scenes to you. You were wide-eyed and naïve and critical and questioning all at the same time, and how was I supposed to resist that?”
He laughed, just one sharp bark, his head shaking.
“I didn’t even make it one day. I smelled your scent and theirs when we got into the office, saw Rhys talk you through things as Marcus pulled out my cock, that had been aching for you since we met. Our scents, they mixed into something I’ll keep with me until the very end.”
He stared out at us, Orion, seeing but not seeing us. This was it—his final goodbye. He catalogued everything he was walking away from, and it broke him.
“I’ve lived in a house my whole fucking life, one people point at and envy, but right then, I had never felt such jealousy. I knew then I couldn’t give you over to some other rich prick to protect, expecting his family to contain my father’s bullshit where I couldn’t. You watched Marcus suck my cock and Bren rut against Marcus and we meshed, and I knew then you weren’t getting away. My pack would have something I wouldn’t. I’d do this, bring Dad down, stop him from hurting anyone else, and what I’d leave behind would live on and get to breathe it in every fucking day.”
“What, Orion?” Brendan prompted, but there was something dark and intent in his gaze, like this was an interrogation, not a confession.