I took a long, slow breath in, then let it out.
It was Tris that first showed me the door to the cage, because he stood outside it. His parents were too busy to ride him, so he rambled around our estate unsupervised, creating his own fun. Fun he soon included us in—climbing trees, riding bikes, swimming in the pool, and playing Marco Polo. We’d just been young animals, relishing the curious vitality of having childish bodies. He was there for every significant moment of my life, so I could be forgiven for wanting that to continue.
As I stared, Tris did too, his eyes shining as he stood there, unable to look away. A single swallow, his Adam’s apple bobbing, that and the slight tightening around his eyes, told me what he was feeling.
Well, some of it.
“Whatever that is.” I wanted to turn towards Chadwick as he stopped and regarded us. “Stay there, in that state. There’s…something about the two of you. There’s an emotion—”
“Just get the drawing done, Chadwick,” Theo had broken in. “My father’s already going to lose his mind when he sees artwork of his omega daughter naked on the wall.”
“Nude,” James corrected him. “This is not some puerile pin-up of a sexy omega. This is…” The pencil tapped his desk for a second, then the reassuring sounds of it scratching across the paper started up again. “The only nakedness here is an emotional one, which I need to capture. Usually, it takes me weeks to get this kind of reveal from a subject.”
“You won’t get weeks,” Theo rumbled.
“Then I best make this sitting count,” James replied.
“You sure?” Cress asked as I stared into my morning coffee. “This could be a lot of attention on the two of you. It might…”
We could both fill in that gap with all the mights. Cress had tried to reason with me, to talk me out of doing this, seeing all too clearly how things were going, and not with my brother.
“I want to go,” I told her, and that was all I needed to do. Cress walked in an uneasy space between alphas and omegas, the only beta member of the family, so she empathised with me, used her greater freedoms to support me, and I loved her dearly for that.
“I’ll see if Kent is free and will call the academy now.” She paused for a second, then put her tablet down, something that warned me about how this conversation was about to go. “Dad won’t say anything, but he got the two of us together in his office to let us know an alpha has made an official offer to court Tris.”
“What?”
I barely whispered the word, knowing better than to shout at the dining table, so the cutlery suffered instead. My hands gripped my knife and fork in a death grip.
“I thought everyone knew that Tris was for Theo?”
“And not every alpha moves in our circles. Nonetheless, this was bound to happen.” Ah, my sister, the practical one. I could see her straightening up, using the voice and stance she did with clients. She was going to tell me something I didn’t want to hear.
“Tristan is twenty-six, well past the time most omegas have found their place. The academy doesn’t have classes for him anymore, and is mainly used to house him, vet offers for his hand, and stop alphas from preying on him. Most families would have cut him loose by now and let him fend for himself.”
Part of me screamed that they should do that. If Tris were free to find a place of his own, I could leave this fucking house, move in with him, and we could… But that could never happen. What we were, our scents, the way we lured alphas near so effortlessly, it would put a target on both our backs. Cress just watched me closely, waiting to see if I understood.
Of course I did. Theo was older, should’ve found himself a nice little omega by now and got himself settled down, proving to Dad and the rest of the alpha elite that he was a solid family man worthy of added responsibility. His inevitable climb up into the upper echelons would be slow, made as my father and grandfather’s generations stepped back, but it wouldn’t happen without a mate by his side.
Right then, I saw my brother’s naked body in my mind’s eye, the epithet scrawled across the back, one that attacked Tris and me. I shivered slightly, then wrapped my hands around my mug of coffee.
“I can’t make Tris take Theo as a mate. I can’t make Theo want him. I’ve never been able to make either of them do a single thing.”
Cress shook her head. “I think you have more power than you think, but not for that. No one can force a matter of the heart, despite what Dad thinks. But if that’s the case, perhaps we should allow this alpha to put his offer to Tris.” A low growl formed in my throat, and her eyebrows jerked up in response. “I know how you two feel about each other. Theo and I had a ringside seat to watching the two of you falling in love. Sometimes, I wonder at the cruelty of the fates, to allow him to become an omega.”
“My omega…”
But my voice was squeaky, my statement angry, desperate.
“Kit, you know if I thought you had any chance at happiness with Tris, I’d fight tooth and nail for the two of you.”
“I am happy.” But tears formed in my eyes, turning my words soggy. “I’m never happier than when I’m with him.”
She didn’t answer, didn’t critique, didn’t pick apart my argument, because she didn’t need to. We might lie to each other, but both Tris and I, we couldn’t lie to ourselves. When I became frenzied after spending too much time with him, or when he did, when our defences were down and our instincts were in full sway, it all came out. One of us would be hanging over the other, trying, needing to satisfy the other, to give the one person in the world we loved the most what they begged for.
But we couldn’t. I couldn’t knot Tris, could only work bulbous dildos in and out of his arse as he came and came and came, just like he couldn’t me. He had to use a proxy.
“Every time you two are together, you break each other’s hearts,” Cress said, and my eyes jerked up at that. My siblings, they loved me, I knew that in my dark little omega heart, because sometimes it was like this. Her perfectly manicured hand shot across the table, grabbing mine and squeezing. “I never thought I’d be truly happy, not with Dad’s machinations, but Kent…” She let out a sigh, one so completely foreign—one of satisfaction. “I love you too, both of you, so you can’t bloody blame me for wanting the same thing for the two of you. You need an alpha, Kit, and so does Tris.”