Then we both froze when we heard the key in the front door turn the lock.
I moved fast then, adrenalin helping me to move with surgical precision as I flicked open the sliding door, one foot out of it, when they came walking in.
“Mum, what the hell are you doing here?” Fen asked, his arms laden with groceries, but it was Colt that saw me.
“Riley?”
“Who’s Janine?” I asked, my voice containing an alpha’s bark of its own, just this once. I studied their faces, watching their expressions like a hawk, looking for the evidence to support the hypothesis I was testing like the scientist I was. I found surprise, alarm, fear, anger, but all of them were ones I could’ve worked with. There could’ve been reasonable explanations behind them, but it was Fen and Ryan’s expressions that sealed their fate for me because I knew them, knew what they looked like when they knew they’d fucked up. Knew what a flush of guilt looked like on them. My mouth thinned, my jaw locking down before I nodded and then turned on my heel.
I slammed the door behind me but chaos erupted as I did.Run, she told me inside my head.Run away from these unworthy mates. Run!
So I did, my feet feeling like they were sliced open by the gravel, but that didn’t slow me for a second. I heard my name shouted out at me as my hand slapped down on the driver’s seat door handle of my car, my finger depressing the unlock button on my keys. Then I was inside, my bag shoved onto the spare seat, my finger locking down the car right as Colt’s hands slammed down on the bonnet. He was mouthing something, his voice muffled by the glass and the thumping heartbeat in my ears, then the roar of my car’s engine as I turned the ignition. He protested, cried out some kind of plea or something, but I just stared into his silvered eyes as I put the car in gear, watching him forced to jerk himself away and out of my path as I turned the wheel and drove out of the property.
At first, I couldn’t think or do anything other than focus on keeping the car on the road. Trees, paddocks, cows, it all whipped past, but I just kept my eyes on the road, just driving and driving until a familiar buzzing sound started up. I tried to ignore it, keep driving and just…get away, but I couldn’t be allowed that privilege, could I? The sound of calls coming in felt like a drill was slowly boring into the side of my head, one I couldn’t ignore, until I was finally forced to flick on my indicators and pull over on the side of the road. The sound only got worse now, the quiet invaded by the regularly pulsing buzz. I ripped open my bag, pulled out my phone, and then looked at it.
This was when I would answer the phone. This was when I would speak to the men I’d known half my life and get their side of the story. This was when we would talk things out like adults, where they would break the news to me about what was happening, what they’d done, and why they’d done it. But as my thumb hovered over the answer call button, something stopped me from allowing the call to go through.
If you stop and think about it, you’d know what it was.
It was that moment when you felt like you totally connected with someone, whether on a date or when you met them at a party. You went from wondering if there was anyone out there for you to being filled with that magical feeling of affinity, all the more extraordinary because it was with someone you’d only just met. Yet once you’d parted, when it came time to make contact, when you were buoyed up by a sense of optimism that was almost dizzying, nothing. Ignored texts or DMs, calls that went unanswered, it all slowly had you realising that at least for him, none of it was real.
It was those many, many small moments of unease that built when you were in a relationship. Initially, the lessening of attention and affection could be put down to a relationship settling into a comfortable groove, but then…it got worse. He was always pulling away first, had absences he couldn’t properly explain. He smiled all the time but it never reached his eyes, and he was always busy, always skating around serious queries about how he was doing, until he was ready to have the final one.
Or the lack of that final conversation altogether. Coming home and finding him gone, every trace of him carefully removed from your life and letting you fill in the gaps the best you could.
Or not. They just didn’t care enough either way.
I didn’t want to talk to the guys, didn’t want to hear what they had to say. It was listening to them that had gotten me where I was right now. I hadn’t wanted to do this, sure that they had a mate out there, and they’d heard my arguments, nodded along, and then systematically worked to get under my defences, dismantling all my protests until I was here—half-dressed, bedraggled, pressing my thumb on the reject call button, only for another call to come through seconds later. They were going to insist, demand, use that alpha bark to get what they wanted, and what would that be? A beta mistress to keep in their pack house, away from the public eye and their true omega, but trained now to take alpha cock whenever they wanted? I rejected the next call and the next, then put one of my own through.
“Biaaaatch…” Candy said. “Can you talk or have you randomly clit dialled me and have a mouthful of alpha dick going on?”
“Candy…”
“Shit,” she said, her tone changing completely. “Hang on for a sec, I’m heading to my office.” I waited until she came back down the line, and when she did, I let out a long breath. “What did they do?”
“They have a mate,” I forced out.
“Yeah, you.” But her voice bristled with indignation.
“No, they have an omega mate.”
I couldn’t say any more after that, feeling my eyes burn as I tried to hold it all back, but what I refused to let out felt like it multiplied exponentially inside me. What Eloise said had felt like an ancient prophecy, one I’d been warned about long, long ago, but I’d just persisted, thinking somehow, I was exempt from its conditions.
Only to find out I wasn’t.
“Meet me at my place if you can,” she said. “They’ll come looking for you at yours. Or I can come and get you. Where the hell are you anyway?”
“I’m fine,” I forced out, even though everything about my voice said otherwise. “I’ll meet you at yours.”
After we ended the call, I turned my phone off, unable to cope with yet more calls coming through. I was going to need to use every damn scrap of focus I had to get me across town to Candy’s, so I did what I did when I first came to town—everything that had happened since they came back was shoved down in that box, the same one I’d stuffed full of memories last time. It rattled and shook as I drove, but I felt much more clear-headed, right up until I got to her place. She was sitting on her doorstep, a bag full of tubs of ice cream on one side and some Jiffy firelighters on the other.
“Eat ice cream first, then burn their place down, or arson first, then empty carbs?”
“Empty carbs,” I replied, stumbling on inside and slumping down on her couch.
A tub of ice cream was put in one hand, a spoon in the other, and I peeled off the lid and stuck the spoon in, taking a mouthful as she settled down in the opposite arm chair.
“So they have a mate? How is that possible?”