Page 34 of Rivers and Roads

“Not yet.”

The words hardly made any sense, but I could feel it. He didn’t want this. Pain gripped me by the heart when I realized it. He needed to be filled—he needed an Alpha, but had no choice, no say in the matter.

My knot swelled hard, locking us together just as my mind started to clear. He was sobbing beneath me, his hand moving fast on his own dick to find his release, and I emptied inside him.

Grief threatened to crush me, even as exhaustion rippled through my bones. As I came, it felt like the life was being drawn out of me and pumped into the man below, and I knew why it was wrong.

He wasn’t my Omega.

He wasn’t an Omega at all. I didn’t know why he was in heat, or how the hell his eyes had changed, but he was suffering just like me. He was changed against his will, and I had taken his choice of mate away.

I felt sick, but it was difficult to move as I fell to the side, boneless, still locked to him. He let out a shuddering breath, and I couldn’t help but draw him close. He smelled like satisfaction and his heart was calming, and I wanted to believe he was grateful it was me instead of some other Wolf.

But I doubted he’d ever forgive me once he came out of the heat.

“Orion,” I whispered again.

He breathed my name out with a sigh.

I woke with the dawn, covered in the scent of the Omega in my arms. It took several moments of listening to our hearts in sync and the rise and fall of his chest for me to come awake. I couldn’t remember the last time I had slept without torment—from the hands of the humans and the nightmares that followed me out of the compound.

The peace I felt with Orion pressed against me wouldn’t last, but for the moment, it allowed me some semblance of my old self again. I still ached, my body more ravaged than it had ever been in battle, and I couldn’t imagine a world in which I wasn’t surrounded by pain. The prolonged half-shift had shredded my tendons and muscles, and the thought of shifting terrified me because I wasn’t sure I could reach my wolf.

At least, not yet.

But I was whole again or close to it. I could take in a deep breath and stretch my limbs and not feel the pull of chains. We were trapped in this house, in the middle of nowhere, but it wasn’t forever. I hadn’t been able to understand much of what Orion had said when he first rescued me, but somehow, I knew others were on the way.

This wasn’t an ending though, I knew that. It was only the beginning.

Carefully extracting myself from the Wolf beneath me, I eased off the sofa, then glanced down at him. His face was drawn, his brows furrowed, and I had the urge to reach out and stroke his cheek until he looked at me. Now, being able to think, I wanted to see the orange for myself.

I could recall my confusion when he first arrived. His scent was home and safety, but it was also wrong. It was twisted and distorted from the Wolf I had once known, and it had set me on edge until he touched me.

He had taken Danyal’s serum in order to find me. It had been meant for deeper espionage, and I wondered how much of my rescue destroyed our efforts to get what we needed from DC.

Shaking myself out of those thoughts, I padded across the room, attempting to keep quiet. Orion’s exhaustion was tangible, even from several feet away. I had no idea how long he’d been awake, how long he’d been fighting the surge of hormones and heat, but I knew it was draining him.

I needed to figure out my own first steps back into cognizance before Kor arrived, because I was in no condition to fight now, but I would be. I wanted to sink my claws into the human who had attempted to turn me into a mindless beast, and I wanted to feel it with my own hands as his heart stopped.

Pushing back the rage inside me, I wandered into the back bedroom and found a small pile of clothing. There was a set of sweatpants and a t-shirt, so I slung that over my shoulder, then hunted for the little phone I knew Orion had to have. It was left haphazardly on the table, and I felt a burst of irritation for his carelessness until I realized that there was no threat here. At least, not yet. Kor had been clever enough to find the one place we could hide without threat of a government knocking down our door.

Of course, it was only a matter of time before those monsters found their way across the border. This couldn’t last forever, but it would give us the time we needed to gather our forces.

I slipped out the front door, taking my first breath of fresh air as myself. I had no real idea how much time had passed, how long it had been since they dragged me from the side of the road and into the van, until I turned on the phone screen and saw the date. My heart thrashed wildly in my chest as I picked up speed toward the stream.

Weeks. I had been trapped there for weeks.

My knees gave out just before I reached the bank, panic rippling through me as images of that room began to consume me. The darkness, the pain, the terror. I had lost myself—lost everything about who I was. I had tasted blood of both Wolf and human, and I had wanted more.

There had been another Wolf there with me for a while, too. I remembered the scent of him—the beat of his heart, his limbs crooked and bent like mine in the half-shift. I remembered being ordered to attack him, and I remembered the ease of doing everything they asked. I fought him, claws and flesh tearing. I remembered tasting his blood and wanting to ruin him. Maim him. Kill him.

And I remembered he fought me with the same, mindless passion.

My stomach rolled with nausea, and I crawled toward the water, letting the freezing stream shock me out of it. What I needed more than anything else was details. Information. I needed the truth of what I had done, and who had taken me, and how we were prepared to take them all down.

And more than that, I needed to know if I had killed anyone.

I felt better once I had washed the scent of Orion’s heat off me, though I felt a hollow ache when the last of him was gone from my skin. The night before, all I had wanted in the world was to bite him—to mate him and bond with him. I wanted to call him mine, and even now, every one of my instincts was screaming to run back to the cabin and claim him before he could be taken away from me.

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