Page 207 of Captive Omega

“OW!” I spin around, rubbing the back of my head as I glare at the drum stick beside my foot, then at the man who threw it. “What the hell?”

“I’m knocking some sense into you.” He throws the other stick aside—thankfully not at my head like the last—and jabs his finger at me. “She doesn’t blame you for it. Let it go. You weren’t to blame for that, and you weren’t to blame for Violet.”

My face freezes. “What does Violet have to do with anything?”

“You slurring apologies at me between throwing up vodka in a bucket for an hour.”

I did what?

“That was days ago. Why didn’t you say anything about it before?”

He growls in frustration. “Because I was waiting for you to talk to me about it. Now I’ve accepted you never will, so I have to bring it up. Her death wasn’t your fault.”

I turn to walk away. Again. “She was in that car because of me. I should have spent more time researching the CEO. I should have known that was no ordinary stakeout, and it wasn’t safe for her to be there.”

“She was doing this job because of me.”

Vaughn’s soft voice stops me.

“She always wanted to do what I was doing,” he continues. “Violet was stubborn.”

When I think of Vee, and how stubborn she could be, I can’t help but smile. She was like a little sister I never knew I needed. “Like a mountain goat.”

“The kind that can scale a vertical wall. When she was determined to do something, not even gravity could stop her.” Vaughn’s smile mirrors mine. Small, sad, but the first real smile we’ve shared in years. “We’d have found her in the trunk if we kept saying no. I caught her eyeing it once like she was building up to it.”

“Yeah, me too.”

We all agreed it was better that we have her out on a safe, boring case that would kill all that excited energy before she got herself in trouble.

“There was nothing you could have done, Blaine,” Vaughn says. “It’s not your fault you survived.”

“It’s not your fault she wanted to do fieldwork. I think she liked to help people. Like us.”

He nods. “It took a while for me to stop blaming myself. I’m not sure why, but having my mom blame me reminded me that no one could make Violet do what she didn’t want to do. And you need to stop blaming yourself for the alpha. He’d been getting away with it for years.”

He’s right. About most, if not all, of it.

I rub the last of the soreness from the back of my head. “I can’t believe you threw a stick at me.”

“Yeah, well, had to get you to listen to me somehow.” Vaughn moves to get up. “I better get back to work before Cynthia takes over the world instead of just my office. I’ll leave you to it.”

“Your shoulder dips,” I blurt out.

He pauses, brow furrowing. “My what?”

“When you were sparring with Resa before you purposely ditched a lesson to throw us together, I noticed you dip your shoulder. It’s a bad habit.”

“I didn’t purposely…” His voice trails off when I raise a brow. “And you’re telling me this because…”

“Opens you up to a counter-attack. If you have five minutes on the mat, I could break you out of it.”

Vaughn stares at me, disbelieving.

I rub my palms on the front of my pants. This isn’t something I thought I would say—or do—again, but this feels right.

One day.

I’ve spent years saying the same thing to Vaughn’s offer to spar.

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