Page 83 of Of Daggers and Deceit

Ihad barely felt the water from the shower, though I had vaguely recognised its icy touch, the redness of my skin a testament to it as I clumsily pulled on clothes in my bedroom.

A numbness had swept in since I stepped foot in this house. It was the only way I could tolerate being here, everything clean and exactly the way she had left it.

My stomach grumbled loudly, and I pulled the door open, moving towards the staircase to trudge down a single step at a time.

I distantly registered the scrunching of paper as I lifted my head towards the sound and was caught in the snare of Bodhi’s broken expression.

I blinked at him as he held my gaze, and that guilt rose up inside me again, threatening to drag me back under.

My feet moved towards him magnetically, just as they always did when I felt like shit, my soul demanding his to soothe my ache.

“Don’t.”

I paused. Guilt and grief drove higher.

“You’re okay?” The words sounded foreign as they fell from my lips, as if I was truly no longer connected to my body.

He grunted, his eyes downcast. He looked wrecked, as if I’d stolen the lively essence right out of his being.

“I’m sorry.” I didn’t know what else to say, not when he looked at me in the same way others had done well before I had joined the defence.

Defective. Murderer.

Not an Alpha.

Not an Omega.

An other, and a broken one at that. I deserved it.

“You’re sorry?” He enunciated the words as if tasting them, a sour expression on his face.

“We had a plan. I wa-” But he cut me off with a bitter laugh.

“Who had a plan, Raya? You and Tia?” He looked at me incredulously. “You and Tia had a plan to leave the Haven, and what? Leave me behind? Leave Riley behind?”

He got up then, fury and something more wretched and broken simmering beneath it as he stepped towards me.

“And how did your plan work out?” I knew the question itself was a trap to highlight my incompetence, to highlight my recklessness.

“How the fuck did your plan work out?” he roared as his voice broke off at the end.

I flinched, and my body shook as the words fell quietly from my lips. “It didn’t.”

But he was ready for it, ready and furious for my answer. “Exactly right. It didn’t. And now, I’ve lost the only parent I have ever known to murderous filth beyond my reach. Now, everything I’ve worked for in this stupid defence over the past years of my sentence has felt like a fucking waste. And now I feel guilt,” he smacked a palm to his chest, “that shouldn’t be mine but somehow is, alongside a pain I cannot even begin to summarise into words.”

Every vein in his throat bulged, his voice hoarse as I stood there, taking in every word as if it was a kick to the gut. Even then, I wished it was. It was hardly worse than the acuity of the pain in my heart. I deserved all of this and more. I should have pushed back on my mother and told him.

“Then there’s you, the woman I thought cared about me just as much as I did her. The woman who, for the first time since I’d met her, made me believe that the dreams I’d had were possible.”

I reached for him, the first tear falling from my eye. “They are possible, Bo. Please listen to me. We were coming back for you and Riley.”

He jerked away from me.

“Coming back for us?” He bared his teeth. “Did you ask me whether I wanted to leave the Haven, Raya? Did you ask Riley?”

I opened my mouth and closed it.

“I wouldn’t go,” he stated. “I wouldn’t go and neither would Riley. Do you not see what they do to us when they infiltrate our borders? There is a whole world of them beyond our shield! Two of our own were murdered last night!”

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