Page 36 of How to Keep a Fae

Her sniffles peter out. “You’re injured,” she says quietly. “Please take what you need.”

I shouldn’t, though, should I? If I do, I will be betraying my best friend. “August’s not here.”

She bursts out crying again.

Fuck!

“I’m hurting. Please, Jayga. I ask only that you love me while he cannot. Who knows what tomorrow brings? Maybe there will be a time when you will be away, and I must be with August.”

My gut clenches as I get an insight into how August must have felt walking out the hall, knowing I’d be here with her while he was elsewhere.

I’m a simple male. Uncomplicated. I don’t claim to have excessive intellect—average at best. But I do have a strong sense of right and wrong, of what is fair and equitable and what is not.

Nothing about this situation is fair or right.

And I am powerless to fix it.

But I can, as she has asked, love her while he is gone.

I cup my hands around her cheeks and press my lips to hers in a brief, chaste kiss. “I heard you went into heat.”

She nods.

“I tried to hide it,” she says, tears spilling down her cheeks.

I brush them away with the pads of my thumbs. A strange, sickly, fluttery feeling emanates from the center of my chest.

Her lips tremble. “I thought if I could hide it long enough, you would return.” She huffs out a little breath. “Stupid, I know. But I convinced myself that you might tend me, claimme, and then we would be together, and no one could do anything about it.”

I swallow past the tightness in my throat. We found a wagon full of captured omegas once after tracking and killing an orc party. One of the girls had gone into heat and died before we found them.

Before we could get back to Sanctum, another girl went into heat.

We were in the middle of fucking nowhere. We’d just buried her sister in the forest. Committing that pitiful, frail body to the earth had already put us in a tense, murderous mood. Her heat scent threw a bucket of raging hormones into the mix.

Our patrol leader was a mature, level-headed alpha. He said stress could stop omegas having heat, but it could also bring them on.

He gave her a choice. She could take the leaves we kept in reserve for severe wounds, which half knocked you out, or she could pick an alpha.

She picked an alpha.

They were given a tent well away from us lest we all go into fucking rut.

Somehow, we got through it. They mated. The lucky bastard now has a mate and babe and works in the blacksmith’s hall.

It ended well for them. But I’ll never forget the sister we left behind in that lonely forest.

“My sweet, foolish queen.” I press my lips to hers and hold her, feeling her trembling against me. “How I would have loved the privilege to tend you. But you must know it is dangerous for an omega to suffer through her heat without either alpha or herbs.”

Gods, I could have lost her. She is not the only one shaking.

“I know,” she says. “I didn’t stop to think about the risks to myself, nor the consequences for others if it went badly. Even so, what if another warrior had been allocated to me? It could have gone wrong in so many ways.”

“It’s over now. You’re here safe. We all make mistakes. Learning from them is the important part.”

“You are very wise,” she says.

“Not really.” Life has just shown me things that are hard to forget.

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