Page 41 of Knot All That Glitters: Part 2

Death by a thousand cuts.

Chapter 14

Little Bombshell

Haven Bell is too fucking good for this world. I’d suspected it months ago, but now I know it to be true. She sits quietly and listens as we tell her our story, Janie’s story. Fingers twisting in her lap, wincing every time we say how much we loved our omega. How we knew she was ours. How we planned a fucking life together. A family.

Haven wears her heart on her sleeve and right now, we’re ripping it apart. I wish I could keep her from feeling this pain, but she needs to understand where we’re coming from. Why we did what we did to her. How it started as revenge for our omega, and turned into a second chance at a life, at genuine happiness. One we never thought we’d get.

And it’s because of her.

I don’t know if the others notice how each time we say Janie’s name, Haven flinches slightly. Or the way her nails are digging into her own skin, not hard enough to make her bleed, but definitely hard enough to leave indents.

I hate that we’re doing this to her. Hate it so goddamn much that we’re heaping more pain on top of what we’ve already caused her. But this is necessary.

It’ll be better to have everything out on the table. Once she knows everything, we can move forward.

Hale’s in the middle of talking about Janie’s reaction when he presented as an alpha—as if there were any doubts he would—when Haven finally loses patience with us.

“I’m sorry,” she blurts out, digging her nails into her skin deeper. I want to untangle her fingers, kiss her palm, soothe the hurt she’s inflicting on herself, but she won’t welcome it. When she speaks again, her voice is modulated. “But I don’t understand what this has to do with me. Why you losing your omega means you would do this to me. I’m not understanding why I need to know all of this. And as badly as I wish this hadn’t happened to you, to-to Janie-” She stumbles over her name, like it’s painful for her to say. “I don’t particularly want to hear every happy memory you have with her. Not when I thought-” she bites her lower lip and blinks heavily, staring down at her fingers.

After a moment, she sighs heavily. “I just-if this has anything to do with me, I’d like to skip ahead. I understand you love her, understand she was taken from you, but why does that mean you would play some kind of sick game withme?”

“Your father’s the one that took her,” Creed says bluntly, tearing the band-aid off so quickly she flinches. The three of us glare at him, but he’s unperturbed. This is what he’s wanted from the beginning, to tell Haven exactly how much of a monster her father is.

She doesn’t deny it, which I’d been braced for. Not because I think she trusts her father or anything, but because he’s so damn good at pretending he’s not like other alphas. That he wouldn’t take and use an omega, because he has his instincts under control.

Her brow furrows. “Why would he do that?”

There it is.

Hale barks out a sharp laugh. “Really? You can’t think of why an alpha would steal a young unbonded omega, Haven?”

Our girl’s jaw tics, but she meets his gaze steadily. “You’re sure it was him?”

That makes all of us bristle, and I have to tell myself it makes sense that she would ask. Frederick Bell isn’t the only fucked up alpha in the world.

“Janie came back to us,” I say as gently as I can. It’s hard when I think about my omega, how broken she was when she returned. How no matter what we tried, we weren’t enough to bring her back to herself. She was there, butnot. “Two years after she was taken, she showed up on our doorstep out of nowhere.”

“We’d spent that entire time trying to find her, spent every goddamn penny we had on trying to track her down, and then she just shows up out of the blue, beaten to hell, pregnant, smelling like suppressants and bonded to someone else.”

“Bonded?”

“Bonded,” Tic confirms.

The furrow in Haven’s brow deepens as she stares over Hale’s shoulder like she’s remembering something. “She told you my father had done all that to her.” It’s not a question. She already knows.

“She did.” I tell her. “We tried everything we could to take care of her, tried to put all her broken pieces back together. But…she couldn’t handle it. She couldn’t handle knowing what had been done to her, what had been taken from her, from us.”

My chest gets tight, remembering those dark times. Remembering finding her, the red splashed across white tile, the paleness of her skin, the stillness of her chest.

Not one of us wants to say it, but from the devastation on Haven’s face, she understands what happened. She knows how her father hurt us, took from us, from Janie. She blinks and tears trickle down her cheek, her scent turning sour with sadness, with heartbreak, for us. Maybe a little for herself, too. Because right now she has to be thinking that we love Janie so much, there isn’t any room for us to love her too. Which just isn’t true at all.

Haven nods and pushes to her feet, hands fisted at her sides. “Okay. I get it. I always knew my father was a monster, always knew he put on a mask every single day, I just- I never knew how bad he actually was.”

I let out a relieved breath at her simple acceptance and her understanding.

See? Too good for this world. Definitely too good for us. Especially if she’s willing to overlook what we did to her in the light of her father’s actions. I start toward her, wanting to hug her, hold her close to my body, stroke her hair and kiss her forehead, but she’s quick to move away from me, to keep space between us, between all of us.

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