Page 39 of Shadowlands Omega

“I was wrong. Is the Lord of the Shadowlands not allowed to be wrong, on occasion?”

She blinks brightly, her eyelashes thick and curly and accentuating the lovely shape of her eyes. Large and tilted up towards her hairline, she looks like a mirage, a figment created by steam. I have to fight my beast back not to reach out and grab her. “No, I don’t believe he is.”

“What about Yaron? Is he?”

She finds the soap and pours more into her palm, massaging her shoulders and the top of her head. Someone threw something at her — feces of some kind. I could smell it on her a mile away. I thought it was the mud, but the smell came from the top and back of her head. Even prostrated as she was in the dirt, the mud would not have spattered so high. It had to have been a farmer. I go through the list of those that I know and vow to repay their dishonor in kind.

“I don’t know. I don’t know Yaron as well as I should.”

I chuckle to myself. “You already know him better than most.” Better than me. “I’d like to discover him with you, though. Through you.”

Her pupils are blown but she still manages to sound coherent as she rejects me again. I’m not offended. She can reject me all she likes, but it doesn’t matter. It’s all but decided. I will win her, I will bond her and she will rule me forever. I am a battle strategist first and foremost.

“I can’t accept, my Lord.”

“Yaron. You call me Yaron.” I wade across the pool and come within arm’s reach of her, but not closer. I slowly pull the green-hued glass bottle from between her fingers. I pour soap into my own hands and rub it through my hair, hair that she criticized before for being greasy, though I know it was the blood on her fingers that made her nose wrinkle. Bloody is an understatement as to how I left Ugaros on the road.

“I have my suspicions, but I’d like to hear from you directly — why are you so determined to deny me?”

“Because you don’t know what you’re saying.” She licks her lips. I stare. She looks away.

“You think I am confused?” I smirk fully then, the thought hilarious in its own right. No one has ever made such an assumption of me, not even when I was a child.

“You don’t know me. You have my family trapped. My Omega bond is the only thing that calls to you.”

I nod. “These are fair assumptions. Is that all?”

“I think they’re reason enough.”

“Perhaps. But then am I to assume that, if I get to know you, release your family from their bonds and prove to you that I do like you beyond the signature of your pheromones…” Which areintoxicating…“…you will consent to take me for your mate when the red moon rises?”

She sinks lower into the water, letting it come up to her chin, but she holds my gaze above it. I can see the reflection of her eyes in the stillness of the liquid, holding fast, unblinking, trying to root out my lies. She’ll find none. Trying to root out my weaknesses. She’ll find one.

“Why are you doing this?”

I open my mouth, but I don’t answer right away. I wish I could tell her that I was swayed by her eclipsing beauty, but I have seen more beautiful females. I wish I could vow that my intent is purely the duty of a Lord to an at-risk Omega in his territory, but it isn’t. There are other Omegas who’ve passed through the Shadowlands underneath my rule and I felt no need to bond myself to them.

I wish I could tell her that it was more than her laughter. That one riotous laugh she released in my presence that made me sure I’d kill every other male in Gatamora before I let them have it. It’s mine. I don’t even want them hearing it. But causing it? Hearing it every day? Watching the expression on her face as she melts slightly, eyes crinkling at the corners, cheeks rounding and bouncing up to her eyes, making them appear as slits… If another Alpha or pack were to claim that laugh, I would have to renounce my title, offer up my claim to these shadowed lands. Because I would be distracted every day for the rest of my existence.

I wish I could tell her it’s more than her words, oaths of power delivered from a being who seems to reject the very notion of power itself. I wish I could tell her it’s more than the way she challenges me and my values, what I believe to be right.

I wish I could tell her that her commands and her mastery over my beast don’t make me mad and leave me wanting. I wish I could tell her that I’d kill everyone in the whole of Gatamora if I truly thought it possible for her to turn that knowing smile onto another male or pack of males and whisper those fateful words to them:Good boy.

I wish I could tell her it’s something selfless and not selfish, but it isn't.

I am curious about her and I have a crush on her like a schoolboy. I am among the most powerful males in Gatamora at present and I am in awe of everything about her. That is her.

I don’t know how to say what I want to say without scaring her off. I settle for something paltry, a vagary that’s not a lie, but a partial truth, leaving so many more important truths still covered. “I want to know you,” I tell her.

Her hands, which have been torturing me by working soap across her pert breasts, still. She’s covering her chest and I want to snarl and rip her hands away so I can see her. I want to see all of her. “You’re scaring me.”

“No, I’m not. You were frightened before. I can scent little fear on you now.” A little, but not a lot.

“I am scared. The Shadow Lord is clearly a madman,” she answers, shocking the hell out of me.

I grin with one edge of my mouth and feel a thousand times lighter, and very close to laughter. I try to remember the last time I laughed…but can’t. “Perhaps.”

“You know that whatever you feel right now, whatever madness compels you to want to bond me, is only because of our time in the woods. It’s only because I’m an Omega and you’re an Alpha beast.”

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