Page 50 of Fated to the Wolf Billionaire

I could feel the blush creeping into my cheeks at the accusation, but I lifted my chin and ignored it. “Not at all. Politely waiting for your call to end. Who’s Quinn?”

“My assistant.” He looped his arms around my waist and pressed his lips to my neck for a slow, torturously chaste kiss. “How did things go with Shay?”

“Great. She’s repairing the barrier. The crack is nearly gone.”

“That’s excellent news. It’ll buy us a little more time to find the omega stone.”

He looked troubled, quietly, like he didn’t want to worry me, even though he was worried.

“Is it really that bad? I know I’m new to all this, but I’ve kind of been dropped into the middle of a lot of dynamics that I don’t really understand. Brielle is a lovely person. Why would anybody think she’s a threat?”

Reed sighed and kissed me on the forehead.

“Ah, Stormy. It’s not about who she is as a person. It’s about what she represents to the community. Most omegas are killed as infants, by the time they’re three days old.”

Nausea roiled in my gut and tears pricked at my eyes. “Are you fucking kidding me? That’s awful!Barbaric!How can anyone think it’s okay to kill an innocent child?”

He tried to hold me, but I snatched myself away, putting a few feet of distance between us as I tried to get my pounding heart and rolling stomach to calm down. Olivia had told me omegas were hunted, but not asbabies. Just the idea of someone out there killing babies made me want to set things on fire.

No, fuck fire.

It made me want to unleash a fucking hurricane. My fingertips tingled with anticipation at the thought.

“Your eyes just turned amber. Are you okay?”

I focused on my breathing, long and slow, trying to regain a little bit of composure so I didn’t actually loose another hurricane on the enclave full of women trying to protect the omegas everyone else wanted to hunt down. “Explain it to me, please. Make me understand why I shouldn’t hate… all the supernaturals who think this is reasonable.Acceptable.”

“At this point, I’m not sure I can make you not hate them. I do, a lot of the time. But the root of it all is fear.”

“The root ofmostevil is fear, so I get that. But how can they look at a healer and be afraid? A newborn?”

He tugged on the wrist of his button-up shirt, and the action seemed to settle him somehow. “Because not all omegas were healers. Their gifts varied, and while most were gentle, beautiful talents, they weren’t all. One had the gift of war, and she nearly wiped several other magical races off the map. Pixies, for one. Vampires took a major blow too, but they can turn new vampires relatively easily, so they’ve recovered and grown since. They turned whole armies to survive, which in turn impacted humankind.”

I blinked, trying to follow what he was saying. “So one bitch goes bad and everybody’s running scared?”

He smirked at my low-rent summary. “In a manner of speaking.”

“And this mark on my hand…” I stared down at it now, after having essentially ignored it since I found out I wasn’t human. It was aneventuallyissue, whereas my turning blue and flooding the place was more of a right-now problem.

“Means that your future child—ourchild—will be born omega.”

“And they’re going to hunt her?” Olivia had also filled me in that all omegas were female.

“No, they’re not going to lay a finger on her. Because for whatever Goddess-cursed reason, our pack has been chosen to fix this, to right the wrong that was done against wolfkind. And that’s exactly what we’re going to do.”

I stared into his eyes, could feel the conviction of his words. But when the air around him started to shimmer, shake, and that old, familiar shuddery feeling started in my limbs…

Between one heartbeat and the next, the Reed in front of me was gone, and I saw a different Reed, standing on a battlefield, claws replacing his fingertips in the early morning light.

His chest was soaked in blood and bare, his eyes alight with his wolf. When he looked at me, I knew then that I was in my other form because I could feel the storm inside my chest, brimming from my fingertips, as I looked out over a blood-drenched field of fallen bodies.

They were creatures I’d never seen before. Gnarled faces and green skin on some, tusks protruding from other’s mouths. Short, red-haired men with great hammers and pale, fanged vampires all clashed at the center. All the while, more wolves than I’d ever seen before flowed like water, deadly and snarling, throughout the melee.

Many fell, crushed under the wheels of war, while others triumphed in bloodstained victory. But it wasn’t untilsheappeared, the raven-haired beauty with a warrior of old at her side, radiating an evil like I’d never seen before, that I unleashed the storm.

“Fiona! Fiona!” The vision disappeared under Reed’s hands, shaking my shoulders.

I broke out in a cold sweat as his face came back into focus, my whole body shaking with the intensity of what I just experienced, as if I’d had a partial seizure.

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