Page 1 of The Omega's Bloodlinem: Part Two

Library. Now!

I fumbled my laptop as Yelena’s voice rang through my head, scaring the absolute shit out of me. Luckily, it landed on the bed and not the floor, but that was no consolation for my pounding heart.

I set everything aside, yanked on some clothes, and raced out of Yelena’s suite. I nearly tripped over Seth and Haru getting off the elevator on the second floor. “What’s going on?”

“We’re not sure,” replied Seth. “Yelena yelled and we came running.”

Margaret, the librarian, was waiting outside the doors when the three of us rolled up, the hallway full of people. What on earth?

She let us in and closed the door behind us.

“Over here, precious.” Yelena’s voice came from the back of the library.

Caden was sitting on the floor, looking white as a sheet, when we arrived and I dropped down next to him. Yelena was kneeling beside him, his head cradled with one arm against her chest, her other hand pressed above his heart.

“What’s wrong?” I cupped his cheek, my gaze darting over him, searching for some sort of injury.

“She’s alive,” he croaked out.

“What do you mean? Who’s alive?”

“Rachel.”

Seth crashed to his knees next to us, suddenly looking as pale as his brother. “What?!How?”

Yelena stroked a soothing hand over Caden’s shirt. “She appeared for a few seconds on a video call. She stayed with us years ago under the name Heather Chambers and reached out about the query we sent to all of the witches who had stayed here before.”

“Can she open the bond again?” Caden asked, one hand desperately clinging to Yelena, and the other to me. “What if she didn’t break it and only silenced it? Ifeltit break. I thought that meant she died, but…”

“I don’t know, panther. Witch magic is varied and unpredictable. Are you worried it will impact Logan if you bond her?”

Caden let out a shuddering breath. “If Rachel is still connected to me, could she connect to Logan if we bonded?”

Yelena looked briefly to me, one eyebrow raised in question. “I can’t imagine why she would want to, though. Why are you worried about it?”

“Because I don’tknow heranymore. I don’t know what she’s capable of.”

“She probably used some sort of magic to either close off her end of the bond or break it entirely,” said Yelena. “I don’t know how that magic works, but it is difficult and painful. She must’ve been rather desperate to go to such lengths to break away from you.”

Caden pulled away from both of us, burying his face in his hands. “I didn’t know. All this time I thought I was the reason she died. I hated myself for decades, thinking if she had just felt safer with me she would’ve told me she wanted to leave.”

Yelena drew him close again and he didn’t shake her off. He hadn’t spoken so much about Rachel in all the time I had known him. Seeing her must’ve spooked all of this out of him.

Yelena tutted. “While I will entertain the possibility that you were a horrific jackass in decades past, that is not the type of man I’ve seen you to be now. Our long lives mean we can make even more mistakes than the humans and it sounds like your choice for your first mate was a mistake on everyone’s part.”

My poor love. Rachel was the sorest spot in his past and he always hated when she came up. Now that she had made a reappearance, she wasn’t going anywhere and I didn’t entirely know what that meant for me.

“Do you want to go back to her?” I asked, swallowing down the swell of nerves that came from the question. Things hadended so poorly between them, but that didn’t mean the love wasn’t still there.

“No, but what if?—”

“Then that’s all there is to it,” said Yelena firmly. “It takes a courageous person to trust again after a betrayal like that. Whatever your past was with this woman is simply that, the past. Your present and future belong to Logan. Besides, Rachel very obviously does not want to be found by you.”

Seth’s fingertips brushed my arm and I turned to him. “You never asked, but if she’s back, I can’t hide what happened from you forever.” Caden and Seth made eye contact, tension filling the air. “You can tell her.”

I’d been content to let that secret hang between us. Whatever had happened, I knew Seth.

“I thought we were happy,” Caden began. “I learned that was just a delusion on my part when she and Seth ran away together.”

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