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Not like her, I want to snarl, but then what? Ivar would ask for an explanation, and I would have to tell him that I had to force myself to sit across from her to stop myself from touching her. That leaning closer to her was like traveling through space and time. That I’d never felt as out of control as when her scent was in my nostrils, not even in the throes of a rut.
“Gabe?” Ivar calls. Irritated, like it’s not the first time.
“What?”
“I said you don’t smell like you went through with it.”
Because I didn’t. Because I was fucking interrupted. Because she was looking up at me with those gorgeous green eyes and daring me to do my worst. Because she smelled better than any Omega in heat I’ve ever had—just on the edge of ripe, but unfinished, interrupted. Because I despise the noble-born. They’re the scum of the earth, and I have never, not once in my life, experienced anything but contempt toward them.
But now I think of Lennart Larsen, and all I feel is envy. Envy of a Beta, for his cold Omega who doesn’t feelcoldat all.
“Gabe?” my brother is asking.
I turn to him, exhale a breathless laugh, and say, “We have a big fucking problem. And I’m going to need more time.”
Chapter11
THE DREAM
Sofia
Gabriel’s bed doesn’t smell like him because, soldier boy that he is, he never uses it. The blankets that make his pallet, however, are another matter. I drag them to the bed after hours of his absence, after trying and failing to open the automatic door and break out, and I quickly fall asleep wrapped in them.
As a cold Omega, my sense of smell has always been abysmal. No more acute than a Beta’s. And yet, Gabe’s scent stands out. It’s immediately distinctive, instinctively recognizable, incongruously familiar. A single sniff, and it embedded in the folds of my brain.
That may be the reason I dream of him.
We’re on the outside during a Low, one that has lasted for weeks, so long that the grass has had time todry. The marsh has taken on a musty yellow color, and we lie in it, belly up, letting the sun warm our faces.
He is still the general. He has no time for this. But he snuck away to be with me, and my heart thrashes around my chest as we laugh about someone named Bastian searching for him, about the flock of birds of prey that mistook the engineers for fish, about my colleague who almost mixed up narcotics and vitamins.
The sun paints his skin golden. He reaches out, his hand warm against the skin of my throat, tracing a scar I don’t remember getting, and it’s like a dam bursting, ferocious, tender, sending a rush of electric heat and love through my nerve endings. With his palm open wide, he caresses up and down my spine, and I close my eyes to savor every second of his touch, to analyze it and commit it to memory and store it deep within me, where it will stay alive, pulsating, forever. For a while, we are silent.
“You can fall asleep,” he murmurs against my forehead. “I’ll keep watch.”
“Gabriel,” I murmur on the tail end of a yawn.
“Yes, love?”
“I’m glad you did what you did.”
He chuckles. Another kiss. “Me too, Sofia. Me too.”
When I wake up the following morning, I am wet between my legs.
Chapter12
THE MORNING
Sofia
The Omega man from the previous night comes to fetch me just a couple of hours after the rise of the sun—which, incidentally, I witness in its entirety from the bed. The servant quarters in House Larsen have no windows, and I’ve never experienced anything like the play of the light through the water: the eerie blue of the night becomes purple, then indigo, then softens into oranges.
I wonder if it looks like this every day. No way of knowing, because I’ll never be back to these quarters.
It’s a relief, I tell myself. And for the most part, I believe it.
“My lady,” the man says after clearing his throat, just as unhappy with my presence as last night. More, possibly. “I will escort you to breakfast.”
