Page 36 of Manix
Gatlin moved his gaze back to Naja. “But I know I speak for us all when I say we would really love for you to stay. You would be safe here, on Manix land. With us.”
The silence in the room was heavy, with Naja looking at the floor, her eyebrows drawn tightly together. Fuck, we’d pushed too hard, too fast. We’d known her for like a week. Less than a week. Why would she stay here? We mightn’t be strangers in the biblical sense anymore, but hell, we could be skinning humans in the garden shed and she wouldn’t know.
Still, she hadn’t said no yet, and I clung to that. I walked toward the wet bar, pouring myself a small nip, holding the baby easily in one arm and my drink in the other. Who said men couldn’t multitask?
I was starting to get nervous, when she finally looked up at Gatlin, before letting her eyes drift around the room. “How would it work, exactly?”
My heart started to pound in my ears, and it was Raiden who answered. “That’s up to you. We can have as little or as much physicality as you like. You can stay here just as a housemate. We’ll help you with Luisa.” He moved to where she was sitting, folding himself to his knees in front of her. “Or you can see if you like living with our Pack, in every sense of the word. We could be lovers. We could show you how you can be cherished and safe and happy. We’ll woo the fuck out of you.” He paused. “You can see our cubs being born.”
I gritted my teeth. Shit, was that too far? Was she going to bolt before the babies were an unignorable fact of life?
She was silent again for a little while, before she reached out and brushed Raiden’s floppy blond hair from his forehead. “I think I’d like that. Like to experience the whole thing with you guys.” Her face was heartbreakingly vulnerable at that moment, then I saw her putting up her walls again. “Then when they are born and I’m sure they’re okay, I can move on.”
I was pretty sure she could hear my heart cracking, though I kept my face stoic. But Ellar? He had no poker face. He looked devastated that she was planning to leave, even if it was months away. But I gave him a reassuring nod. Four and a half months was long enough to make her love us. Just meant we had our work cut out for us.
Finlo whooped and bundled her up into his arms. “You won’t be sorry, I promise.” He kissed her hard, bending her backwards until she was gripping his shoulders. It was an old-fashioned kiss filled with Hollywood romance. Damn, my Alpha was smooth as fuck.
Gatlin cleared his throat. “She didn’t agree to pursuing a physical relationship, Fin. Just to staying. Stop pressuring her.” Yeah, Gatlin said the words, but his body was saying something completely different. He wanted her so bad it probably hurt.
Finlo straightened, dropping one small kiss on her forehead before stepping away. “Apologies, Omega.”
Naja flushed red. “Well, I guess if I’m going to be here for so long, it couldn’t hurt to, you know, explore every aspect of Pack life.” Raiden fist pumped the air, and she frowned down at him. “Few rules though. No unsafe sex. I don’t wanna have a baby, um, myself anytime soon, okay?”
Gatlin nodded seriously. “Of course. We’ll respect your wishes completely.” Ah, he was always so cool and formal, like he had no preference which way this went. All business, our Alpha, despite the fact he was as desperate for her to stay as the rest of us and just didn’t know how to express it. I hoped that wouldn’t stop Naja from giving him—giving us—a chance.
I thought about Naja, heavy with child. Maybe my child. Because while impregnating a male Omega was tough for a Beta, it was as natural as the birds and the bees to conceive with a female Omega. It was just the old-fashioned process. Two people who loved each other, and an hour or two of hot sex. Yeah, I meant a couple of hours; I had a reputation to uphold. Alpha, Beta, Omega, it didn’t matter in single births between a man and a woman. We were all on an even playing field.
I kept all this to myself of course, because she really would fucking run as fast as she could if she could read my thoughts. But I could dream.
Naja paused, and I could hear her heartbeat start to speed up again. This made me frown. Her scent didn’t say it was because she was horny. No, she smelled of fear. I looked out the windows. No scent that shouldn’t be there, nothing out of place.
She kept her eyes on the floor as she said, “I feel like I should be honest with you guys straight up. Taking me in comes with risk.”
My hackles rose and I had to work hard to keep a growl from rumbling past my lips. I didn’t want to scare Luisa. But the very idea of potential trouble stalking my Omega made me irrationally angry. I mean,theOmega. Not my Omega.
Not yet anyway,I thought and smiled to myself.
“What is it, Omega?” Gatlin asked, his voice clipped like the smell of her fear was getting to him too.
“I kidnapped Luisa from her father. He is kind of, well heis, the largest producer of heroin in Mexico. He’s a full-blooded tiger Alpha. He’s also the most violent cartel boss in the Northern Hemisphere. And he wants me back to sell me to a rival cartel boss for thirty million dollars.”
Well, holy fucking shit.
25
Naja
Iwanted a hole to open up in the ground and swallow me as I blurted out my greatest secret to these perfect fucking strangers. I couldn’t meet Gatlin’s intense gaze so I let my eyes drop to Raiden, who was still kneeling beside my feet. The look of raw rage on the fiery Omega’s face had me scooting back in my chair, though he softened it immediately. “I’m sorry, Naja. Just the idea of someone trying tosellyou makes me feel very un-Omega.”
Finlo let out a mirthless laugh. “Omega or not, we are a warrior race for a reason. You are no exception to that, Raiden.” Still, Raiden rested his head on my knees and I stroked his hair, because it was impossible to resist. From what I could tell, all the full-blooded Manix were blond. I guess that was genetics for you within a small population. It must have made Gatlin and Ellar stand out even more.
Finlo sat again, steepling his fingers on his chin. “You may need to start from the beginning, Omega.”
I let out a shuddering breath, and then sucked in a fortifying lungful of Raiden’s calming scent. “I can only tell you what I remember, but from what I know, my mom was from the US. She fell in love with a tiger shifter, who was my dad. She moved back to Mexico with him, and he was part of the cartel too. He died in a bad deal when I was four. My uncle, Luisa’s father, refused to let my mom go home. That's when things got…” I hesitated over the true extent of the horrors I’d witnessed, even as a child. “Rough. It’s when things got rough.”
I’d lived nearly sixteen years in my uncle’s care, but I’d always had my mother as a buffer between him and I. She might have been broken and addicted to heroin by the end, though I don’t think she’d started out that way, but she was a fierce protector when she could be. She must have had something over my uncle. “My uncle got my mom hooked on drugs, and then they started a relationship. He made it his mission to knock her up every chance he got—hell, I barely remember a time when she wasn’t pregnant. Those babies though, they always disappeared within a week of being born.” I shuddered as guilt rained down on me. Those tiny faces would forever be etched in my memory, visual representations of my helplessness.
“Then my mom had Luisa, and it must have been like her twelfth or thirteenth pregnancy. Luisa was born, but my mom didn’t make it. She was too weak, too emaciated from a long-term drug addiction. Whatever my uncle was trying to achieve by breeding my mother like a prize poodle didn’t happen with Luisa, but I refused to let the last vestige of my mom disappear into the night, never to be seen again like the rest of my half-siblings. I fought for her, and my uncle gave in, letting me keep her. I was so stricken with grief that I failed to see he’d given himself a weapon, a tool he could now use to keep me in line and make me do what he wanted me to do.” I shook my head about how foolish I’d been, though I had no regrets. I’d been grieving for my mother, sleep-deprived from trying to keep a heroin baby alive, and I was so dreadfully, painfully alone.
