Page 42 of Omega's Dream (The Hartwell Sisters Saga 4)

“Dear goddess!” I laughed. Oh, this child! I barely knew him but I’d never met a more kindred spirit. There were no children in my future, but if I had one, I wanted them to be like this rebellious, inquisitive child. In a wild moment, I rushed him and took him into my arms for a hug. He wriggled but when I squeezed tighter, he stilled. Then I felt two little arms come around me and hug me back. “You should know I only hug very clever people,” I whispered into his hair. “And you, Tod, are very clever.”

“Gonna give me some sweets for being clever then?”

I kissed his curls and murmured that he could have as many sweets as he wanted.

Entering the room, Sarah’s soft scent assaulted my senses. Everything in the room was exactly as I had left it. The bed unmade but the pillows artfully arranged to my liking. The dress I had worn the day before everything changed for good draped over the chair at my dressing table. If there was a sign to show time had passed, it was the scattering of caramels on the hearthrug. The box they’d come in tossed into the grate and charred.

“You meant to burn the evidence.”

“Oh, that. Prog came in when he smelled the smoke. Why’s he called Prog? It ain’t a real name or nuffing.”

“I’ve never asked him.” I crawled onto my bed and curled onto my side so that I could watch him stuff his mouth with the sweets. Exhaustion crept over me but I remembered falling asleep with a smile on my face.

“Wakey, wakey, aunt Polly!”Tod said in the loudest whisper imaginable. A sticky finger emphasised the command, poking my cheek. “You need to wake up. It is afternoon and I have questions.” I blinked awake and twisted around to find him standing next to the bed. “Clarissa said I shouldn’t get into your nest so I’m on feet instead.”

On feet? What an odd expression, but in case he was sensitive I didn’t pry as to the peculiar wording. “I’m up.”

“You are lying.” He giggled at his own joke.

Rolling upright, I discovered that I hadn’t slept so well since the last time I’d been in the rooms I shared with Jude, a month ago, I realised. A week at the Hell, two with my sister and no Jude. Damn my heat for remembering with fondness anything to do with that alpha.

“I’ve been thinking about staying,” Tod said with all the seriousness of a child. My breath caught in my throat. Everything I had wanted since he was born was in my grasp. All I had to do was adopt the boy and reintroduce him to my family. I could call him an orphan and leave it at that. I had the money, the means, the love to raise him in his blood family. What stopped me from doing just that? From poisoning this boy against the two alphas who had so thoroughly upended my life. Who mockingly called me lady bountiful. Who thought me a bitch. Nothing but the image of two protective alphas prepared to pull me apart that they might find their nephew.

“Let’s have something to eat and then we can talk about it.”

After lunch and while Tod played in the garden, Mustardseed and Prog confirmed they’d negotiated with Oberon and Puck for the safe return of Tod. “We’d no taken his money, Polly. Looked in all the places an omega might go or be taken. Fed that information right back to them. Let him know exactly how many omegas are being secreted away. And just how good you are at rescuing them.”

“But we protected omega house,” Prog interjected. “None who know would ever tell.”

“Thank you.”

I had a big choice to make and no way of knowing what I would decide.

17

Oberon

She had been gone for four days now, and it ate at me.

Before the Hell had opened, I’d gone to ask Polly, kindly, to work with us and return Tod. But on opening the door, the room was empty. The cage locked, the window closed and latched. None had seen her leave, and she had left nothing in the room but a couple of her pins tucked under the mattress in her cage.

Worse than her escape was the reminder that she had my nephew. She and her gang of thieves had secreted him away. Short of physical torture we had done everything we could to extract from Jude and Polly’s people for her location. All he’d confessed was that he’d been the one to take Tod to Polly’s secret base. And those fairy-named thieves had either declared they didn’t know where the place was or if they did, desired, to quote the eloquent Daisy, “She might quality, our Pol, but she’d have yer’ back even if you were halfway to the bottom of the Atlantic. There ain’t no breaking a bond with a woman like that.”

How she’d kept it secret, when my own spies had been on her and she had made love with at least half of my the men and women in my employ, was a question for another day. What I wanted now was my nephew safe, my omega safe and mated, and the both of them under my roof.

“I’ll force her heat,” I railed at Puck as he lounged in Polly’s cage. He examined with her pins including a mean-looking knife. “I’ll take her heat and mate her.”

“Where does this passion come from?”

My jaw ached from grinding my teeth but I forced my answer out. “She put Tod at risk. And now she’s out there—”

“Probably guarded by her people.”

“Don’t be so virtuous or naive,” I spat. “She’ll be sneaking around in the dead of night rather than have a nursemaid on her tail. We could have followed a bodyguard but never her on her own. And when she gets to Tod what if he’s not there. Why did the hells curse me with an omega with no propriety and a nephew just as foolish and reckless as one could not want?”

He swung himself into a seated position. “I’ll break his back and get him to tell me,” he offered.

“No.” As much as I wanted to know where she was, where my nephew was, I’d not kill Jude for the knowledge. “She’s too proud, has too much honour to keep Tod with her forever. But damn if I let her off for pulling such a stunt.”

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