Page 112 of Shattered Omega: Part Two

“Okay?” she asked, as if she hadn’t expected it.

“I’ll help you protect them.”

Her smile was enough to stop the world.

“Kiss me,” I told her.

I’d done it before, and I’d craved it since. The command lit between us, igniting the bond that made her ours. Her palms brushed my cheeks, her energy through the bond—anxiety, anger, fear—it all drained away for peace as she melted beneath the command, submitting it in a strange moment of freedom.

Her fingers wove through my hair as she pressed her lips to mine, and I realised she’d brushed out every last tangle.

TWENTY-SEVEN

UMBRA

Shatter had been obsessive about those files for too long. It was ten in the evening, and she’d barely stopped—ducking out only once for a short time to see Ransom, but she’d been back at it the moment she’d reemerged. The living room looked like a bomb had gone off in it.

Her anxiety had switched out for frenzy, and while I loved that she was trying to save us, it worried me.

I sat down on the couch that had been shoved backward so she could have more floor space. She was chewing on another pen since her first had exploded all over her earlier. There was still evidence of that in her hair.

She glanced up at me, then back down at the papers, a shiver of nerves taking flight from her end of the bond. They did that every time she stopped for too long. Every time the papers in front of her stopped offering solace amidst obsession.

The bond completed my picture of her—the things I’d suspected but couldn’t confirm. Shatter was someone who’dbeen running from her fears for as long as she had memory. With every victory came a dozen failures until her world was made of nothing but doubt.

And now our pack was at risk of being one of those failures.

She was afraid, not just of this, but the trauma that was chasing her, the pain from her mates that she hadn’t had time to process.

“Are you… are you okay?” she asked, looking up at me while fidgeting with a stack before her. Shifting it back and forward, eyes snagging on words like she couldn’t quite look away.

“I could use some cuddles,” I said.

“Oh.” She reached out, beginning to gather up papers.

Oh ho ho, I didn’t think so.

“Inthe hot tub.”

She opened her mouth to argue, but I quickly added, “Hot tub cuddles are my dream.”

I had a lot of dreams, but she didn’t need to know that.

Her jaw clenched as she looked down at the papers, as if trying to figure out how she could make them waterproof.

“For a bit,” she said.

Psh.

I’d cuddle her for as long as it took for her frenzy to die down. She’d asked for the dark bond. I wasn’t going to throw around commands like Ransom, but if it was necessary to order her to keep cuddling me so her very important brain didn’t melt out of her ears, then that was just life.

Andthat’show I found myself climbing into the warm tub beneath the stars with my sweet little siren nightshade.

I was right, too. She wasn’t better. The frenzy had been a mask. She kept her T-shirt on, scared to show me what was beneath.

Her scars. The bites.

I knew.

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