Page 22 of Omega Hunted

Fuck.

“I shouldn’t have said that.” The apology scraped out of me. “I forgot… no, that’s a lie. I didn’t forget. I reacted before I thought, and you don’t deserve that.” I shook my head. “I’ve been alone for a long time, Soren. I’ve forgotten how to be careful with people.”

His eyes widened, and for the first time since we’d started arguing, he looked at me instead of the floor.

“Okay,” he said, but I wasn’t sure if he was accepting my apology.

The knot in my chest loosened. “I’m sorry,” I repeated. Then I ruined it. “But you can’t leave.”

Soren went still, and fear spiked sharp enough to sour the air.

Wrong.

His shoulders pulled tighter, and I scrubbed my face hard enough to hurt. “As I said, the bridge is out, we’re in the middle of a snowstorm, you’ve barely eaten, you nearly froze to death, and whatever Ronan pulled you out of has to be bad enough that he sent you to me for some godforsaken reason. So, until someone arrives who can make better arrangements for you, you’re going to have to stay here with me.” His chin came up then, defiant despite the fear pouring from him, and I forged ahead, the words sounding harder than I intended. “Do you want to lose your child? You can barely stay standing long enough to argue with me.”

Color flushed hard across his face, humiliation hitting so fast I watched him try to swallow it down in real time while my wolf recoiled from the damage I was inflicting with my careless words. Where was my compassion? Gone to the same place that my soul lived—with my dead mate. Soren looked away first, his hands shaking from the weight of his weapon, and somehow that retreat felt worse than if he’d shouted back, because it carried the exhausted acceptance of somebody already used to being spoken to like this. The silence stretched between us, ugly and heavy. Somewhere along the line, whatever part of me used to know how to speak to frightened people without turning every conversation into a fight had vanished. And the worst part was that I could hear myself doing the damage in real time and still couldn’t seem to stop.

I’d lost whatever part of me used to feel human around fear and pain, and Soren staring at me with that hunted expression was chaos and danger and another person I might fail to save.

His arms dropped a little, and he winced.

I reached for the biggest knife in the block and laid it on the table between us, handle toward him. “Take the knife, put the lamp down.”

He looked from me to the knife and back again, shuffling closer, and then resting the lamp base awkwardly with one hand on it, and picked up the knife as if it were unexploded ordnance. Only when he had his hand around the handle did he release the lamp.

“Will you sit and eat, if not for yourself then for the baby, and we can figure the rest out after.”

After a long pause, Soren stepped closer toward the chair as if he expected me to turn vicious if he did something wrong, before sitting down without another word, his hand gripping the knife.

I turned back to the stove.

I tried to let the work settle my wolf, but he wasn't settling at all.

“Are you hungry?” I asked.

He made a noncommittal noise, and it occurred to me that maybe steak wasn’t good for him, so I focused on the chicken, plus eggs.

What did a pregnant cat shifter eat? I’d been turning that question over since I’d made his first tray, because I’d eaten for my wolf my whole life, but cats weren’t wolves, and pregnant wasn’t the same as not-pregnant, and the omega at my table was smaller than me by a huge margin.

The smaller the shifter, the harder the third trimester pushes. I’d read enough ORT medical briefings in my time to fill a shelf, none of which covered a cat shifter, heavily pregnant, hypothermia, no vitamins, and emotional shock all in one go. Eggs, cheese, chicken, sourdough from the freezer, and toasted and buttered heavily.

I put the plate down on my side of the table, then slid it over to Soren, who still held the knife.

He stared at it, and then he picked up the fork. “Thank you.”

“I eat for my wolf,” I said. “I’m improvising.”

“It’s fine.” He didn’t look up.

“If there’s anything that doesn’t work for you, tell me, and I’ll adjust.”

“I don’t want to stay,” he said, then coughed, “I don’t want any of this.”

There wasn’t anything useful to say to that, and I wasn’t going to offer him something that sounded like comfort and wasn’t, given how worry and a trace of temper still fizzed in my veins. I moved back to the counter, drank my coffee, and didn’t watch him while I worked through the problem: Brec not knowing where Ronan was, why Ronan had sent the omega—Soren—here, and what the next step would be.

Soren managed most of the plate one-handed, and he put the fork down

“Can I get you anything else?” I asked.