Page 76 of Omega Hunted

What surprised me was that they weren’t trying to crush me anymore; instead, they walked beside me. Goddess, was I even making sense anymore?

I stood in front of the stone for a long time before taking off my jacket to sit on and lowering myself onto the packed snow.

I brushed off accumulated ice and rested my hand against the cool granite.

“Hi, baby,” I said quietly, and swallowed hard. Now what? How did I explain what I’d done? “I want to make a promise. I’m ready to make a promise.” The words hung in the stillness between the trees. “To Soren. He’s an omega. A snow leopard. He crashed halfway up the mountain because Ronan sent him here. He was terrified when I found him. Terrified of me, terrified of everyone.”

I stopped then, not sure what to say next.

“He’s having a baby.” I let out a slow breath. “A little girl.” Even saying it aloud made something warm settle beneath the grief. “Her name’s Asha, and somehow she’s already taken the part of my heart I have left, and she’s not even here yet.” I looked back at the stone. “I want to promise that I’ll protect them, and I don’t know what I’m doing. Why Soren? Why Asha?”

I closed my eyes because this was the hardest part to admit to him. The awful soul-destroying truth of it all. “I want to tell Soren that I’ll stay beside him.” The words broke something open inside me. “I thought I was protecting them, but what I was really doing was choosing to live, and I don’t understand it. Goddess, I wish you were here to explain it to me. I wish you and our child were in this house with me.”

He’s dead.

My Raff is gone.

“I know that you’re not here; I’m not losing my mind. I know that if you were here, then fate wouldn’t have sent Soren to our mountain.”

Silence. I sat there for a long time, listening to the wind. Every visit, I’d come here hoping for some impossible sign that Raff could hear me. A gust of wind or a bird landing on his stone. Anything to tell me I hadn’t been left entirely alone.

“I’ve been angry with you,” I admitted. “I don’t think I ever said that out loud.” I rubbed my thumb over the edge of the stone. “I’ve been so angry that you went back into the warehouse, and that you left me to face seeing you dying in front of me.” Even now, guilt twisted through me. “And then I feel guilty because you didn’t choose to leave me; I know you didn’t.” I laughed quietly, shaking my head. “Hell, if anyone had been given a choice to stay or go, it would’ve been you. You’d have negotiated with death until it gave up from exhaustion.”

I can’t do this.

“You’d like Soren.” I looked down. “He reminds me of you sometimes, but not because he’s like you at all. He wasn’t one of the lucky ones; he didn’t have any kind of life, and he’s spent so long surviving that he doesn’t know how to ask for anything. The trouble he’s bringing to the door is insane; he’s the son of one of the Families, and his baby was fathered by someone from another Family, and Goddess knows how the three of us will get out of this alive.”

I could hear Raff’s voice as clearly as if he were sitting beside me.

“You’re going to be okay. Don’t stop living because I died.”

Another long silence settled around me, and the breeze stirred through the pines.

“They need me, Raff, and I don’t understand how this has happened, but I need them. They’re mine to look after, to love, to live my life with.” Emotion stole my voice, and tears tracked down my cheeks. “How can I do this to you?”

I cried in silence, but somehow the weight in my bond eased another small bit, the tiniest of movements.

“Please forgive me?”

I waited for a whisper through the pines, but the mountain was quiet. The answer wasn’t something I heard. It was something I felt. The guilt that had lived beneath every breath for three years loosened its grip just enough for hope to find a way in. Raff hadn’t become smaller inside my heart. I’d simply remembered there was room to keep living around the love I’d never lose.

“I will always love you, Rafferty Moreau,” I whispered. “Always.”

But there’s room in your heart for another.

I started at his voice, clear in my head, different from my wolf, and the trees whispered over and over.

I will always love you, Cassian.

Chapter Twenty-Three

SOREN

Tonight’s nightmare had wolves in it. Not Cassian’s wolf, not the big, quiet, dark shape I’d been hugging in my sleep every night for the past week, but the other kind—the ones from Center 14, the ones in dark jackets who came down the corridors with their hands already reaching. I was running, and I couldn’t get my legs to work properly, and Asha was so heavy, the weight of her dragging me down. Someone behind me spoke in my brother’s voice, and I turned, and it wasn’t Emric, but it was a faceless monster grabbing and clawing at my belly, and the pain was intense.

I woke in a panic.

I was wet through. The sheets under me were damp, and my hair was plastered to my face, and I was breathing too fast, already reaching for Cassian’s wolf. I pressed my face into his neck and breathed pine, clean air, and waited for my heartbeat to slow.