Violet blushes, tracing the ragged bite under her ear, but doesn’t say anything.
“Give her a break,” Rylan drawls, though his voice is light. “It’s been a rough couple weeks for her.”
I frown. “What’s wrong?”
Had Sienna done something since our dads filed the dissolution paperwork? I haven’t seen her since they quietly moved into this place last month under her nose. Maybe she’d seen Violet, though? The thought has rage burning through my veins, so hot it temporarily overrides my nausea. Hasn’t she done enough to fuck up all three of her kids?
“Faedra got hurt while we were out in Denver for Violet’s birthday,” Rylan explains without moving. “Between that and you, she’s feeling guilty.”
Violet scrunches her nose and looks over her shoulder to her bonded Alpha. He smirks before she can say anything, though, and her fight fizzles. I’ve never seen her drop a fight so quickly. And blushing? Not once.
“Damn, bonding’s done a number on you, hasn’t it?”
“Shut up,” she snaps, but it has no fire.
“Might be the double knotting,” Rylan says, his southern roots more prominent, a smug satisfaction in the words. “But it’s probably the bonds.”
“Rylan Montegue,” Violet hisses, glaring at the Alpha now. “This is my littlebrother.”
Rylan chuckles. “Yeah, and it’s not like he doesn’t know anything about knotting.”
Now it’s my turn to blush. It flames down my neck and onto my chest. Violet smirks, but before she can gloat, the doorbell rings. She looks over her shoulder with a frown. The sliding door opens just as I’m trying to convince myself to get up. It’s been a week since the gala, so it should be a council intern with the list of cities for me to rank. Of course they’d come when I’ve felt the worst I have in days.
“I’ve got it, Cole,” Papa says as he strides across the room.
He lets a hand run across my shoulder as he passes, and the small touch soothes a bit of my unease away. I settle deeper into the sofa, some of the tension loosening in my shoulders.
No one bothers to say anything as Papa answers the door. Whatever words are said are too low to be understood this deep into the house.
“Those must be your cities,” Violet says, a new nervousness in her tone. “Have you thought about where you’d like to end up?”
I give a noncommittal grunt, and she frowns. “What is that supposed to mean? You have to have met at least one Alpha that caught your attention. That’s just statistics.”
“New York City,” I admit. “He said he lived in SoHo.”
She smirks, a spark in her eye. “You’d do well in Manhattan. You love Dad’s condo there.”
Before I can decide just exactly how to respond to that, a new voice fills the room.
“Mr. Fallon?”
Six
COLE
The formality and careful rigidity of the new voice has me sitting up and ignoring the wave of vertigo that nearly has me throwing up. A man in his mid-twenties stands at the entrance to the den, a small envelope in his hands. A pin of the Unified Council’s insignia holds his green tie in place. My gaze catches on the small metal instead of taking in the rest of him. Pins mean employees rather than interns.
An employee? Violet and Scarlett’s lists were delivered by an intern. Only the final matching packet is served by an employee, the Match Overseer assigned to our file that sees us through the entire process.
I offer a small wave, not trusting my voice yet with my throat still burning.
The man crosses the room and holds out the envelope.
“Please reach out to me with any questions,” he says, bypassing any other niceties. “My contact information is on the second page.”
“All right,” I whisper, taking the envelope in a careful grip, ignoring the way my hands shake.
He nods and then turns toward the door, disappearing as quickly as he showed up. Papa’s there in the next minute, and there’s movement upstairs, my other dads coming to see what cities have been curated for me. God, I hope it’s somewhere with an Omega Bond Sickness specialist nearby. Having to carve out entire days to see someone to keep my disease in some kind of check sounds atrocious.
