Torin shrugs. “Keep our mouths shut and stay close. Trying to run made them more paranoid than if we’d stayed, but we had to leave.”
“And if you go to the cops or run, they’ll stop giving Lottie the medicine she needs?” I say.
They all nod.
“And is she…” My voice trails off before I can ask exactly what Lottie is to them. They must care about her a lot to try so hard to save her. I once saw them laughing with a beautiful omega. Maybe that was her. I hated my scent matches then, and I hated her too. It’s a little harder to hate her now, knowing their parents are using her as a hostage.
“Is she?” Archer prompts.
I avoid all their gazes when I ask, “Were you together before she became a hostage?” I haven’t forgiven them for hurting me, and I’m not sure that I can, but asking if they’re in love with her is too painful. They are—orwere—my scent matches, and the thought of them being with anyone hurts.
“Why would you think we were together?” Archer asks, voice so quiet I have to strain to hear him over my pounding heart.
I don’t dare look up.
“Juniper?” Callum asks in the same quiet voice Archer used. “Did you think we were cheating on you with Lottie?”
Yes.
Taking a breath, I release it quietly as I lift my head. I look Callum in the eye when I admit, “I saw you laughing with her when Veronica brought me back from the heat clinic you sent me to. I thought that was why you’d done it. You couldn’t bear to touch me because you already had an omega.”
A muscle in Torin’s jaw twitches, and his eyes are wide with shock.
Archer stares at me, his chest rising and falling as he breathes hard.
Callum’s face is white. Utterly white, and he’s barely breathing.
This isn’t guilt. It’s disbelief.
Without another word, Callum walks over to me, dropping into a crouch right in front of me. “I had no one else after my mom died, and she became like a sister to me. When she got sick, I promised her we would all get out together. We became afamily.”
I study his serious expression for a long moment, wanting to believe him, then I look at Torin. “But she’s an omega.”
“Yes, she is,” Torin says. “But she’s not ours.Youare.”
“Lottie is the sister I never had,” Archer confirms quietly. “When we get her out, you can ask her yourself. We never cheated on you, Juniper. Not with Lottie or with anyone else.”
My gaze returns to Callum. “Then what was she doing with you at the house?”
“We get one thirty-minute visit with her a week,” he says, voice hard and bitter. “And sometimes not even that. My dad dangles those visits over our heads constantly.”
I sit back against the couch and wrap my arms around my raised legs as Callum gets up from his crouch in front of me and crosses my apartment to lean against the wall beside the kitchen.
“You were flirting with a woman at the party you abandoned me,” I say to Callum. “It looked like cheating to me.”
A flash of emotion chases across his face too fast to read. Regret, I think.
“I wanted to hurt you, humiliate you. I knew you were listening, and I wanted you to get the wrong idea. It was cruel, and you didn’t deserve it. But I didn’t cheat on you, Juniper. That’s a line I could never—and would never—cross.”
I study him for a beat, then nod. “Say I believe all that, why did you shutmeout? I wasn’t involved in any of that. We never even met before.”
“We thought you were another spy that Callum’s dad sent to watch us,” Torin says. “Callum’s dad told us to pick an omega from the Haven Academy end-of-year ball, or he’d choose for us. We thought we’d lucked out and found our scent match.”
“Then the next morning we find you having a cozy breakfast with the enemy,” Archer says. “And when he admitted he chose you himself…”
“He waslying,” I grind out.
“Which we didn’t believe, and we should have,” Callum says, holding my gaze. “We should have believed you over someone we already knew we couldn’t trust, but we didn’t.”
