“He killed my family.”
Not Mordecai. It’s just the two are all entangled up in my mind, and I can’t face one without facing the other.
“The Beta’s Fang killed my family.”
The words come out of me, broken, torn up, revealing me for the half grown omega I still am, the one who misses her mother, who wants her aunt, who wants to go back to a time when I was innocent and could just play all day.
Cadel stills, and then his arms come up around my back and pull me harder into his body.
“We’ll kill him. Before this is done, you will have your revenge. It won’t bring them back, but we can stop him from hurting anyone else.”
I bury my face in his shoulder and cry for me, for my cousin, for my aunt and all the neighbours that helped raise me.
There’s still two mysteries left. What happened to my mother and my two year old cousin, Caelyn? Perhaps I will never know, and now I’m not sure I want to.
I see Mordecai, and my temper flips.
With a snarl, I pull free of Cadel, jump up, and stalk towards him. I pull back and slap him. He doesn’t react.
I hit him again.
And again.
“Keres!” Cadel says sharply.
There are people all around us, waking up and watching. Murmuring. Shocked by my aggression.
But not the alpha in front of me; he doesn’t raise a finger to protect himself.
I keep hitting him.
“KAIDA!” Jarek shouts.
I punch Mordecai’s chest and shout at him until I collapse against him, sobbing again. He brings his arms up and wraps them around me, and I hate I feelsafe.
“I hate you.”
“I know. Kaida, I don’t blame you,” he whispers. “I am so sorry, but if it kept you alive, I would do it again and again.”
I glare up at him. “We’re strangers. We don’t know each other. Not really. How do you know you would keep me alive? I’m just no one.” I scream the last words.
I am no one.
Why would he come for me? Why would he save me? Why? Nothing makes sense, nothing-
“You’re everything,” he says with such fierceness that I’m immediately silenced. “I might not know you, but my heart tells me I do, and when I sleep, I can hear you giggle when I’ve never heard it before. I hear you calling my name, and I can see you in…I know you. My heart, my soul, my mind, and my body know you, and I don’t know why. And leaving you was the hardest thing I have ever done.”
“You did it for the Resistance!” I howl. “You left me hanging in that trap to save them!”
“I did because she said if I didn’t do it, you’d die that night,” Mordecai roars back at me. “There is nothing, nothing on this Earth that is more important to me than you.”
I inhale sharply. “She’s a dream,” I protest with a whimper. “Just a dream; you couldn’t possibly know that.”
“So were you…and then you appeared,” Mordecai snaps. “I dreamed about you for years. On all the nights I didn’t have a damn walking prophet telling me the miserable future, I dreamed of you. And then you were there. Right in front of me, tied up and about to be taken to the worst place you could be taken, and I knew what I was getting into, but I would have ignored her and let the world burn. What stopped me was you being on the line.”
I stare up at him, struck by the intensity of his gaze. We’re chest-to-chest, his arms around me and mine holding onto his waist because as much as I want to hate him…I can’t. There is something in me that won’t let me.
“I don’t trust you,” I say instead.
