All the fight drains out of me. “You… you asked my father for his blessing? To court me?”
Cassian turns away, a wounded expression darkening his face. “At the end of the summer, before your designation even revealed. That you’d be an omega was practically a foregone conclusion, that you’d have mating contracts your father would bid out… it’s a barbaric practice, but so help me, Juniper, I would have done it foryou.”
He would have, but then he gave his bite to someone else. To some other omega, only months after our summer romance. “I never despised you,” I whisper, my voice hoarse and hollow.
“He said—”
“My father lies.” I know that now, that my father will lie, manipulate, and do whatever must be done to get his way. That he’d kill me to keep his plans from going afoul.
Cassian deflates, his shoulders dropping, and he slowly nods his head.
“That’s why you were so cruel when I arrived at Fairhaven,” I realize.
“I wanted you to suffer. I wanted to hurt you as badly as you’d hurt me. I wanted to start a life with you, Juniper. A pack. And—”
“And you never asked me.”
“I texted. You told me to leave you the hell alone. I called and you didn’t pick up. I wrote you emails. Letters. I tried everything.”
“Wh-what?” I heard nothing from Cassian after our summer together. I heard nothing from him, and when he heard nothing from me, he turned to another. He found solace in the omega who won his heart.
“You never received any of them, did you?”
“No. Not a word. I tried texting you too, but Ineversaid to leave me alone.” I swallow hard. My father. My fucking father ruined any chance of happiness I had with the alpha before me. The alpha who looks so broken and lost as the pieces all fall into place.
“He blocked my number and intercepted all of your messages.”
I let out a shuddering sigh. “So it would seem.”
Cassian turns away, running a hand through his hair. He swallows hard, his throat working, and I duck my head, staring at my shaking hands in my lap.
Saints, I could have had a future with this alpha, the very first boy I loved. My first kiss. My alpha prince.
He shakes his head and sighs. “We can’t change the past. We’re different people than we were then.”
And he chose someone else.
“My offer to get you out of the country still stands—and will always stand. Whatever you need, Juniper. I would do anything for you.”
So says the alpha who loves another.
“Anything but choose me,” I murmur as I stand and slip from the study room.
CHAPTER23
Idon’t mourn Cassian Leclerc and the future we could have had together, because I don’t let myself. I distract myself with classwork, with research, burying any feelings with distractions.
I move on, just like Cassian did.
Simon may no longer be my tutor, but we still spend every Tuesday and Thursday together, now in a much bigger group study room, or taking up half the tables at Ciel. The other omega girls join us, along with Luca and Darika, and we goof off as much as we study.
We grow closer as friends, but closer as lovers, too. He’ll mention a book one of us needs for an assignment and lead me off into the stacks in the library, back me up against the bookshelves in the library and kiss me until I’m breathless. He’ll lure me away from our little group’s air hockey tournaments in the residence hall’s rec center, pull me upstairs into the blanket fort nest he now always leaves in place for me, and roll me onto my back, wedge his knee between my thighs and kiss and touch me until I’m panting for him.
We take our time—and sometimes too much of it. We’ll wander back into the rec room, clothes rumpled and hair mussed, and pretend we were just looking at one of Simon’s latest tech inventions.
No one believes us.
“You guys are so bad at being sneaky,” Bitsy mutters as we watch the Monroe siblings play air hockey and trash talk each other like only a brother and sister can. “Literally no one thinks you’re looking for books or at inventions or whatever silly excuses you come up with. But you two are cute as fuck, I’ll give you that.”
