Willow looks at me with pity in her blue eyes and it softens her expression until the alpha severity is gone, if only for a moment. “I wish things had been different between us,” she says.
“Me too,” I choke out, my throat burning.
Finally, she starts the car, throws it into reverse and peels out of the parking lot, and I wonder, for the first time, if Willow knows all of my father’s dastardly plans. If she knows she’s being manipulated, just as Father has manipulated me.
* * *
This family is poison.
Willow’s muttered admission haunts me in the following weeks. I suspect Willow knows more than she lets on about our father’s plans, but I glean little more than scraps from her with my affinity. There’ssomethingshe’s working on with affinitied omegas, a setback from the delayed cargo container she’s still dealing with years later, but despite my digging, I get little else.
During my courting dates with Rad, I don’t catch much more than daily corporate minutia from her: trivial deadlines being missed, calls to make, emails to send, tasks to follow up on. She locks herself in Father’s study during the rest of the week. The room is so well warded, and without the spell Hawthorn cast allowing me to snoop, I can’t even catch her voice through the keyhole.
Alone with just a few household staff at Rose Manor, we don’t see each other often, but we do sit down to dinner together every night, and I occasionally bump into her in the hallway or the kitchen—especially when I’m listening for her and can engineer an “accidental” interaction. Her mood is the same every time I see her, her thoughts the same frustrated snarl.
She resents having to stay with me for the summer, and misses her husband, Tom. Not her mate, because two alphas can’t mate the way an alpha can mate a beta or omega. Not the father of her children, because they haven’t been able to conceive. She longs so much for a family of her own, for a child. She’s frustrated about her work, too, but it seems most of that stems from having to babysit an unmated omega for a summer instead of making headway on whatever project Father has tasked her with and getting the results she’s been working so hard for.
It all comes down to results. Her future. Mine.
Radcliffe’s.
During our final courting date of the summer, Willow lays into him as soon as we’ve ordered our meals.
“You’ve been at the helm of this initiative for months now, Mr. Radcliffe, and we’ve yet to see any meaningful results from you,” she says sharply.
“If your brother hadn’t lost dozens of test subjects,” he seethes, “maybe I would have made more progress by now.”
My heart pounds in my throat. Test subjects. Those affinitied omegas from Rose laboratories around the world, the container ship of dead omegas, trafficked out of China. So that’s what Rose Pharmaceuticals is providing to Radcliffe Industries. My blood runs cold.
Saints, I had thought Rose Pharmaceuticals was the only one experimenting on omegas. What could a defense firm like Radcliffe Industries need with omega test subjects?
“Watch your words, you idiot. We’re in public,” Willow says, her voice low and dangerous. Her eyes flash with frozen fire, and alpha dominance radiates off of her. Rad cringes away from it, baring his teeth at her, but there’s no doubt Willow is the more powerful—more dominant—alpha. “If we don’t see results by All Saints’ Day, her mating contract will be forfeit.”
A spark of hope catches in my heart.
If Rad fails within the next three months, I could be free from him. I know it wouldn’t be the end of the problems I’m facing, that my father would only find another way to leverage my mating contracts for his benefit, but to escape a lifetime with Rad… I can imagine no greater relief.
He scowls and turns away, and I catch the barest hint of a smirk grace Willow’s lips. It’s gone as fast as it appeared, but it takes that spark of hope in my heart and blows it into a blaze.
But my hope is short lived. It stutters in my chest, flickering out in a flash, when Rad holds his arm out to me after our meal. “Walk with me,” he says, pouring every ounce of his alpha command into his voice.
It bears down on me, a pressure so great it makes my ears pop, and I wince. I’ve managed to disobey alpha commands before—something I attribute to my affinity—but it’s best if I don’t do it in front of Rad.
He can suspect, but he mustn’t know.
It’s best if I behave, for now.
I look back at Willow, but she waves her hand toward the golf course as she taps the screen of her phone to take a call, abandoning me to Rad’s whims.
I cringe, my insides turning to water, and take his arm.
His scent spikes with pleasure at my obedience, filling the air with anise and orange. It’s cloying, rotting, and it makes me want to heave up my meager lunch into one of the perfectly tended flower beds that flank the pathway toward the golf course.
Soon, I tell myself, I won’t have to see this vile alpha every other week. He’ll be at the Radcliffe Industries headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and I’ll be back at Fairhaven Academy, just over the US-Canada border. Hundreds of miles will separate us. With only months to show results, he won’t have time to court me.
I’ll have a reprieve.
I’ll be back where I belong, at Fairhaven Academy, surrounded by my friends and my men. I’ll be able to see them, safe and whole, away from Rad’s brutal plans.
