“I can’t,” he says, stiff and clipped, and he forces himself to look away from the little siren in his arms.‘This isn’t… I can’t be that for her.’
'Can't, or won't?'I counter.
That earns me a look sharp enough to cut steel.
I just shrug. He can glare all he wants, it won’t make me wrong. He needs to hear it, even if it scrapes against his insecurities.
Knox is still grappling with letting go of his Prime Alpha training.
He wants to. We wouldn’t be here in this crumbling fortress as freshly defected soldiers if he didn’t, but letting that side of himself go doesn’t happen overnight. Undoing that kind of conditioning is slow work. It’s like rooting malware out of an ancient system that’s been patched too many times and never updated properly. One wrong line of code, and the whole thing crashes.
Knox has spent his whole life avoiding softness. He’s good at control. Violence, strategy, discipline? He can handle all that without blinking. But this? A warm, needy Omega whispering that she’ll be good if he just touches her?Thatwas never part of his programming.
It’s not that he doesn’t want her. If anything, that’s the problem. He wants her too much. Always has. Even during her early training, when she’d challenge his orders and test his patience just to see what she could get away with, he was watching her closer than he should have been.
Fraternizing with a subordinate is strictly forbidden in the military, especially for Prime Alphas. So he kept his distance. Used his prickly personality as cover and played it safe.
But a connection between an Alpha and Omega doesn’t just stop because the rules say so.
And now she’s pressing into him and asking for his love and care, and all of that pent-up desire is close to erupting.
I’ve seen him face a thousand enemies without flinching. Watched him sprint through live fire, drag teammates out of bomb craters, and tear apart obstacles like they were paper. He’s never looked this rattled.
Knox places his hands on her shoulders to push her back, but his fingers are shaking. His whole body’s trembling, tight like a wire pulled too far as he fights against the effects of her purr.
"Omega. Halley, I can't," he says, and it comes out like it hurts to say. “Not yet. I have to take this slow. I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Alpha,” she cries, and a tear slips down her cheek.
It cracks him, and it all comes spilling out through our Pack bond.
It hits like an emotional gut punch. A surge of guilt, sorrow, and raw, scorching desire, so intense I forget to breathe.
It's not mine.
It's Knox’s.
I inhale sharply, the pain curling under my ribs like hot smoke.
Fuck.
Viper wavers, and I know he feels it too.
As a squad, we’ve shared a lot of things. A barracks, missions, endless fucking death. We've even adapted to hearing each other's thoughts, but feeling each other in our hearts like this? It’s as terrible as it is great.
It's as if he's there, right in my chest. His distress is sharp and visceral, like burning embers of agony. I feel closer to my Prime Alpha than ever before, but also like I don’t know him at all.
I press my hand to my sternum, right over the ache.
He wants to touch her, to fuck his good little Omega like his inner Alpha craves, but to do that, he has to offer her comfort and his own vulnerability.
He has to open himself to her and he can’t.
Not yet, anyway.
He thought he could. That because he made the choice to defect and followed her, it would be enough but…
He still has work to do on himself.
