A cold wave of nausea washed through me. Jack was marrying someone else?
I shook my head to dispel it. Salisbury was lying. It was just another part of the massive manipulation he was trying to pull off so he could keep his warped reality in place.
“I won’t do it,” I said, filled with more energy and certainty than I’d felt for weeks. “I didn’t want to marry Chester before, but now I’m determined. I won’t be manipulated into doing your bidding like this.”
“Then you’ll never even have a chance of your sever being repaired again,” Salisbury said, looming over me. “You might find it hard to even get the medications you’re taking now to keep the worst effects at bay. It would be a terrible thing if your medical records suddenly advised every doctor in Barringtonthat you have been abusing medications and are at risk of misusing them or selling them on the black market.”
“You wouldn’t dare,” I seethed.
“Do you think you’d be happy going through life in your condition unmedicated?” Salisbury asked quietly.
The man was evil incarnate. And to think that he wanted to be governor of the state or even more.
“I would rather live out the rest of my life in a straitjacket than let you get away with any of this,” I said in a low, furious voice.
But would I? Life was bad enough with the meds I could freely take right now. It wasn’t difficult to imagine that I would lose my mind entirely if I wasn’t on them. What would that do to my family? How would they be able to afford to take care of me?
Salisbury grinned as he watched my expression change with my thoughts. “Are you ready to do what has to be done?” he asked with all the menace of a cartoon villain.
“Fuck you,” I hissed.
I didn’t see any way out of the darkness. It enraged me on a level I didn’t think I had, but I was trapped.
I knew how Jack had felt for his entire life. The fact that he’d endured decades of this sort of abuse was tragic and heartbreaking.
We should have kept driving in our stolen RV. We should have disappeared forever. We should have?—
“Quincy!”
I gasped for breath and turned to find Jack striding down the hall toward us, some overly excited omega woman following him.
“Jack!” I cried out and made a break for him.
“Junior!” Salisbury shouted in warning.
We both ignored him. I flew down the hall and slammed into Jack so hard he nearly reeled backwards. He lifted me into his arms and clamped me tight, growling with feral protectiveness.
“Oh, wow!” the woman with Jack exclaimed, her eyes as wide as moons. “This is…you’rethe alpha he really loves? I didn’t know…I can’t believe this is actually happening!” She looked like Christmas had come early as she fished around in her designer handbag and pulled out her phone to start filming.
“You have no business being here,” Salisbury shouted, marching down the hall like he would personally pry me and Jack apart. “I have forbidden you from contacting this omega ever again. You know the consequences.”
“Fuck the consequences,” Jack snapped back at him. “I love Quincy and he loves me. I don’t care what you want to do to stop us from being together. We belong together.”
“Oh,wow!” the woman gasped. “This is amazing! This is the most romantic thing I’ve ever seen!”
“Maybe we should just let the two of them be together,” Chester said, keeping his distance from the heart of the scene.
Salisbury ignored him. “I won’t allow this,” he shouted as a larger and larger crowd gathered around to see what was going on. “I have told you what your place is in this family. I have explicitly laid out for you what you will and will not do. I will not be defied like this.”
“Yes, you will,” Jack said, sounding so certain that I would have dropped to my knees and sucked him off, or maybe just hugged his leg like the subbiest sub, if we hadn’t been the center of so much attention. “I want Quincy, not your so-called plan.”
“Then you will be disowned!” Salisbury shouted. “I will strip every cent from your bank accounts. You will never be able to sign a lease or buy a house or a car or anything.”
“I don’t care about your money,” Jack said, sounding surprisingly calm, all things considered. He gently set me on myfeet so we could face Salisbury together. “I don’t want anything to do with you.”
“Do you want to see your omega suffer?” Salisbury demanded, pointing harshly at me. “Do you want to see him descend into madness when you could have helped him by turning him away?”
His threats were terrible, but I burst into a smile anyhow. Salisbury had called me Jack’s omega.
