“Don’t knock down any more doors when you’re upstairs ‘talking’,” Flint jested, his fingers in air quotes around the last word. “Us mutts will just wait here until you’re done rearranging the furniture to discuss next steps.”
Ignoring his smart-ass packmate, Ethan carried me up the stairs with a grace and strength that exemplified the man himself.
When we reached the bedroom, he opened the door and walked over to the bed. Sitting down with me still in his arms, he said, “I know that phone call must have been difficult for you, Millie.”
He was right. Talking to my mom had been one of the hardest things I’d ever done, as well as disappointing. I’d wanted so badly for her to have answers to questions thathad been plaguing me since learning I was a ware, such as why couldn’t I shift? Unfortunately, I was never going to get the truth from her. All Jenny wanted to do was feed me to the pack. To Osyrius, the “chosen one”. Fuck that! Now she really was dead to me.
“She doesn’t think of me as her daughter, Ethan. She only thinks of me as a pawn in this cut-throat game between packs.” The realization came to me in a wave that nearly made me sick.
Anger, hot and stinking, bubbled up inside of me. My temperature seemed to rise alongside my resentment as the truth detonated painfully inside my chest.
“That’s the downside of the so-called pure blood packs,” Ethan explained with a frown. “They’re so steeped in tradition, rules, and lineage, they forget what they even stand for. It’s sad really.”
“I’m glad you don’t belong to one of them,” I spat, getting to my feet. Turning to my mate, I placed my hands on either side of his cheeks and told him, “I’m glad you’re a Cascia House mutt. You’re a better ware and a better man for it.”
Ethan gifted me with a rare, full, beautiful smile. “Me too.”
Having to blow off some steam, I moved around the room, anxious and frustrated with my mom and that terrible phone call.
“What now, Ethan?”
Standing, my mate watched me pace but allowed me the much-needed space to vent. “We keep doing what we’re doing. You stay here and we protect you.”
I tilted my head. “For how long? Weeks? Months? Years? Your brothers have lives, Ethan. They can’t just hang around the cabin and babysit me from now to the end of eternity. I want to work, go back to school, and live my own life. Not be a prisoner in your home until Osyrius finds a new mate or kills our entire pack off one by one.”
“I know, Millie. Let me and the guys brainstorm. We’ll come up with a solution that takes into consideration all of these important points.”
Suddenly, I recalled something my mother had said. “Ethan, what was my mother talking about when she asked if you had knotted and bitten me yet?”
Because of everything else we’d talked about, I’d nearly forgotten that comment. Ethan froze at my question, which made me do the same.
“Now’s not-,” He started to say, but I cut him off midsentence.
“If one more person tells me now’s not the time for something that it clearly is, then I’m going to lose my mind,” I warned in a deceptively quiet voice. “What the hell did she mean by the comment?”
“It’s what happens in the final stage of becoming bonded,” he admitted with a heavy sigh. “Alphas bite their mate’s throat while knotted to seal the covenant between themselves and their Omega.”
A second, powerful flash of anger crested over me then. Ethan had bitten me our first time, but not on the throat. He’d latched onto my wrist.
I was horrified that he should deceive me this way. “So wearen’t actually bonded? How long were you going to keep this information from me?”
“We’re bonded, Millie. Just not fully, yet. I didn’t tell you because I wanted to give you the choice when you were educated enough to make it,” Ethan explained, which somehow only managed to anger me all the more.
I was furious that I’d stumbled upon yet another secret that was associated with a world I’d so long been denied. “What that hell does that even mean?”
Coming closer, Ethan gazed down at me from his superior height. “I wanted to give you a choice about whether or not to be my mate for life, Millie. Until I bite and knot you, you still have the choice to leave. To explore this new world of being a ware and all that goes along with it. It’s every omega’s right to choose her alpha.”
“You don’t really want me!” I gasped, my body feeling as though it were being torn in two at his rejection of our bond.
His brother’s words from last night came to haunt me then and I was nearly brought to my knees.
“Stop it!” Ethan roared, stretching out his arms to stop me from pulling away from him. “You’re my life’s blood, Millie. Losing you would be the single worst thing that could ever happen to me. It would cripple me, mind, body and soul. But you’re still so young, and I’m unwilling to rob you of the most important choice a young omega could ever make. Tell me you understand that. I need to hear it.”
My frantic gaze searched his then. He was telling the truth. I could see it all right there in his beautiful, kind eyes. He wanted me to choose him. To make that decision on my own. Well, I was going to do it.
I was going to do it right now.
Tugging the collar of my shirt to the side, I demanded, “Do it! Bite me! I want this. I want to be your mate for life.”
