We also thought and pondered the impacts. I was trying to remember everything my parents had told me about omegas, bonds, and heats. It had been a long time ago and I had never expected to have an omega, so my memory was faulty, but it was coming back slowly.
“Why hasn’t it happened?” she asked.
“Why hasn’t what happened,” I said, though I suspected I knew.
“The bond.” Her eyes met mine. “I’ve read about it. I thought I felt something during. But it hasn’t set. I can feel that it hasn’t set.”
She was right. She had good instincts about her own body, which was remarkable given how long she’d been kept from understanding it. The bond hadn’t set. The potential of it was there, the direction it was pulling, but the mechanism hadn’t completed.
“A bond requires a bite,” I said.
The silence settled in the room for a few moments as Aveline pondered my words. Thane studied me with pretended indifference, but through our bond, I could sense his tension.
“A bite,” she said slowly, deliberately.
“The alphas bite the omega. It completes the bond. Without it, what you’re feeling is the pull of it, the potential, but it doesn’t set permanently without the mark.”
She stared at me.
“You’ve known this,” she said. Not a question.
“Yes.”
“This entire time.”
“Yes.”
The look on her face moved through several distinct phases. I watched her arrive at the one that meant I had approximately thirty seconds before she said something pointed.
“Why,” she said, with the careful enunciation of someone being very controlled about being very annoyed, “have you not mentioned this?”
“Because we haven’t known each other long. Because a mating bite is permanent. Because you’ve spent your entire life having choices made for you, and I wasn’t going to add to that list.” I held her gaze. “I wanted to give you time to be certain. Perhaps after this heat, when you’ve had time to?—”
“I told you I wanted you,” she said. “I told you both. In the room downstairs where my mother left a memory spell, I told you exactly what I wanted.”
“You’d been through a significant emotional experience and your heat was starting.”
“I was lucid.”
“You were also about to go into the most intense biological event of your life. Context matters.”
She put her hands flat on her knees. The gesture she used when she was composing herself, but I could sense rising anger. Thane pushed off the wall and crouched in front of Aveline.
“You have not met many people,” Thane said, evenly. “You’ve been in this tower your entire life. How can you be certain that we’re?—”
“The tower chose you. It let you through, and it has kept everything else out for years.” She pressed two fingers to her sternum. “And I can feel you. Both of you. In here. Not the full bond—I understand now why it’s incomplete—but the potential. I know what you are to me. You said that the bond only forms with soulmates. Was that incorrect?”
Thane froze.
“You are my mates,” she said, a hint of hurt in her voice. “Both of you. Unless you don’t want me.”
We were treading on thin ice here. She had been used her entire life, not wanted by anyone except for her power. She needed to know that we wanted her, not her power. I knelt in front of her, next to Thane. “Aveline…Omega, I want you as my partner for life, along with Thane. I knew that. I needed you to be sure of us.”
“Then why are we discussing this?”
“Because I don’t want to take advantage of?—”
She moved.
