“Oh, it’s nothing,” she insisted. “Just something I was messing with.”
After promising to be back, Alexei pulled me down the hallway.
“You looked like you were going to punch Edgar in the fucking face.”
I practiced breathing in and out through my nose, squeezing my eyes shut so the scarlet fury wouldn’t dominate my vision.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It just made me so angry what they’ve done to her. Can you imagine having an Omega like that and then giving her up,rejectingher, shoving her in the basementand forcing her to work in the ridiculously understaffed laundry?”
There was something jagged in my throat as I glanced back down the hall.
I didn’t want to leave her.Each step further away was causing me physical pain.
“I can’t bear this.”
I looked over at Alexei.
“I’ve never asked for anything from you before. But could I have some time just to protect Jessabella and make sure she’s okay? She doesn’t need to be down here. She needs a bigger place to live, so she has room for all her art.”
I looked down at my hands.
“I know her art is important to her. . . . I just didn’t like that defeated look in her eyes. Usually she’s so happy, so magical. . .I can’t stand this.”
My skin felt raw, swollen with anxiety.
I didn’t usually talk about my feelings like this.
Had I just exposed more of myself than I wanted to? After all, you weren’t supposed to want someone else’s Omega. Not this badly. Not this much. Not so much that you couldn’t even look at another woman.
Jessabella should have been off-limits to me.
What was Alexei going to say? Was he going to judge me for wanting her so badly that it must be written all over my face?
I tightened my mouth and straightened my shoulders.
Well, I wasn’t ashamed of it.How could you look at Jessabella and not love her?
Alexei’s eyes narrowed at me.
“Why do you thinkyouget to be the only one to protect her?”
I stared at him.
Because you weren’t supposed to want a mated Omega.
But ever since I’d come of age, she had always been the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen, with her soft voice and those little laugh lines around her eyes that said she was always looking out for something funny.
One Spring Festival I’d been maybe 21, and everyone had been hunting eggs, my boots rustling through the slushy show. Jessabella reached for one hidden in the crook of a tree, and it slipped from her fingers.
I had been watching her, watching as a little strip of skin appeared when she stretched high, watching how the move exposed more of her slightly rounded belly, and it made my mouth fill with drool. Without thinking, I darted forward, grabbing the egg before it fell.
“Oh thank you!” she had cried delightedly, our fingers brushing as I held out the egg to her.
It was such a tiny, little moment, and she probably didn’t even remember it or the gangly young man from five years ago who was so awestruck that he couldn’t even speak.
But it had made a lasting impression onme.
“Youhave a thing for Jessabella,” Alexei said teasingly. “The big monk here is practically blushing.”
