The one he retreats into when the world presses too hard. The one where he folds himself away, quiet and unreachable, like he’s bracing for something he can’t stop.
His eyes stayed unfocused, fixing somewhere far past me.
He wasn’t ignoring me; he was just gone in the way he goes when life became too much.
He did it at Lockswell. And he is doing it now.
“Come on, sweetheart. Let’s go to the couch.”
Once the words left my mouth, he shifted instantly, slipping into that politeness he uses when he can’t cope. His feet carried him exactly where I’d told him to go. Not because he wanted to, but because he didn’t know how to do anything else.
I exhaled, shaking my head. Pushing him right now would only make him fold in more, so I let him go for a moment and stepped into the kitchen. I grabbed one of the anti-anxiety pills and filled a cup with water.
When I returned to the living room, his sight hit me harder than I expected.
Kasey was kneeling on the floor.
I didn’t fight him on it. Not now. Not when he was already hanging on by threads. Instead, I lowered myself onto the couch beside him and reached out, letting my fingers slide gentlythrough his hair. He didn’t lean into the touch, but he didn’t pull away either.
“Open.” His mouth opened moments after the word was spoken, and I slipped the pill into his mouth. He easily swallowed it with a sip of water before straightening his spine.
“Relax, sweetheart.” My words fell on deaf ears.
Thankfully, within minutes, his body loosened, and he leaned more towards the couch than kneeling up straight in that perfect pose.
“I don’t want you to be perfect, Kasey. Because you already are perfect just the way you are.” At those words, he looked up towards me, enough to let me know he heard them, but not enough to understand them.
That was okay. Because in the short amount of time I already had this Omega in my house, I saw a tiny glimpse of that boy he once was.
Chapter 24
Kasey
I don’t remember moving. One moment I was standing in front of Evander, staring at the floor like it might swallow me whole, and the next I was kneeling on the living room rug, hands resting on my thighs just like I was trained.
Those pictures…Evander…none of it made sense. If he didn’t want me to pretend to be that boy in the photos, then why show them to me at all? Why tell me Iwashim?
I wasn’t that boy. I couldn’t be.
I wasn’t anything except a lonely Omega who’d been raised to serve Alphas and nothing more. That was the truth I knew. The only truth that had ever been given to me.
So, what did a handful of old photos change?
It didn’t matter that Evander somehow had pictures of my parents. There was an explanation, logical ones. Ones that didn’t require me to rewrite my entire existence.
First, he was an Alpha. Alphas made the laws and had access to anything they wanted. If he wanted pictures of my parents, he could get them. ?
Simple.
Second, pictures could be altered. Faces could be swapped. Memories could be manufactured.
If he wanted me to believe I was this…. whoever that child was…. he had the power to make it look real. ?
And I knew I wasn’t him.
I’d been given to Lockswell after my parents died. That was the story I’d been told for as long as I could remember. It made sense.
There had been no family to come for me, even when I still had the hope that they were out there.
