Page 9 of The Omega’s Nest

Chapter 3

Adrian

Icry myself to sleep with my nose pressed into Leo’s shirt. I’m quiet about it, letting the tears well and slide down the side of my cheeks, a flow that doesn’t cease, powered by an ache in my chest that rises and falls unendingly throughout the day.

I haven’t cried since that first time, though tears threatened after an alpha used me through his rut, and when another one used me in my first heat here. It was the first time I’d spent a heat with anyone. The shame of it, the bastardisation of something I’d thought was going to be so special . . .

When I’d presented as an omega—going into my first heat while working on a surfboard in the garage attached to the shack my dad and I lived in on the harbour—my dad had come out and told me to get inside.

I’d known what was happening. I’d wanted to text Leo. But my dad shook his head, and I knew he was going to call a service. Betas provided a service for unbonded omegas who didn’t want to bang a random alpha. I thought I might cry.

But my dad said he wouldn’t be doing that either. I can still picture him, red-faced from his whiskey, eyes sharpening to sobriety as he watched me and listened to my omega father down their bond. I could always tell when he was communicating with him because he went so quiet.

“You’re gonna let me die because we can’t afford the service?” I’d asked incredulously. Admittedly, I’d been more pissed that he wouldn’t let me text Leo.

“Have a little faith in me,” my dad had said with an eye roll. “Now, I know you like that Hale boy, but you’re too young to get knocked up. We—I—” He always stumbled over it when he had to talk to me for both of them, an omega I couldn’t remember and him, an alpha who was barely present because of said omega’s absence.

“We’re gonna tell you a secret. Don’t ever tell anyone, you hear? Not a bloody soul, Adrian. Not even Leo.”

And that’s how I learned that omegas could, in fact, manage a heat alone. The whole, “You will die if someone doesn’t fuck you through it” was a load of bullshit, no doubt spread and maintained by alphas. There was some truth in it, my dad told me, for omegas who came off their suppressants.

“They’re all fucked up,” he said, and his lips twitched with a smile that meant it was a direct quote from my omega.

Then he gave me a bag of new toys—mortifying, just fucking cringe—and told me to get up to the attic and “Take care of it.”

It’d been hell, but at least I’d had Leo’s smell with me, all the hoodies I’d tricked him into giving me by “forgetting” my own. And I didn’t have to fuck someone who wasn’t Leo. I was going to get to save myself for him. His dad said he could court an omega when he was eighteen, and I’d hoped he’d pick me.

A new wave of tears wells in my eyes.

Crying over Leo now is a different kind of shame. I never wanted any of the alphas who’ve had me. I can compartmentalise that, but for Leo to see me here? He didn’t want me before, how the hell is he going to want me now he knows I’ve been run through by hundreds of alphas?

I always knew the dream was dead, but now I see I’d been fooling myself. I’d still hoped. Hoped what, exactly, I don’t know. Hoped there was a parallel world where Leo had just known and come back before they took me. Made it just in time. Claimed me. Said he’d always wanted to.

But Leo’s alpha would’ve known what happened—surely he told Leo. I’d sat in the old house I’d grown up in, and stared at the shimmer of the sunlight on the water beyond the run-down buildings of the fishing harbour until the sun dipped behind the mountains and the moon rose over the water. Writing and erasing texts I couldn’t bring myself to send. Waiting, a part of me certain Alpha Hale would’ve given Leo the message. Desperate for him to come to me. I needed him to choose me this time because I was paralysed by the hot shame of his rejection. My finger hovered over the send button . . .

Leo, please come home. I need you to claim me or they’ll take me.

Then his face in my memories, the shock at me presenting for him. I couldn’t bear the thought of trapping him in a bond he clearly didn’t want. Because I knew he’d do it, too. He’d come back if I asked. He’d save me. But not because he wanted me, but because he loved me. As friends. Except maybe if it was his choice, if he found out from Alpha Hale, then that would be different. I don’t know. I look back on that night and cannot parse through the overriding feeling of shame. The loneliness of being left, and the humiliation, both old and new—Leo's rejection and now this.

And then came a blue dawn, and the black sedan from the Department of Dynamics down the dirt track. And Leo didn’t come back. Instead, he believed in some uncle. He believed I’d bonded someone else.

I force myself out of my nest and into the late afternoon sunshine streaming into my room from the high windows that ring the walls. At first, I’d mourned the knowledge of the ocean on the other side of that wall and my inability to see it. But after a while, I’d been grateful for the lack of a view. I caught sight of it sometimes when I was downstairs—the tight curls on the horizon that meant a big swell was coming in. The pain when I realised I couldn’t grab my board and run to it had been so shocking, I always tried to keep my back to those windows now. It was easier not to see it.

The clock on the wall tells me it’s almost five. I miss having a phone—who uses a clock to tell time anymore? Well, I do. Now.

Dinner is at six. All the omegas eat in the bar before doors open at eight. I don’t know if I can eat, though.

“Adrian?” Cammie’s voice comes from beyond the curtain. “You up?”

“Yeah, man,” I reply and give him a weak smile when he pops his head around the curtain. I like Cammie—Cameron—he’s only been here six months, but he wears an armour of indifference to this place I envy.

“Tristan said something about a guy you knew from school coming in last night?” he asks and frowns sympathetically.

I wince. Of course Tristan would have let all the other omegas know.

“Yeah.” I don’t really want to explain beyond that, because if it was just a guy from school, I’d be understandably humiliated. But this was my best friend, the friend who’d presented as an alpha and my omega latched onto with the unshakeable conviction he was my alpha. Humiliation doesn’t quite cover it.

“Rough,” Cammie says as he comes in and sits on the bed. I busy myself at the vanity, Cammie visible in the mirror behind me.