Page 81 of His Stolen Omega

He couldn’t imagine people like that, ones raised in bloodshed and spoiled with the dirty kind of wealth, would make parent of the year.

“Hardly,” Levi replied. “I wanted to do the caring. And I wanted to prove I could do it the right way.”

“There is no right way to care for someone.”

The corner of Levi’s mouth tipped upward, the only sign he gave that he didn’t agree. “Still drunk?”

“Definitely tipsy.” He hummed and then corrected, “Nope. Yeah. Still drunk.”

“Warm up here for a bit. It’ll help with the sore muscles you mentioned at dinner as well.”

“What about you?” The alpha had left Elm’s pajamas on, but had taken off his silk robe. He searched his chest and arms for any signs of damage, but couldn’t find any. There were a couple of mostly faded scars, but they were too old, nothing that had happened in the past few days. “What happened? Why’d you show up bleeding?”

“Ambush,” Levi said. Like it was no big deal.

“That happen a lot?”

“Enough.” He shrugged. “There’s no need to worry. No one knows about this place. You’re safe here.”

“Alpha, you’re forgetting that the only one I need to be worried about is you.”

“That so?” Levi finished with his massage but didn’t move away. Instead of taking the spot next to him, he rested his palms over Elm’s knees and met his gaze. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m not the one who stole you from Glyph and brought you here. I’m also not responsible for the dose of Rebirth that’s messing with your system.”

“Maybe not,” he agreed, “but you stole me all the same.”

He smiled. “Have I?”

“Don’t.” Elm reached up and covered the alpha’s mouth. “When you smirk like that, I get nervous.” He inhaled slowly, taking in the scent of frost and pine and minerals from the water. “When will this end?”

Levi grasped his wrist and eased his hand away. “When will what end?”

“The experiments.”

“When I get what I want.”

“What’s that?” Elm frowned. “A completed data set? You said you had files on the drug already.”

“Everyone reacts to it a bit differently,” Levi told him. “I know another synthetic. He was altered from alpha to omega. It took him a full year to stabilize.”

Elm sucked in a sharp breath.

“You’re different,” he reminded.

“That only makes this make less sense. Why bother with any of this if you won’t get clear answers from it anyway? There’s no guarantee that the next person you give this drug to will react to it the same way I have.”

“No, but there hasn’t been a single documented dominant omega to come about from any of the initial testing either. You’re the first. The chemists who created Rebirth even wrote in their notes that creating a synthetic dominant would be impossible. Yet here you are.”

Elm scoffed. “Yeah. Here I am. In the middle of a forest, in a natural hot tub with the scariest alpha on the planet. Hooray.”

Levi chuckled. “You’re kind of adorable when wasted. Except for the escaping part.”

“When did I do that?” He rolled his eyes when he realized what the alpha was referring to. “I went outside. That’s it. I wasn’t trying to run away.”

“No?”

“You literally told me there’s nothing for miles and miles. Where would I go?”

“Exactly. Nowhere. You’ll stay right here. With me.”