Omega’s nests were supposed to be a thing of beauty, but the one this omega had done looked as if a stray wind would blow it right over.
Squatting down, I peered inside of the small opening and found her fast asleep, her red hair fanning out around her head as she breathed in and out softly.
Now that all of the tacky makeup that had been painted on her face was gone, she looked just as young as I knew she was as she frowned in her sleep.
She was fifteen years younger than Edison and me. I’d met girls in their early twenties and most of them had been flighty and unreliable. The lady of the Keane family needed to have grit, and I wasn’t sure if the fairy curled up in a ball underneath her sheet fort would be able to manage it.
I told you I was going to find an omega for us. Edison’s earlier words echoed in my mind as I watched said omega sleep.
She wasn’t for me. No matter how much Edison bucked against the constraints of the Keane family, there was no way he’d ever convince them that the head could have a pack—even if it was just one other person.
Without thinking, I reached inside of the nest and tugged the duvet more firmly around the omega, tucking it under her chin. I’m not sure why I did it and my breath clogged in my throat when she pressed her nose into the top of my hand, inhaling deeply as she let out a coo in her sleep that nearly brought me to my knees.
Tugging my hand out of the nest as if she’d burned me, I straightened and hurried out of the room.
The omega’s strawberry scent followed me for the rest of the night, haunting me as I realized that, whether I liked it or not, things were about to change around here.
Five
“And this is the garden. When Master Edison’s mother was alive she loved sitting out here when it was sunny,” Oona explained as she led me through the cobblestone garden that looked like something out of a Shakespeare play, her arm looped affectionately through mine.
I made appropriate noises under my breath, the same way I had throughout the rest of the massive house tour that had taken nearly an hour and a half. The little section of the mansion where my room sat was in an enclosed courtyard, making it feel as if the rest of the house was far away.
The house—a veritable mansion really—boasted three stories, eight bedrooms, a grand hall, and countless little parlors and offices. There was also a section of the western wing where the staff and security lived.
Oona had given me the historical background of the place and it sounded as if Edison Keane’s great grandfather had built it after coming to the New World in the mid-eighteen hundreds and starting a mining company.
I wasn’t quite sure when the mining and other operations had turned shady, but the Keane family were well-known mobsters for as long as I could remember.
Sometimes it felt as if the city I was born and raised in still existed in the 1940’s where the Irish, Italians, Russians, Chinese, and Japanese hovered just behind the curtain of our squeaky-clean metropolis, pulling at all of the strings that mattered.
Even if you weren’t a part of one of the five crime families, they still managed to string you up like a marionette whether you liked it or not. It was a constant tug-of-war for power—to be the strongest of the bunch so you could leech off of them and make your people stronger.
And yesterday I’d become the rope in a power struggle that was much bigger than I ever realized.
“Sweetheart?” Oona’s voice cut through my mental ramblings and I turned to find her frowning at me. “If you crease your brows together like that, you’ll get wrinkles—just look at me—I’ve been frowning at Master Edison and Rhodes for almost as long as I’ve been alive and I’ve got these lines to show for it.”
To prove her point, she reached out and scrubbed her thumb between my eyebrows until the muscles in my face relaxed.
“Sorry,” I apologized sheepishly, giving her arm a squeeze. “I was in another world for a minute there.”
Truthfully, I liked Oona. She reminded me of the nanny that had raised both Romey and me for the majority of our lives. The one who’d been fired a week after Romey turned eighteen and who we hadn’t seen since.
“Try a few minutes,” Oona teased dryly as she wheeled us around to face a tall hedge that had a wooden gate in the center. “But for now, I was told that you like to swim.”
Oona opened the gate and tugged me inside of the hedges where I found a small pool area. The pool itself was thin, no more than a twenty-five yard lap pool, but the surrounding area was calm with a little wrought-iron table and chairs and a single chaise lounge surrounding the water.
“How did you know that? That I like to swim?” I asked, ducking down to dip my fingers in the water. It was lukewarm, telling me that it was heated.
“Master Edison has your file, love, did you think he wouldn’t do his research on you?” Oona said it with a laugh, as if it was obvious and she let me explore the pool area to my heart’s content as I tried to digest the information she’d just given me.
If he had a file on me, then he had to know about my leukemia and which doctor treated me while I was in the hospital. Edison Keane seemed like a smart man, so I figured he’d have made the connection between me and the skinny bald teenager with the same name. So why hadn’t he said anything yet?
Or he knows and you just didn’t make enough of an impression on him the same way he did with you, a nasty voice whispered in my mind, causing me to straighten abruptly and wipe my hands of the pair of jeans I was wearing that fit like a glove.
Apparently, my file also included all of my clothing sizes too.
“Don’t you think it’s a little unfair that he gets to read a whole file about me, and yet I know nothing about him?” I knew I sounded like a petulant little child, but I didn’t care.
I’d spent the past six months being yanked around by my parents, by the Amantes, and now by Edison Keane. It was dizzying to think that I was barely an agent in my own life—a life that I hadn’t always been sure I’d live after my diagnosis.
Oona opened her mouth, probably to defend her master, but then her eyes went to something that was behind me, and she promptly shut it again.
“I’ll tell you about me if that’s what you wish.” Edison’s familiar deep timbre came from behind me. “All you needed to do was ask nicely.”
Wheeling around, I found Edison standing by the gate to the pool area, one hand carelessly tucked into the pocket of his suit pants as he stood looking like a damn GQ model in front of me.
“I’m not sure it is what I wish,” I said carefully, reminding myself that despite the pretty room and garden and pool it was all still a part of my new cage, no matter how nice it may have been.
Alpha, my inner omega purred when his scent caught on the breeze and was carried to my nose. It sounded like someone else’s voice completely in my head.
I was told a symptom of my long battle with leukemia was that sometimes my instincts would feel detached—like a part of my brain had separated and created an entirely new person that was now sharing my brain.
A person that needed to shut her trap before I started panting over the man who’d crashed my wedding yesterday. The one who I refused to be attracted to even if he smelled divine.
Edison’s chuckle rumbled through the little hedge in the yard as he stepped inside of the gate and I saw the man who I quickly realized was an ever-present shadow come in behind the alpha.
