TWO
Leona
“BECKETT’S HERE.” Theclink of a glass being placed on a table accompanied Kam’s matter-of-fact declaration.
I pried open gummy eyelids, unsure if I was hung over, still drunk, or some hellacious combination of both. “Great,” I rasped, and reached for the water glass.
“I would make some comment about an omega doing vodka shots on an empty stomach...” he began, settling onto the overstuffed sectional couch that delineated two sides of the sunken nest in the safehouse’s upstairs den.
“Yeah, don’t bother,” I told him. “Look at it this way—it’s not like maintaining a professional demeanor is really that much of a necessity anymore.”
Kam stretched, his rumpled white button-down shirt riding up, exposing a bit of olive skin below the side gusset. “We still don’t know what Beckett’s got in mind for us,” he said. “You never know, maybe we’ll have to give up all our vices.”
He looked...tired. Not exactly a surprise. I was dealing with the shock of having to completely reinvent my life, and not knowing exactly what that would entail. By contrast, he already knew what was coming, at least in broad terms. He’d done this before.
His tousled dark hair, devoid of styling products, curled over his forehead. Bruised circles beneath his soulful brown eyes advertised his need for more uninterrupted sleep than he was currently getting.
We’d been here for a week. My heat was due to start in two days, but it could be a day early or late. Normally, I’d have taken my heat blocker last night, just in case. This time around, I hadn’t. That still felt weird.
With luck, Beckett had been successful in getting the contraceptives he’d promised me—because apparently, the five of us were actually going to do this. Three alphas in our borrowed nest. The idea made me feel jittery. Not a bad sort of jittery, necessarily... though I would admit to a certain degree of fear of the unknown. When it came to being knotted by actual alphas, I was a thirty-one-year-old omega virgin.
I finished the glass of water Kam had brought me and set it down.
“Let me freshen up first, and then I’ll go talk to him,” I said. “Will you come with me?”
“Of course I will,” Kam said. He rubbed his hands down his face, stretching the skin. “Tell me, though... how offended are you going to be if I curl up in a corner of the nest and sleep for four days straight while Jax and Flynn take turns fucking you?”
I tossed a pillow at his head. He batted it away with an amused snort.
After splashing cold water on my face in the ridiculous bathroom with its massive sunken tub and separate two-person shower, I gathered my disastrous hair into a bun and secured it with a couple of pencils that I’d liberated from downstairs. While my clothing was no longer limited to oversized T-shirts borrowed from the alphas, my available wardrobe was still painfully basic. The white tank top and black leggings I’d napped in would have to do.
Thankfully, our situation wasn’t quite as dire as I’d originally assumed it was. I’d been taken from my loft in a three a.m. raid, and quite literally had nothing left to my name. But Jax and Flynn had managed to scoop Kam up from his apartment before the authorities started snooping around my closest contacts. He’d had time to grab his emergency bag, along with the ten thousand dollars in cash that he’d kept hidden in a wall safe.
I’d had a similar stash prepped and ready to go, for all the good it did me in the end. But—just as I would have shared my resources with Kam, had our positions been reversed—the money he’d hidden away was for both of us. If we were careful, it would be enough to sneak out of the country and make it to Jamaica, where my parents could help us set up new lives.
But now, while that might in fact be the safer option, it appeared we wouldn’t be doing it. That was one of the things we needed to talk to Beckett about today, before my oncoming heat stole my higher brain functioning.
I headed back to the den and nudged Kam awake from his doze, trying not to feel guilty about doing so. Together, we trudged downstairs. Interesting smells wafted from the kitchen, making my stomach rumble.
I seemed to be hungry all the time, these last few days. At first, I’d assumed it was stress eating—not helped by the fact that the alphas always seemed to be shoving food at me. Eventually, I realized that it was my body bolstering its reserves for my upcoming heat. For several days, I would survive on only whatever water the others could get me to drink between peaks, burning fat for calories as my body shifted all its resources to my reproductive system.
Led by the nose, I followed the smells and found Jax standing over the electric stove. Flynn sat at the kitchen table, cutting a pile of fruit into pieces and dumping it in a big ceramic bowl. They both looked up as we entered. Flynn’s face lit up; Jax flashed us a pleasant smile.
“Hey,” Flynn said. “We’re just stocking up. No one wants to cook after a good heat, but everyone wants to eat.”
I nodded in understanding. “What is that?” I asked Jax, inhaling the scent of meat and browned potatoes.
