And if they admitted it… I wasn’t sure I would want to leave then, either. All I’d want to do was show them all the reasons they were right to want me.
While Leighton cooked breakfast and rubbed against Kiara like it was going to put me off, I wandered back into the living room and snagged my phone from the coffee table. Mercury had called me, because of course he had. My packmate was worse than my dads had been when they were alive.
“Why haven’t you come home?” Mercury asked the second he picked up.
“Didn’t Ambrose fill you in? They need protection.”
Leighton would deny that she needed protection, but she did. The Connollys weren’t a family to fuck with unless you were well connected. She kind of was, but not on my level. Most of her connections started and ended with her mother—and Edith Winston was a bitch like no other. When she found out her daughter had dark bonded a normal omega, she wouldn’t offer a lick of help.
“Hire them a goddamn security detail, then. What are you going to do? You host an internet talk show and go to kickboxing classes on occasion.”
If I’d been anyone else, I would have been offended.How harsh.
“I’ve got my big strong alpha aura to scare people off.”
“Leighton is an alpha and far scarier than you. Why are you really there? You’ve glared at Leighton every time we saw her at a gala, on TV, or in passing on the street for the past six years. What’s with the sudden change of heart?”
He had a point, and I didn’t have an answer. It was just the way my brain worked, maybe. I clung to things inexplicably until suddenly, it was like a switch flipped. And then I didn’t cling.
My hatred for Leighton had flipped off the second she’d looped me in on that video call.
Instead I’d been… intrigued. That had only gotten worse when I realized she’d been fucking Ambrose all this time.
Except for the time she’d brought it up, I hadn’t even thought about her brother.
“Come meet the omega. Maybe you’ll get it then.”
“You haven’t been interested in an omega since—”
Mercury cut himself off before saying his name. It was a cursed name in our pack. The rejection had hit Mercury hard too, though not as hard as me. Ambrose hadn’t really given a fuck.
That was the first time the mention of him didn’t make me feel like I was cleaving in two.
How odd.
I glanced toward the kitchen, wondering if they had anything to do with it.
“You can’t judge until you meet her,” I said. “You seem tense, Merc. Did Ambrose not fuck you hard enough last night?”
I heard Kiara giggling in the kitchen, but nothing from Mercury. He would usually be quick to tell me off for being crass, so something was wrong with him.
“Had a fight, huh?” I asked casually.
My stomach twisted, but I was a pro at hiding my regret. They’d stopped their relationship a year ago because I’d been bitter and broken on the five-year anniversary of meeting our scent match for the first time. Five years since we’d been unceremoniously rejected.
Mercury had thought it would make me feel better—that it would help me get over the rejection if all of us were suffering the loneliness together.
It hadn’t.
For a while I’d taken pleasure in them sharing in my misery, but I’d been drowned in guilt for most of the last year. They loved each other, but their affection for me was keeping them apart.
Well, Mercury’s affection for me. Clearly, Ambrose hadn’t given a shit about whether his lovers would hurt my feelings. I preferred that, in all honesty.
“That omega stabbed him, and you’re all acting like that’s somehow OK.”
So his protective side had come out, and Ambrose had been defensive of Kiara. Definitely fight-worthy, especially since they’d been tiptoeing around each other for so long.
“She’s enthralling. I might beg her to stab me,” I teased.
