He made to put his arm around me, but the beta man stood between the two of us with a shake of his head. “No touching. You shouldn’t even be allowed to come.”
“Kinky,” Dash muttered under his breath.
I snorted. The beta man didn’t find it as funny as we did, herding me in front of him and into the elevator.
We were silent as we rode down to the parking garage. A black sedan waited. The beta man slid into the middle seat in the back, continuing to prevent Dash and I from touching each other. A man in a suit drove the car, while an omega woman with a wide smile turned to face the backseat.
Her smile faltered when she saw Dash, but she focused on me. “Hi, honey. I’m Selena, your Institute contact. We’re going to make sure you get taken care of while we work everything out. No matter what you say to me, you’re not going to get into trouble. If your alpha told you that you would, that’s a lie.”
I glanced over at Dash. He was amused by her, but unconcerned.
Selena’s words weren’t exactly true. I was pretty sure I would get in trouble if I admitted to stabbing multiple people. She was trying her best, though.
“How long will it be until I get to go back to Leighton?” I asked.
Her gaze flicked down to my throat. “You seem eager to go back.”
“She’s my alpha, and I asked her to bond me. She’s also not the one who gave me the bruises.”
“OK, honey. If you say so. We’ll get into some more questions once we get to the Institute building, after the seers have taken a look at you.”
Her tone had a hint of condescension. She didn’t believe me. The bruises were going to be hard to explain, but I think what was harder for her to grasp was why any omega would ask for a dark bond.
My gaze strayed to Dash again, but this time he had a sour expression on his face as he looked at Selena. She’d turned to face the front, and we spent the rest of the drive in tense silence.
* * *
The seers were nice.
The rest of the staff weren’t.
“Check again,” Selena instructed.
My aura was being probed by the Institute’s seers, trying to prove that Leighton had dark bonded me without permission. That wasn’t what they were going to find. I’d given permission enthusiastically. The ones who could see my aura would know that.
This was the second seer who’d checked me over because Selena was confident they were all wrong. I had no idea why she was so set on being right. Shouldn’t she want me to be happy with my bonded mate?
“There is no evidence that the dark bond was forced,” the seer said again.
The seers were dealing with her far better than I would have. I wondered if they often had to deal with people who didn’t believe their findings. It wasn’t as if Selena could double check their work.
Selena looked me up and down, loosing a sigh and then offering me a smile. It was the same one she’d first offered me in the sedan, and I’d since learned it was fake.
Big and fake.
“Well, then, let’s move on to the interview. Grab me a coffee.” She directed the request to the seer, and I gave the woman a sympathetic smile.
I was pretty sure she wasn’t supposed to be a coffee-toting secretary, but Selena liked to make demands.
She led me down a hallway in the vast building we were in. Dash had been forced to wait in an office, but I caught his scent from here. It was comforting. That meant he could smell me too, and my family wasn’t going to be able to whisk me away completely unnoticed.
The room we entered was small but cozy, with a couch across from an armchair and a small desk in the corner. It was what the therapist’s offices looked like in the TV shows my mother watched.
I took a seat on the couch, leaning back into the sanitized leather, devoid of all scent except the lingering note of lemon cleaner. Selena perched on the arm of the chair, not at all relaxed.
“If you could give me a rundown of when Leighton claimed you, that would be wonderful, honey.”
I didn’t like her calling me honey anymore, not when it was so obviously patronizing. “We were at a park. I asked her to, and she bonded me like I wanted,” I said simply.
