Chapter Seven
Aden
When we got to the backup safe house, I found the bedroom and locked myself in. It wasn’t just the brush with death that had me ready to break down into tears.
The rest of my pills were gone, and I had no idea how I was going to get more. Being stuck in a house with Zane was going to make me go into heat without them. Not only would he know what I really was, and know that I’d been deceiving him for years, the rest of Delta Squad would know too.
I had no reason to believe that they would keep my secret, and I couldn’t expect them to lie to the military on my behalf. It was all about to come crashing down around me. I had to sit down on the bed and put my head between my knees. The world began to spin and tilt like I was about to pass out.
My career was over and there was a very good chance that my mate would never forgive me. Deep in my heart, I knew that’s not how fate worked, but I was still terrified. I hadn’t had the best luck in life with Alphas who were close to me. Hatch had never abused me sexually, but that was the only form of abuse I didn’t suffer at his hands.
Part of me sometimes wondered if he wouldn’t have done that too, but if he had, it would have meant juvenile hall or jail time instead of psychiatric care. He didn’t want to go into the criminal justice system because he couldn’t manipulate people there the way he could maneuver his way through social workers and counselors who only wanted to believe the best about kids.
Suddenly, a memory that I’d forgotten came back to me in a flash. I was around three years old, and the smoke alarms in our house began to blare. We lived in one of those old Victorian houses that had bedroom and bathroom doors with keyholes, so they could be locked from either side.
I could hear my omega daddy screaming for me and Hatch. I was in the downstairs bedroom that functioned as our playroom. When I tried to leave the room, the knob wouldn’t turn. I started to scream and pound on the door.
My dad came and tried to open it, but it was locked. “I’m going to go to the kitchen and get the skeleton key, baby. Stay by the door. The fire is upstairs. Please don’t be scared; Daddy will be right back.”
I tried to stay calm, but then I could hear things crashing in the kitchen and Daddy yelling bad words. He couldn’t find the key. I immediately thought I was going to die and started screaming for my daddy.
That’s when the window broke. I was far enough away from the window that none of the glass hurt me. It was my Alpha father. When my dad couldn’t find the key, my father got an axe from the garage and used the blunt end to smash the bedroom window. The acrid smell of smoke filled my nose as he called out to me.
He cleared the glass, climbed in, and swept me up into his arms. I passed out from fear before we got outside, and there isn’t much to my memory after that. I could kind of remember my father passing me to my daddy, but it went back to being a complete blur the moment I felt his arms wrap around me.
A shiver passed down my spine as I recalled that day. I don’t remember our house burning down, but I know that we moved shortly after that. At least, that’s what I thought I remembered. Memories from that long ago could be a tricky thing.
Either way, that had to be the point where I began to distrust Alphas. It made for very complicated relationships with them because it was my Alpha father who saved me. That push and pull of wanting to trust them while at the same time being terrified deep down inside had colored my entire life.
I wasn’t sure what to do. I was trapped in a house with the Alpha that was my mate, and I was on the verge of going into heat. I didn’t have any of the medication I needed to mask that I was an omega.
His omega.
It couldn’t be happening. My military career, the thing that meant the most to me, was about to go down in flames. Once Zane got a good whiff of my heat hormones, he would claim me. I felt myself growing hard thinking about it.
No.
I began to run scenarios in my mind. We were a mile away from one of the biggest black-market hormone suppliers in the world. I thought that perhaps I could sneak out and find someone to sell me a few days’ worth of pills. Javier’s men hadn’t gotten a good look at me, so even if they were doing sweeps of the town, I figured they probably didn’t know what I looked like.
All I had to do was wait until Kali and Rory came back and everyone went to sleep. I doubted we’d be shipping out that night. Zane would want to wait until things died down and get an extraction in the morning. Hell, we could’ve probably just flown out on a commercial flight the same way we’d flown in. That would’ve been less obvious than a military extraction.
I could just wait a few hours more and go buy some of the drugs I needed. Then, I could keep pretending to be something I’m not.
I could keep living a lie.