Page 98 of Daughter of Garnet

"A dinosaur? You're a dinosaur?"

He shushes me. "A prehistoric crocodile."

"How fucking big are you?"

"Well, I didn't have time to get measured or weighed, now did I?" I glare at him. There is no way this Alpha did not research his beast to hell and back. "I believe around five tons, and three stories long."

"Three stories!" I'm growing louder by the second, and he slaps his hand over my mouth.

"Yes, three stories. Long, not tall. Now you see why my ceremony was such a disaster?" I try to say something against his palm, but he can't hear me. He pulls it away slowly, with a pointed look that tells me to watch my volume.

"It's starting to make sense."

"What is?"

I briefly explain to Cameron that I had a heat spike, Ray showed up and threw Warren out, and that I found out Ray is my scent match.

By the time I'm done, he's fuming. "How come no one came and got me?"

"I was fine, Cameron. That's not the point I was getting to. Ray is my scent match."

"I assumed."

"Do you know his shifted form?"

"A condor, right?"

I waggle my hand. "Kind of. He's also prehistoric. An Argentavis."

Cameron's eyebrows raise. "And Dominic is a sabertooth. Also prehistoric."

"I've been tearing myself up since the ceremony, wondering why me. Why am I the one who has to try to fix things? Why wouldn't one of the other Gods choose an Alpha to fight this battle?"

Realization hits him now. "They did. They did choose an Alpha."

"And they needed a strong Omega to bring them all together."

"Oh, the Gods are clever, aren't they?" He grabs me by the chin and kisses me.

I am still upset with Ray for withholding the fact that we were scent matches, and I'm not over it, but now I know he needs to be by my side, so I'm going to have to forgive him eventually. I don't need to fall in love with him, but we'll need to be civil. I need him to fight with me.

My biggest concern is Dominic. Will he fight against his father? Or is he aligned with those ideals?

CHAPTER 47

Dominic

My whole life, I have been surrounded by liars and sycophants who will show their necks and make promises they have no intention of keeping just to gain favor with my family. Even the professors at the Institute have tried to kiss my ass from the moment I walked through the door in hopes of gaining proximity to my father.

I love my beast, but he made everything worse. My father was thrilled when I shifted on that stage in my sabertooth form. He's a lion, dangerous and respectable, but nothing compared to my beast. I could see the gears in his mind turning as he thought about the best way to utilize me.

He told me my whole life that he'd love me no matter what I shifted into, but I knew it wasn't true.

I also knew the subtext was that he wouldn't love me if I weren't Blessed as an Alpha. It was my biggest fear growing up. No Bradly man had been anything but an Alpha for generations, and if I was the one to break that streak, I don't think I would've lived to enroll in the Institute.

I can picture it, sometimes, the way my father would have gotten rid of me if I stayed a Beta, or worse, received an Omega Blessing. He would have used my death to further public perception of him.

Over the years, I grew accustomed to interpreting lies that, if overheard, would seem like nothing. I don't know what happened to my mother, but I can guess that the story told to me about her death is just another one more lie in a life full of them.