Page 109 of Omega Hunted

“No.” Cassian lifted his head off my lap for the first time. “Nobody I don’t know comes near you or her. Not tonight. Brec knows how to keep his mouth shut. Anyone else asks questions we can’t answer right now, and it could bring more people to the mountain.”

Decker’s gaze moved from us to the blood to the gun on the floor and finally to Emric’s body, and something unreadable crossed his face before he let out a slow breath through his nose and pushed himself upright with a grimace. “I’ll go check on the other stubborn alpha hero who refuses medical help.”

“Ronan is okay?” The question escaped before I could stop it.

Cassian nodded, his fingers tightening around my wrist, and relief hit me so hard my eyes burned. He’d come back through that door. Ronan had come back through that door. Somehow, despite everything, they were both alive.

“Ronan’s fine,” Ronan said from the doorway, and he was not fine.

One side of his tactical jacket had been torn almost to pieces, dried blood soaked into the fabric from shoulder to ribs, and fresh blood showed through the tear. Bruises darkened his jaw and cheekbone, one eye already swelling shut, and he walked carefully, favoring one leg, but he was standing, and he was alive, and his gaze went straight past me to the body on the floor.

“Emric Kastor,” he said, stepping into the room to nudge my brother’s shoulder with the toe of his boot. “Well. Shit.” He scrubbed a hand over the back of his neck. “That’s going to leave the families in one hell of a mess.”

My stomach dropped. “It was an accident,” I whispered, and the words sounded hollow, almost childish, even though they were true. I’d never meant to pull the trigger. I’d wanted to stop him taking Asha.

I’d killed him.

My hands started shaking again, and the room seemed to shrink around me as every question I’d been too afraid to ask crowded in at once. Would they care how it had happened, or would they see an omega who’d killed an alpha? Would they put me in prison? Send me back to the Kastors? Decide whether Asha deserved better than a father who’d shot his own brother in a room full of blood?

My voice cracked as terror gripped me. “Will they take Asha? I can’t lose her.”

Before anyone else spoke, warmth flooded through the bond, not words but certainty, pride that I’d protected our daughter, that I’d survived, that I was still standing here breathing. Cassian’s thumb stroked slowly across the inside of my wrist until the shaking in my hands started to ease.

“No one,” he said, “is taking Asha.”

“Not while I’m breathing,” Ronan added, nudging Emric again, his expression hardening. “He’ll disappear.”

I frowned, and Ronan met my eyes.

“This never reaches a courtroom. It never reaches the SED. The Kastors won’t report it because explaining why Emric was here means explaining that he crossed state lines to steal an omega and an infant. They’d expose themselves doing it.” He nodded once towards the body. “This was an accident that needed to happen.”

The words settled over the room with a weight I hadn’t expected, not celebration, just necessity. Emric had walked in with a gun. He’d come for Asha. There had never been another ending to this.

“Well, fuck.” Another voice drifted in from the doorway, and I shrank closer to Cassian, tightening my hold on Asha before I’d even turned.

The newcomer took in the room with one sweeping glance, his eyebrows lifting when they landed on Emric. “Late to the party as usual.” Unlike everyone else, he didn’t stare. He stepped over the blood, stopped in front of me, and held out his hand as though we were meeting under ordinary circumstances. “Breckon. Call me Brec. I’m here to patch up whatever these two have done to themselves this time.”

I stared at his hand for a second before shifting Asha onto one arm, shaking his hand. “Soren.”

His smile was warm as he pulled me into a side hug. “I know.” Then he crouched in front of us and studied my face for a moment before brushing one finger, very gently, across Asha’s hair. “And this must be little Asha.” His expression softened into something that reminded me of the way Cassian looked at her. “The beautiful princess.”

Asha sighed in her sleep, oblivious to the blood, the guns, and the dead man a few feet away.

Brec stood, rubbed his hands together once, and glanced around the room. “Right. Which one of you idiots wants stitching together first?”

Chapter Thirty-Two

CASSIAN

The bridge had been open three weeks before I let myself believe it wasn’t a trick, and even then I kept running the fence line every morning, checking the cameras before I let myself have coffee, because trust was a muscle I’d let atrophy for three years, and it needed the same slow rebuilding Soren’s body had needed after the birth. I wasn’t watching for a threat. I was making sure the world I’d built for the three of us was still standing.

Decker came up twice that first week, once in uniform and once out of it, and both times he sat at my kitchen table with a mug of coffee he never drank and told me what the paperwork on my mountain now said. Bodies were recovered and logged as out-of-state trespassers involved in a hunting accident. Emric’s death never entered the system at all because a man who’d crossed state lines to steal an omega and an infant didn’t officially exist on the land that killed him. Decker had favors owed to him in three counties, and he never told me what it cost him to make a Kastor Patriarch die on every record that mattered, and I never asked.

The news that Emric was dead hit Skinside, and I printed it out and gave it to Soren.

SKINSIDE // FIELD REPORT

KASTOR PATRIARCH CONFIRMED DEAD IN HUNTING ACCIDENT—FAMILY SILENT