Page 113 of The Other Omega

Caius had gone very still beside him. Leon’s attention stayed fixed on my hands until I finally stopped twisting them together.

“I don’t know where to start. There’s so much.”

“Begin at the beginning, my heart.”

“It’s just…” I swallowed. “I don’t think you’ll believe me. I don’t even know if I’d believe myself if I were in your shoes.” I looked between them. “It’s going to sound insane.” I looked away from them. “Could you try to keep an open mind?”

“You have it, my heart,” Alaric said.

I looked at the others. No one seemed doubtful or impatient, and that gave me some courage.

Please believe me.

“A few weeks ago, I was with my sisters at a party. I was going to drive us home, but my car wouldn’t start, so we decided to walk instead.”

“Why did you choose to walk? Were you travelling without security?” Darius asked.

“No. We didn’t have security.”

Darius frowned. “You were travelling without⁠—”

Alaric lifted one hand. “Let her finish.”

Darius inclined his head, although his expression suggested that walking home without security had already joined a list of things he intended to revisit later.

“So… we started walking home.” My throat tightened around the words, and I swallowed.

Leon noticed immediately and reached for the glass of water beside the nest, holding it out to me without saying anything.

“Thanks.”

I took a sip, then passed it back. He nodded and returned to his place.

“Nights are pretty safe back home, so we weren’t worried. Everything was fine at first, but then suddenly…” I stopped again, trying to find words for something I’d never been able to explain properly. “Everything around us started melting. Or bending. I don’t know. The road, the lights, everything looked wrong, like the whole world was being pulled out of shape around us. I don’t know how to describe it.”

“You are describing it perfectly well,” Lucien said from the end of the nest. “Do not concern yourself with explaining what occurred. Tell us only what you saw and what you remember.”

I nodded. “There was this light. It got bigger so quickly that I thought it was a car coming straight at us, so I pushed my sisters out of the way and then…” I searched my memory, but nothing came back between those two points. “I lost consciousness. The next thing I knew, I woke up in a bedroom at the Hart Manor. I was just… there.”

Leon’s brow creased slightly, and I looked between all of them.

“You see, that wasn’t my home.”

Confusion crossed his face. I knew there was no easier way to say what came next, so I just said it.

“The Hart Pack isn’t my family. I’m not Lady Elowen Hart.”

For a second, nobody moved. Then Caius’s fingers slowly closed around his thigh, Leon blinked once and sat a little straighter, and Darius leaned forward before stopping himself. Lucien gave me almost nothing except that his eyes never left my face, while Alaric remained completely still.

“Before that night, before everything started melting and that light appeared, I didn’t live in any of your seven kingdoms. I lived in a place called England, in a world where there were no Alphas, Betas or Omegas.”

None of them interrupted.

“I’m not from your world.” My fingers tightened on the skirt of my dress. “I think I came from another reality. An alternate reality, or another version of the world, or…” I shook my head. “I don’t know what to call it.”

Still nobody spoke. I watched them try to take it in, and the longer the silence lasted, the more I feared I’d finally reached the part they couldn’t believe.

“I woke up in a room I’d never seen before, still wearing the clothes I’d had on the night before, except it was daylight outside. When I went to the window, there was a desert. Just sand and sun everywhere. At first I thought I’d been kidnapped, and then I thought maybe I was dead, because my mum and dad—my dead mum and dad—were there.”