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“Oh yeah, I’m sure having horned little devils bouncing round everywhere chewing holes in everything is super practical,” he snorts.

“Alright then,” I retort, crossing my arms over my chest. “What would you have?”

“A dragon. Obviously.”

“Very fluffy.” I snort.

“I’m not an omega. I’m analpha.” He puffs his chest out comically, but it still stirs something in me that my omega appreciates. “I don’t need fluffy. I have you for that. I need something big and strong and noble and kickass. Like me.”

Ignoring the way my heart flutters at the way he says hehas me,I scathingly remind him that dragons aren’t real, but he shrugs and dismisses me, telling me that his dragon will bepink. Before I can argue with him, Dane interrupts with the next question.

“Who used to live here with you?”

I freeze. Up until now we’d avoided anything too personal. But this…this opens a whole can of worms I’m not sure I’m ready to inspect and dissect.

“Uhhh…”

“It’s okay, Evie. You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to,” Xar says kindly, offering me an easy out.

“Yeah,” Blaise adds, eyes twinkling with mischief. “We can move on to a different game, like strip poker!”

Dane chucks a cushion at his head and the tension breaks as I laugh. I take a deep breath and shake my head.

“No. It’s okay. We’re getting to know each other, right? I want to do this.”

No matter how hard it is.

Okay, here goes nothing.

“This house used to belong to my grandmother, Grams. She was…well, she was a formidable lady. A beta. She didn’t know the first thing about raising girls.”

“Girls…plural?”

I nod. “Yeah…my three sisters and I. We’re actually…ummm…kind of…identical…quads.”

“Holy shit!” Blaise gasps. “Quads as in…there’s four of you?” I give him a tight smile.

“You can count?” I retort. He grabs his heart dramatically yelling ‘wounded’ and I laugh.

Even quad betas are rare, he doesn’t need me to confirm that the four of us are all omegas and therefore rarer than a unicorn that shits diamonds. Not that Grams knew that we’d definitely be omegas when we were younger, but she suspected.

“Yeah. Our mother, an omega, died in childbirth, and our father, her alleged scent match and true mate, died a couple of hours after. Grams said he died of a broken heart, but always made it sound more stupid than romantic. So she was left with four screaming babies to raise, on her own, and I think she was already pretty old then – or at least she seemed it to us. She was incredibly strict and old fashioned. Gave a whole new meaning to the term old school.”

“Wow, little dew drop. I can’t imagine how she’d manage that. I wouldn’t even know where to begin.”

I have to try really hard not to swoon at Xar calling me little dew drop.

“I know, right. So Grams brought us back here to the farm house and raised us, single-handedly, with absolutely zero outside help. She was pretty reclusive, but of course she still had to get supplies delivered from town and things. No one knew that my mother had given birth to four babies. Well, I don’t think many people even knew she was pregnant to be fair. And so Grams kept it secret and…” I trail off, dreading how to explain the next part. If they didn’t think I was weird before, they will by the time I finish this tale.

“Basically, Grams raised the four of us as one person.” I cringe at the stunned silence that follows. “Okay. That didn’t come out right.”

“Can you explain what you mean by that?” Xar asks patiently. I jerk my chin.

“She called us all Evie. Only ever took us out one at a time if absolutely necessary. Dressed us the same. And we, ummm, just share one birth certificate and ID and stuff. Which might even be fake now I come to think of it. Anyway, so yeah…umm...that sort of thing…”

Silence. Deafening, screaming,what the actual fucksilence.

“…Why?”