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With a plaintive meow, a small shape detached itself from the alpha in my doorway. Princess hit the ground with a light thump and trotted across the room to me, weaving through the piles ofpillows on the floor. The soft press of her head against my shin dragged me free of the past.
I glared up at Emiel, not uncurling from my miserable hunch. “It’s incredibly rude to enter an omega’s nest without an invitation. Get out.”
Emiel ignored me, coming far enough inside to find a bare patch of wall across from me and slide down it until he, too, was sitting on the floor.
“Shut the basement door when I wanted to be on my own, didn’t I?” he muttered. “You picked the lock.”
I felt heat rise to my cheeks, glad that the shadows in the room would hide the scarlet flush of humiliation.
“That’s different,” I said.
He shrugged. “If you say so.”
Princess trilled her displeasure at not being the center of my attention, and I stretched out a listless hand to tickle behind her ears. She immediately pushed into the contact, a purr all out of proportion with her tiny frame rumbling outward from her chest.
Fine.
Just because Emiel had barged in here and bulldozed my moral high ground, it didn’t mean I had to talk to him. I petted the cat with absent movements and pointedly refused to look at my unwanted guest.
The silence stretched... and stretched some more. It occurred to me that maybe trying to out-silence Emiel wasn’t quite the no-brainer I’d thought it might be. I pressed my lips together, attempting to ignore the growing pressure of words building up behind my teeth.
Minutes passed.
“She can’t fight the gangs alone,” I blurted. “They’ll roll right over her.”
The silence returned as soon as it was out of my mouth, folding over the small disturbance like the tide slipping over a rock pool.
“Dunno,” Emiel said at last. “Maybe.”
I stared at him. “You can’t possibly be in favor of this.”
He pondered that for a time. “Not really my call, is it? An’ she’s got that husband with her, too.”
I continued to stare at him with blank incomprehension. “Herhusband? That waste of space?”
Another shrug. “I kinda like him.”
“Why?” The word was dragged straight from the depths of my soul, because... seriously,what?
Emiel’s posture loosened a bit, his forearms coming to rest on his raised knees. “He came to check on her. When she was in heat.”
That didn’t really answer the question, did it?
“And he’s lucky he didn’t get his head knocked off in the process,” I shot back, hearing the contempt coming through in my tone.
“That’s what I mean, though,” Emiel said. “He was worried that maybe we were taking advantage of her. And he came to make sure she was okay, even though he might’ve got punched in the face.” He paused, before admitting, “Thought about doin’ it myself.”
Slow-rolling realization washed through me, the bile rising a bit higher in my throat.
“Because no one ever did that for us,” I whispered hoarsely. “No one ever checked on us.”
“Yeah,” he agreed.
I swallowed and licked my lips, reaching for deflection. “I think he’s probably bisexual. He was checking out Byron pretty blatantly, anyway. So, who knows? You might be in with a chance there, big man.”
“Fuck off,” Emiel said.
I couldn’t help the choked snort of laughter that shook free of my lungs as I scrubbed my hands down my face and let them fall.