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FORTY-THREE

Elijah

“SO, HOW WAS IT?” I asked, when Emma slunk into my bedroom a couple of hours after she’d left to seduce her alpha. I could have saved us both the trouble—she had the dazed and faraway look of the extremely well-knotted.

“It was...” She paused. Swallowed. Tried again. “It was... good?”

I raised my eyebrows. “That made it sound like you aren’t sure.”

Her tongue darted out to lick her lips. “No, I... I didn’t mean to make it sound like a question. It was good. Really good. And what the hell am I supposed to donow?”

“Bask in the afterglow,” I suggested. Honestly, I wasn’t trying to be trite. Or impatient. I was well aware that all of this was new to Emma, in a way that it wasn’t to me. She was overcoming years of twisted-up thinking about alphas and omegas, and her place in the world.

By contrast, I’d been happily fucking alphas since I was a teenager. Even so, I had limited high ground to stand on in this situation. I knew my way around a knot well enough, but I was dealing with my own internal panic over the prospect of having caughtfeelings. We were already a scent-match with Gabriel’s pack. That was scary enough on its own. But the factthat I wanted them—that Ilikedthem—opened up new vistas of potential heartbreak that I’d managed to avoid until now.

“Onyx asked us to stay,” Emma said softly. “I thought they were the safe one, Elijah. But they asked, and they talked about what it would be like if we were a pack, and—” She cut herself off, shaking her head sharply.

She hadn’t stumbled over a single word since we’d started talking, I couldn’t help but notice.

Her stutter had barely been detectable back in New York, before all of this mess had started. It appeared under stress, I was pretty sure. Apparently, a good, hard fuck trumped whatever angst she was processing about possibly becoming a pack.

“Did you like what you heard?” I asked, prodding cautiously. “Do you want to stay?”

“Not in London,” she said quickly. “I couldn’t. Too many ghosts. It hurts to be here.”

“But with the alphas?” I pressed.

“I don’tknow,” she said plaintively. “If... if everything else were a blank slate, then maybe so. But I can’t undo my family connections. I can’t go back in time and keep Gabriel’s sister from being abducted.”

“If you could, we wouldn’t have met them in the first place,” I pointed out.

She was right, though.God, what a tangle.

“I know,” she said, and let out a sigh that sounded like it came from the depths of her soul. “I thought sleeping with Onyx would make things clearer. But now, I’m even more confused.”

So much forOperation: Explore Sex with Alphas. Ah, well. It had been worth a try—and at least the poor girl got a good fuck out of it. The idea that she’d spent a lifetime faking it with betas made me feel vaguely nauseated on her behalf.

“You should go have a warm bath,” I said, for lack of anything more constructive to add. “I wasn’t kidding about enjoying the afterglow.”

She huffed out a breath of self-deprecating amusement. “I never thought of you as the practical one before.”

“Oh,dove,” I said, slapping a hand over my heart. “Youwoundme. Practicality is my middle name.”

Another reluctant breath of laughter. “Really? Wow. I know your parents were terrible, but that’s a whole new level of abuse.”