Page 52 of Omega Forged (Hartlock Omegas #2)

Pan

“It could be nothing.” Sybil, the voice of reason, attempted to calm us as Tully’s phone went dead.

Walden’s sisters huddled together in a small armchair, all tangled limbs and tentative smiles.

Walden swiveled in his chair and took another fortifying breath.

The sound of Tully’s call going through made my heart lodge in my throat.

We’d just finished watching a teaser for her new video series, Hartlock, Unfiltered .

She looked self-possessed and strong as she interviewed Designated who lived in The Barracks and showed snippets of their lives.

There were gritty parts that Tully didn’t shy away from.

Her warm heart shined light in a way that demanded to be seen but not judged.

Her editor spliced in footage she’d taken from years ago, featuring her parents.

This new series would do more to shed light on the lingering effects of the HLA than Starhaven’s own council ever had.

“How could she ever doubt how perfect she was for this?” Ajax swiped his hand down over his open mouth.

Lloyd couldn’t look away from his phone.

“Right? She has this energy that invites you in and makes you want to listen.” Beatrice clapped her hands together. Trying to distract us from the very smug, very male voice that had answered Tully’s phone.

“Who was that on the phone? Her editor?” Walden rasped.

My alpha’s perfect poker face faltered like cracks through clay. He scrubbed at his stubbled chin. His sisters hadn’t been able to hide their double take when they walked in and found Walden in stained sweats.

“No, she has an all-women team. She asked us for advice from a PR perspective, and I’ve been wanting to pivot to more marketing-focused projects, so I took it on. Don’t be a douche about this.”

Walden jerked back, “I’m not, it’s just…”

Sybil set her jaw and crossed her arms. “Can you blame us? The worst thing you could do is huff and puff your way down there. I know you expected her to forgive you and come back by now.”

My stomach twisted. It had been over a month since Tully left us and I’d be lying if I said I thought she’d forgive us. Something broke in Tully on the gala night, in all of us, but the ripples she left turned into waves of chaos.

She was finding herself, and it was a scary prospect, to know we might not be a part of that future.

Have you hurt her?

No more than you did.

I knew we were all thinking about the man who answered her phone and who he was.

“He might be a friend.” Ajax scratched at his jaw.

“There are bigger things happening than our pack, I know that,” Walden replied, though he sounded sullen about it. Sybil reached out and rubbed his shoulder.

The triplet omegas thought they were being slick.

They worked in shifts, always turning up with errands only Walden could solve.

They brushed their fingers over him like he was breakable, and I suppose he was.

I’d never seen Walden shatter like he had in the past month.

Scruff hoarded his cheeks. My love had a broken heart. We both did.

He was used to being bull-headed with solutions. Forcing outcomes through sheer willpower. But that wouldn’t work with Tully. He rubbed his chest, and I narrowed my eyes, worried about his health.

“Your campaign?” I added.

We were crowded around our comfortable sectional, but I couldn’t stop moving. I hadn’t had a moment of comfort since Tully left. All I could think about was the night of the gala and the look on her face when Chase tossed me the SubduX.

I took my first pill when I was sixteen years old. It was at my debut end-of-year performance at PAMA. I hadn’t slept for almost twenty-four hours and my stomach screamed with vicious cramps.

Try harder.

Practice more.

Impress the agents.

The sound of my parents’ voices followed me everywhere, like a wasp in my ear. Everything hinged on this performance, and I was about to blow it. No matter how many hours I practiced, I kept making mistakes. My right hand trembled and hit the wrong keys.

The audience was full of scouts who had come to watch me specifically.

The pressure drove me to the bathroom, where I threw up everything in my stomach.

My piano mentor held his palm under the bathroom door and urged me to take the innocuous pill.

Salvation in a tiny, round form. He promised it would ease my muscles and let my talent shine.

I swallowed it dry, paranoid about the lingering scent of bile that clung to my hunched shoulders.

It hadn’t taken long for my shaking limbs to settle, my watery bowels to still. My cheeks had gotten hot and cold, and a wave of calm settled over me like a blanket. It was the best performance I’d ever done. My body obeyed me.

The audience surged to their feet afterward.

But my sharp pleasure soon turned vicious without the help of those tiny white pills.

My genius accessed only through the chalky taste.

Until they, too, stopped working. My fingers curled in worse.

The notes came out wrong. So, I crushed the pills and snorted them instead.

One became two, two became three. Until I was face down on the stage with my nostrils caked with vomit.

It didn’t matter.

My parents handled the bad press, swept it under the rug with a statement about it being the combination of a bad flu and ‘exhaustion.’ The exhaustion was true.

It was constant. if I didn’t take something to get through the day.

Black shadows painted my under eyes, and I swallowed yawns that made my jaw ache.

I wanted to play, but my fingers wouldn’t stop shaking, and my stomach would turn so violently I doubled over.

I craved calm.

All I wanted was the shield of that first time. The easy slide into peace, where my screaming insides turned numb. When the constantly berating soundtrack of my parents turned off. Back when I could access the only part of me other people cared about.

I had a talent others would dream of, and losing it was killing me. I was a jittery, angry mess.

When I met Walden, I got clean for a while. I could barely string together two notes, but I’d been determined to impress the alpha. The stiffness in my right hand made me fly into a temper. Until my piano mentor offered me something new.

SubduX.

What alpha would take a drug that emulated being like an omega?

But I was hiding a secret, one that this drug made right for the first time.

There was a ravenous hunger inside me, since I could remember, to be an omega.

When the glittery, cloud-like fugue settled over my body, I was hooked.

My insides were marshmallow, soft. I could perform again. I felt perfect.

Until it wore off, and a gaping maw opened in my chest and clawed at my soul.

It left me hollowed out, shrunken in its absence.

The glossy haze over my vision became haunting.

My skin was too tender to touch, yet prickling with need.

SubduX became my whole world. I lived between moments when I was high, and it worried my piano mentor so much that he refused to buy for me any longer.

But without it, my hand became a claw, and the shivers returned. So, I made more reckless trips to The Barracks than anyone ever should. I was careless, selfish, and it had almost destroyed my pack.

Giving it all up nearly broke me, and even now I could feel the echo of it in my veins. So, I used hard spirits to replace the endless hunger. But it didn’t match the glow I craved, just made me sloppy enough to forget what I really wanted.

When I saw Tully for the first time, a glimmer of a high sparked in my chest. Where SubduX flooded me with calm, Tully was a soft trickle. Being around her sweetness didn’t make me itch with endless need or leave me with the growling ache of the comedown.

Until the night of the gala.

I was on edge because it was the first time I’d been out in public with the pack, sober, since the incident .

Seeing someone else playing the piano made my chest ache with everything I’d lost. All night long, I tasted phantom alcohol on the back of my throat.

Then CJ waved my greatest weakness in my face.

My nostrils itched and my blood grew feverish under my skin.

All I could think about was the rush. That first taste and the soft escape to follow. The tight grip around my lungs and chest would ease, and all my worries would melt away. My fingers would be soft, not stiff.

I found the strength to resist, surrounded by the skeletons of my dead talent. For myself, and the future I wanted with Tully. But now she was gone, and for what? A campaign that was crushing Walden and this pack to pieces?

“I can’t even concentrate on it,” Walden muttered, carded his hand through his hair.

Each word was a razor blade on my insides. Cutting narrow, deep slices. We were mirrors of lost passion.

“Walden…”

“This won’t break us. I won’t let it.” A flash of the Walden I knew reappeared, but only for a moment.

He was gaunt with guilt, but his words soothed me. I caught my bottom lip to trap a whimper of relief. We were good. But we weren’t perfect, not with our omega still missing. Walden dropped a kiss on top of my head.

“If it’s any consolation, she’s safe and settled in The Barracks,” Lorna piped up.

Sybil and Beatrice smacked her shoulders and Lorna swore under her breath.

“Pretend I didn’t say that.”

We shared uneasy looks.

Lloyd folded in on himself. “The Barracks?”

“I know you promised never to return there—” Walden started, but Lloyd held up his palm, his lips colorless.

“Has she been there this whole time?” Ajax asked.

Sybil shrugged and avoided our gaze. They’d been helping her all along.

Walden wheezed. “Are you trying to antagonize another panic attack out of me?”

“That phone call doesn’t mean anything. It was probably a prank.” Sybil let out a soft purr for a moment before cutting off with wide eyes. It wasn’t the purr we wanted.

“I just wish I could talk to Tully, to see what she’s feeling,” I sighed.

“Tully thinks we used her for her name. She’s been through trauma after trauma and survived, but it’s made her believe she isn’t worthy.

I’m not letting her go or letting her move on.

Our role right now is to be her support as she finds her power.

She doesn’t need us, and we can’t force her to,” Walden said.

“How do we move forward when we can’t even say that to her?” I frowned up at Walden, his expression like stone.

I squeezed Walden’s hand and shared an intense gaze with him. I’d carve myself inside out and make a shell of my body for Tully. We both would.

“I’m falling apart without her. There are so many things I didn’t say…” Lloyd tugged his fingers through his hair.

His eyes were red-rimmed and hollow.

I massaged my pounding forehead. Everything was fractured, and I didn’t know how to process it. Hunger surged, hooks digging into my insides. Want for oblivion shuddered down my veins. But only for a second. I closed my eyes against the assault and breathed until the thought subsided.

Drugs hadn’t helped my shattered life in the past, and they wouldn’t now. I would not give in or let it take anything more from me.

“Are you ok?” Lloyd reached out and his beachy scent was like a vacation. His green gaze swirled with concern.

“I’m fine.” Lie. I couldn’t stop thinking about that voice. So masculine, with a threat entwined through it. Was the message for us? Or Tully?

But there was no point in dwelling on the hurt in my stomach. I’d been born twisted up inside, and the only thing keeping me from hurtling over a cliff was the thought of getting Tully back. I shook out my stiff wrist, and Walden tracked the movement with a sigh.

“Everything is going to be alright.” His voice was velvet soft, and I sank into it.

Lloyd’s phone buzzed, and he snatched it up. Ajax had a little wrinkle between his brow, and it deepened as we answered the phone. I scrambled over the back of the couch and peered at his screen.

“Tully?” Walden said.

“Don’t touch me,” Tully screeched.

“Are you alright?” Ajax said as she let out another scream.

“Thorn, I will scratch you if you don’t call him off, please. Gods.”

Thorn? Who was that? Ajax rubbed his chest.

Envy was a new, bitter taste that never left my tongue. Bitter scents swirled around us. It twisted my intestines until I gasped. Tully tilted her head on the screen and the sight of her neck, pale and unblemished, made me shiver.

“Don’t freak out.” Lorna waved her hands at Walden, whose face was turning red.

“Tully, please, answer us,” Lloyd begged as Tully’s voice got softer, but still distressed.

“Fuck, you rang someone, shut her up.” A deeper, razor-sharp voice filtered through and the phone call ended.

I leaped up, unable to stop the instinct to go to her. “Lloyd, you don’t have to come, but I’m not going to stay here. What if she’s in trouble?”

“You think I’m going to stay here while you all go? I-I’d do anything for her, including—” His shoulders hunched forward and he was so green that Sybil made a worried noise.

I knew what Lloyd endured there. The strength it took to survive. He was putting everything on the line for Tully.

“You three stay here,” Ajax said to the triplets, already moving to the door.

Lorna hurried alongside him and barred the doorway for a moment.

“Think for a second. You go down there and what? Crash her apartment. She won’t thank you for being jealous idiots, not when she doesn’t belong to you.”

A rusty growl escaped Walden, and I pressed my hand on his chest, worried for a moment that he was going to charge his own sister. Sybil joined Lorna, and they took a step back, clearly coming to the same conclusion.

“She is our omega. Maybe she doesn’t belong to us, but we belong to her. Don’t you ever say that to me again.”

“Ok,” Beatrice squeaked. “Very dramatic. But you still need to think about this. Tully’s not going to be happy to see you.”

Walden clenched his jaw. “I’d never forgive myself if I let anything happen to her. Maybe it was a joke, but she can tell me from her own lips. If you care about her, you’ll tell me where she’s living.”

“Now we’re talking.” I set my jaw and snatched up the keys. “I’m driving.”