Page 45 of Omega's Heart

Lysoonka save me, he didn’t think it was funny. I could tell by his expression, so I forced a stop to my awful hilarity and made myself answer him truthfully. “I’m not very omega-like. Not the way I look anyway. It would take an alpha in a million to see past the size of me. I don’t think he exists.” I leaned my head back against the wall and stared at nothing. “I hated myself for a long time. Did a lot of stupid things, too. But you can’t hang on to that kind of emotion forever. You either have to kill it, or it kills you. It wasn’t easy, but I think I won.” Though that wasn’t the whole truth either, but it was good enough for now. And, honestly, it was more than I thought I probably owed him anyway. “It’s not fair to them or me to expect them to be different than they are.”

“No, but I can expect them to be better than they are. Which is fools.”

There was no convincing an alpha once he had something fixed in his mind. I shook my head and tried to redirect the conversation. “Do you think you might sleep if I rubbed your back for a while?” My mother had done that for my father when his muscles had ached from overwork, or he’d been too tired to sleep.

“No. But I might sleep if I can watch you battle the VA first.”

I glanced over at him, startled, to find him holding his phone out to me. “You mean it?”

“I’m tired of dealing with them. And maybe I’ll learn something from you. After all, you made Holland go away. If you can bring him to heel, I want to see what you can do with a bunch of government bureaucrats.”

“I didn’t bring him to heel. Mostly just startled him, then ran while he recovered.”

“Uh huh.” He was still holding out the phone toward me expectantly.

He needed to see a human doctor, one that could order him the right tests, get the proper scans, do the things that he needed to be done. I didn’t want to see him stuck in that wheelchair for the rest of his life—not because I thought it made him any less, but because he did. And, for stupid omega reasons, it was important to me that he felt like a whole alpha, no matter the missing parts.

I took the phone. “Okay, time for the Holland treatment.”

C H A P T E R 2 8

F ive days later his blood tests came back—clear, no cancer. No deficiencies. Bram couldn’t see anything except that the bone felt ‘really alive’ to him, whatever that meant.

No fucking explanation.

Kaden brought Adelaide flowers and an expensive pen as an apology; she offered him x-rays in a week’s time, when the machine would be fixed.

Which he was able to say no to, because nine days after that first appointment, he flew out to Washington.

They were catching two rabbits with one lunge. Felix had wrangled, coaxed, flattered, and somehow manipulated the VA into giving him an appointment for tomorrow to have his leg looked at.

But before then, he had to get through this—the White House.

He was surprised at how alien his uniform felt after so little time. It was almost as if he’d already checked out of the army, though his official medical retirement was still in progress, waiting on the rounds of doctor’s visits and meetings that would decide whether he was still fit enough to serve. Six months ago, he would have done anything to stay in.

That had changed since he’d moved to Mercy Hills. Now he cursed the inevitable red tape delaying his official change of status from injured warrior to no-longer-needed veteran.

He hadn’t really believed Quin when his brother had told him they wanted to give him a medal. Oh, he figured they planned to do it since they’d called and everything. But he really didn’t believe he’d earned it—what he did was no more than anyone else would have done and certainly wasn’t worth a medal. There had to be more behind this.

Quin and Abel thought so too.

So here he was, sitting in a room filled with furniture the value of which would probably have fed half the enclave for a month. And that was the biggest surprise—that they were doing it here, at the White House. Normally, this would take place at one of the bases, whichever one was forced to claim him for the time being.

Which made this even weirder.

The half-dozen other soldiers in the room were probably camouflage for his presence. A random assortment of men from different units, but no other shifters. The tabs on his collar stood out like spotlights in the corners of his vision, like mockeries of his other medals hanging below them.

Abel thought this was a political move—this was the same president who had come to Abel’s mating. He hadn’t come to Quin’s, but he’d been out of the country at the time, so maybe that wasn’t as much a political withdrawal as it was just not having enough hours in the day to do everything.

A young man in a suit and tie popped in through the door. “Okay, we’re ready for you now. There’s going to be press, let us handle it. If any of them approach you, send them to us. Only approved picture opportunities as well. Once the ceremony is over, we’ll have staff in place to take care of that. The president asked me to let you know there’ll be a small reception after without the press and those of you with family members here will be welcome to bring them along.”

Well, that would make Quin and Abel happy. His two older brothers and their mates had come, leaving the enclave in Cas’s hands. Kaden had carefully refrained from asking if they were trying to bring the walls down ahead of their stated schedule, but Holland had smiled widely at him and declared that the mountain of paperwork they’d left him would be more than adequate to keep Little Trouble out of, well…trouble.

And the social invitation added just another tiny bit of confirmation to the idea that they were there for more than just pinning a medal on Kaden’s chest.

The mixed group of soldiers filed out of the room and followed the man in the suit down a busy, narrow hallway and out a door onto a stretch of beautifully manicured lawn.

At least he could roll across this.