Page 5 of Omega's Heart

When we were settled, he took his seat in the big chair behind the even bigger desk and laced his fingers together on the space in front of him. “So, Felix. Your Dad tells me you’re unhappy here.”

Oh, here we go. “Not unhappy, sir,” I squeaked, and it sounded funny even to me, that tiny voice coming from my huge body. The Alpha gestured at the glass in front of me and I took a sip from it, then put it back again. “Thank you, sir,” I said, more normally this time. “I’m not unhappy here. My family is here, I have friends. I just...” How to explain?

It seemed I didn’t have to. “But you’re turning twenty-eight this spring and watching all the nineteen and twenty-year-old omegas finding mates and starting their lives.”

I nodded dumbly and stared at him. That was pretty much it. I was staring down a long future of becoming more and more invisible, less of a person and more of an institution, and it was depressing.

“What do you think will be different for you in Mercy Hills?” the Alpha asked gently. “Nothing about you will change. You’ll still be the same age. You’ll still be—” He snapped his mouth shut on the words, but we all knew he was going to say something like “—too big for beauty.” Dad reached across and squeezed my hand, then held onto it after.

The Alpha stared at me for a few moments longer, but it didn’t feel like he was actually looking at me. More like he was looking past me, seeing all the complications I presented here, as opposed to the ones I would create moving to Mercy Hills. He frowned a little harder and my heart sank, then he let out a long breath and reached for the right-hand drawer of his desk. “Give me a minute,” he said, but when Dad started to stand up to leave the Alpha waved him back down again. “It’s six pm here,” he muttered, “which puts it at seven there.” He pulled out a little book and flipped through the pages, then reached for his phone. “Hello? Oh, Baxter, I didn’t think you’d still be in. It’s White River. No, I do need to talk to him but I understand this is his Mate’s project too if he has a few minutes.” He paused for a moment, listening. I cheated and borrowed from my wolf to eavesdrop. Dad side-eyed me and I expected I’d get punished for it when we got home, but I desperately wanted to hear.

“Quin here,” came a deep voice from the speaker on the phone. “Is there an emergency?”

“No emergency,” the Alpha said. “How’s the trial going?”

“They’ve got a continuance while we try to get the sister brought here. It would have been easier if they’d been caught in a state that had no enclave in it. Maybe. I don’t know.”

“Well, if there’s anything I can do to help, let me know. I’d like to see those laws loosened up a bit as much as anyone.”

“I’ll keep it in mind.” There was a pause, and then the strange shifter—the Alpha of Mercy Hills, if I’d guessed right—asked, “What’s going on, Logan? You usually call during the day.”

“I was wondering if you were serious about taking in any omega who wanted to come to Mercy Hills and live there?”

“Let me get Holland. It’s his group that takes care of that, I just sign the paperwork.”

“I’d heard that.” There was a tone in Logan’s voice, but I couldn’t figure it out.

“It hasn’t hurt us a bit, either,” Quin said with a cheerfulness that felt odd paired with that deep voice. It made me wonder what he looked like, and if the body matched that voice. Maybe he had a brother…

Oh, don’t be ridiculous, Felix.

Voices murmured in the phone, low enough that I couldn’t hear them even with the wolf’s help.

“Holland here,” said a second voice, smoother than the Mercy Hills Alpha’s, with a note of southern twang in it. I’d heard that the Alpha of Mercy Hills had mated an omega from out our way; this must be him. “What’s happened?” the Mate asked.

The Alpha looked over at me and I understood he wanted to know if I was ready to hear his take on my situation. I thought I had a pretty good idea just what I looked like from the outside—anything he had to say wasn’t going to hurt me. I nodded and steeled myself to hear the unvarnished truth in someone else’s voice.

Logan nodded back. “I have an omega here, he’ll be twenty-eight in the spring. Good natured, good character, has all the skills that anyone would want to have. Not bad looking, except that he’s —” He paused here and asked, “Felix, how tall are you?”

I was wrong. It did hurt. “Six foot two, sir.”

The Alpha nodded. “He’s six foot two and, to be honest, he towers over most of the pack and while there have been a few sniffs of interest, it never lasted.”

“Are you calling us to see if we can find him a mate?” the Mercy Hills Alpha asked.

“No.” The Alpha leaned back in his chair and spun it half-way away from us as if he didn’t want us to hear his next words. “It can’t be easy on him, watching everyone else getting mated and having pups and him still living in his parents’ home with no sign of a mate anywhere. I know there’s been some talk around here, some unkind words said.”

Damn, did he know about the teasing too? But he was the Alpha, it was his job to know. I wondered when it was that Dad had first spoken to the Alpha about me. Had he spent the last month investigating me?

Why did I come here?

Dad squeezed my hand again and I tried to smile for him, but my mouth seemed to have forgotten how to move like that.

I missed the next part of the conversation as I fought to keep my expression calm, so all I caught was the Alpha making arrangements to talk to Mercy Hills about something to do with the packs themselves in two days. Then he hung up the phone and carefully closed his little book and put it back in the drawer. “Well, Felix,” he said slowly. “If you’re dead set on this course of action, Mercy Hills will have you. We’ll have to run the paperwork through the human government, but if Mercy Hills is indicating acceptance of your application, then it shouldn’t be a problem.”

Yes! I was going to Mercy Hills! My head spun briefly and I babbled out a thank you speech full of promises not to embarrass him and to keep a low profile and I didn’t really remember what kinds of silliness, until the Alpha held up a hand, stopping the flow of words tumbling from my mouth like he’d physically put a hand over it.

“It’s going to take a couple of days to get things sorted out, and Quin and Holland have to find a place to put you yet. I know you’re a good boy, and I don’t have any concerns about your behavior over there. But while you have this time to think, I want you to really consider what this move will mean. To you and to your family. Who’s going to look after your parents as they get older? And you’ll be all alone over in Mercy Hills. Your family will be here. I want to know that you’re not going to go over there, stay a couple of weeks, then decide you’re homesick and want to come back.”