Page 46 of The Forgotten

Olivia turns slightly, allowing me to see her grimace as she presses her hand against her lower stomach. She’s wearing one of Gareth’s hoodies that hits her mid thigh, and it doesn’t look like she’s wearing much else. My eyes widen as the air thickens with the scent of her slick. Fuck…

“I promise I won’t,” Olivia says, her eyes pinched in pain. “I have to go. I’ll call you later, okay?”

She’s pretending that she’s simply away on a short vacation instead of being held captive. I can tell that she’s used tominimizing things to show that everything is normal. That’s definitely some kind of trauma response if I’ve seen one.

“Mmhmm,” Olivia says, replying to something her daughter says. I’m no longer paying attention as I stalk forward. “Love you too. Bye.”

Hanging up, she glances in my direction.

“I didn’t say anything I shouldn’t have,” she mutters. “I’m going to go upstairs to lie down.”

“Not yet,” I say, my hands squeezing her hips as I lift her up on the counter. “I want to check your bandages.”

“They’re fine,” she says, leaning back and lifting her leg before I realize what’s happening. Olivia kicks out at my face with her bare foot, and I barely have time to turn my head before it connects.

My head snaps back before I grab her thighs and push upward until her back hits the counter. Goddamit, Olivia.

The Hellcat is fast as fuck.

“It looks like Gareth wasn’t only fucking you,” I grunt. There was something odd about their banter behind the door the first night she was here, and now I think it’s because he was teaching her self defense.

Pinning her legs tightly against my shoulders with one arm, I smirk at her. There’s a great many things I’ll need to discuss with Gareth when he’s back, but it’ll need to wait until after Olivia’s heat.

I’m done keeping secrets for my father.

“I’m not responsible for any of your dumb assumptions,” she says, struggling to escape me. All her thrashing does is push more of her scent into the air, and her panties are damp with slick.

How much longer am I expected to ignore the elephant in the room?

“What’s with all the yelling?” Maddox asks, strolling in. He takes in the position I’m in with Olivia and his nostrils flare as he smells her sweet scent. “Why are you holding her down?”

“I went to check her bandages and she kicked me in the face,” I reply. My other hand presses her chest down so that while she’s hitting me, she can’t sit up. There will definitely be a bruise later, but at least she missed my nose. That’s a miracle if there ever was one. “A little help please?”

Maddox rolls his eyes, pocketing his phone as he walks around to firmly shove her sleeves up her arms but gently takes her wrist. Olivia whimpers as he begins to pick off the tape and pulls off the bandage.

“Am I hurting you?” he asks, freezing in worry. He hasn’t realized that she’s in heat yet, and she shakes her head.

“This is silly,” Olivia says, trying to pull back her arm. “I’m perfectly fine.”

Maddox ignores her and peels back the bandage in its entirety. I can’t see her wrist from here, but I can see his gobsmacked expression.

“Is this for real?” he breathes. “Are they both like this?”

“What?” I ask, pulling her wrist away from him. Maddox drops it in favor of grabbing the other, allowing me to see that her skin is completely clear.

It’s like that day never happened. But it did, and she’s healed.

“I’ve always healed quickly,” she sighs, refusing to look at me. “I wouldn’t have survived everything that I have otherwise.”

“Does this have something to do with being in heat too?” I growl.

Whenever I have a spare second, I’ve been going down the rabbit hole of information available about omegas. My education is severely limited, and I realized after my misinformation about rejecting a scent match, that I needed to figure out fact from fiction.

During my twenty minute scroll this morning, one of the best tidbits I learned was that omegas can heal much faster than normal leading up to their heat. That’s not to say that Olivia doesn’t have super fast healing, because there’s not a single scar or blemish on her body.

“Excuse me?” Maddox asks, his thumb moving over her perfect skin as he tosses the bandages into the garbage. “We need to revisit what Cai just said, but I’m still having trouble processing how quickly you healed up. You’re lucky that the stitches kept up with you since they’re the kind that dissolve.”

“I didn’t think about that,” Olivia says, making a face. “If I’d been conscious, I would have mentioned it to the doctor. My skin was a mess yesterday, it reminded me of Frankenstein as the skin grew over the stitches before they finally began to dissolve."