Page 44 of Want It All

I didn’t think he’d hear me over the breeze, but he did.

‘I won’t say it was easy,’ he answered. ‘Tina was headstrong and sometimes she didn’t think things through.

But the world should have been safe enough for her to make the same mistakes alphas and betas can make, and it wasn’t.

It isn’t. Everything was against her, and it’s only human to err.

‘When she finished school, she got an apprenticeship with an all-female company of electricians. It was great for her, though I think …’ He inhaled.

‘I think she would have moved onto something different, if she hadn’t –’ He cut himself off again, as though he wasn’t ready to say the word.

‘She had this amazing creativity. I think she would have ended up in design, or engineering, maybe. She could look at an empty space and see what it could be, you know? She’d take a box of blocks and build a castle, a palace, a dreamscape. She could have … She could have …’

He shook himself. ‘It was just after her twenty-first birthday, just after my twentieth. Her friends were going out. Usually, I would have gone, too. But we’d had a fight.

’ He was silent for a long moment. ‘It was stupid. So fucking stupid. She’d worn one of my favourite shirts to work and had to plaster and paint a wall.

It wouldn’t come out of my shirt and the band didn’t sell them anymore, and I got cross about it.

I stuffed my nose in a book and told her to have a nice night. ’

A tear ran down my cheek. The sky was a mess of pink and orange now, with the dark blue blur of night spreading slowly up from where it met the sea.

‘He wasn’t even her scent match.’ There was a tremor in his voice.

‘He was a complementary scent. But Tina’s heat was close.

She slicked in the bar.’ His tone steadied and became detached; I watched his profile fall back into expressionlessness.

‘He convinced her to go home with him. She got into his car, and he went into a rut.

‘They were two blocks away from the bar when he lost control. He was doing twice the speed limit, the police said, and he’d been drinking. He drove into a shop window.

‘Then he left – he left her there.’ I swallowed a keen at the way his voice halted and thickened, pressing myself against his side.

‘He was injured, but not enough that he couldn’t stagger away from the car.

He left Tina there. She wasn’t dead, not at that point.

She was still alive when the ambulances arrived.

She died on the way to hospital. She’d bled out from a wound that he could have compressed, if he’d bothered. If he’d stayed.’

I pressed my face into his arm.

‘My parents … I can’t even describe what they were like, when the police showed up on our doorstep. It broke them, and that’s the sum of it. And it wasn’t just them.’

For a few moments, we listened to the crash of the waves beneath us.

‘Rage isn’t a big enough word for what I felt,’ he continued at last. ‘That alpha had taken my sister, taken my best friend. And he didn’t even have the guts to stay with her while she was broken and dying.

‘It was easy to find the address of his packhouse. Easy to wait until the police returned him home on bail, pending his trial. Easy to use my bark to make him come outside, easy to let my fists fly.’ He swallowed.

‘It was what I was used to. He looked up at me and told me to keep going. That he deserved it.

‘The worst thing is that I don’t think he was evil. He was stupid, arrogant, and careless. And that was enough. His carelessness took the best thing in our lives. It was enough to break our family. Enough to change everything we’d known, enough to tear our hearts in two.’

He moved, and I could tell he was looking down at me. I lifted my chin, looking back at him.

His jaw worked. ‘The government and the APF don’t tell the public that a rut and an instinct blackout start the same way,’ he went on, his voice lowering as if someone might hear.

‘My vision went white. I’d never had a rut before, and I didn’t know what was happening.

I just saw clouds in my eyes and the alpha who had killed my sister on his knees.

So I kept punching, and that’s the last thing I remember.

’ He blew out a breath. ‘I’ve seen the footage.

I know what I did, and what I kept doing.

I know that it took dad to stop me. But I don’t remember it, Rose.

It’s like I fell asleep. And when I woke up …

’ He trailed off. ‘I woke up in a bed that wasn’t mine, in a room I didn’t know, with what seemed like a thousand monitors strapped to my body.

But my alpha settled, and I did wake up. Some alphas don’t.’

The weight of his stare was almost unbearable, but I made myself meet it.

If he’d been strong enough to get through it, then I could be strong enough to hear about it and not look away.

I wondered how many alphas had never come back to themselves, whose bodies became a husk ruled by the creature beneath their skin.

‘It took a while to … adjust,’ he went on at last. ‘I was watched every moment of the day. They like to study us, because instinct blackouts aren’t a common thing.

In the past, they didn’t even know what caused it.

Medical textbooks will say it’s a critical surfeit of hormones, causing permanent or temporary cognitive collapse .

They’ve found no links to existing illnesses, either physical or mental, and there are no factors they can find that make an alpha more or less susceptible, other than their designation.

One of my doctors told me it was simply a thing that can happen , which wasn’t a comfort then, and still isn’t now.

‘And then … I had to relearn my life without Tina in it.’ His breath hitched; I felt it beneath my cheek.

‘It wasn’t easy. I think about Tina every day.

I’ve spent the last seven years making sure that I was never in a situation where I might go into a rut.

But when I saw you like that, Rose, flushed and perfect and needing, the rut started to rise and my vision went cloudy –’

‘I understand,’ I whispered, wrapping my arms around him as another tear ran from my cheek down my neck. ‘I understand.’

‘Thank you,’ he said, a long moment later. ‘For understanding.’

The sea was darkening, the points of white silvering as the moon rose. I shivered, even with Byron’s warmth pressed against me. ‘Do you think it will happen again?’

‘I don’t know. I hope not. The doctors don’t think so, but I can’t give any guarantees. And I’ll likely be wearing monitors forever.’

‘And if we decide you’re worth the risk?’ I said softly.

He swallowed. ‘Rose –’

‘Please give us a chance, alpha,’ I whispered. ‘Please let us in.’

‘I need to tell you something else,’ he said dully. ‘Tristan –’

‘Told Sebastian to kiss me at the first-year party so he would make me slick, compromising me in exchange for membership to the Revels?’ I interrupted.

He stared at me, frowning, turning his body to face mine. ‘Tristan is –’

‘Sorry,’ I broke in again, looking him in the eye. ‘He’s sorry for what he did. He told me about it, apologised, and looked after me when –’

‘When I left.’ Byron looked out at the sea once more.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘When you left.’ I reached up and gently turned his face back towards me.

He blinked at me. ‘I’m angry about what Tristan did.

I won’t pretend I’m not. But I’ve seen his good side, too, and he’s genuinely sorry.

He’s Sebastian’s alpha, so he’s mine, too, even if he needs to rethink his priorities.

He fucked up and so did Sebastian, keeping all the secrets he did; they both know it.

But one bad thing doesn’t have to define our relationship.

One mistake doesn’t have to define our future. ’

He searched my face, his eyes darkening as the light faded. ‘Do you really believe that?’

I knew he wasn’t just asking about Tristan and Sebastian. ‘How do we learn, if we can’t make mistakes?’ I answered. ‘How do we grow, if we can’t change?’

His hand came up; he smoothed my hair back from my face. ‘Do you still want the Banksia Prize?’

‘Of course I do.’ My heart beat faster at the thought of battling against Sebastian. ‘Seb might be my scent match, but I’m not giving up on what I want, even if he wants it too.’

‘Good.’ His thumb stroked over my cheek. ‘You deserve that prize.’

I climbed into his lap, pressing my cheek to his chest. He was still for a moment, then his arms came around me, holding me tight. I’d never felt quite so sheltered as I did in that moment, soothed by his solidness and the rhythmic sound of his heartbeat.

After a few minutes of us listening to the waves, he sighed. ‘My heart almost stopped that night, you know,’ he said softly, ‘when I saw you on your knees. You were the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. But I would have been satisfied with this , Rose. Just with the privilege of holding you.’

‘It was too fast for you,’ I said, realising. ‘It was too much, too soon.’

‘Maybe.’ He nuzzled my hair. ‘Although I need you to know that I want you very much. But I hadn’t known what to expect, and my alpha … Well, my alpha liked it too much, perhaps.’

I leaned back against his arm and looked up at him. ‘Your alpha is perfect .’

He snorted. ‘The preening bastard agrees with you.’

I laughed; the sound died as he dipped down and brushed his lips over mine, once, tentatively.

Oh .

I surged up to make it happen again. More .

I hadn’t realised I’d spoken aloud until he chuckled against my mouth. ‘Whatever you want, whenever you want it, omega. Literally anything. Ever.’

His alpha wasn’t the only one preening.

The kiss was sweet, so sweet. His hand cupped the back of my head, cradling me like I really was precious, and his lips moved against mine, gently.

I lost track of time amidst the nuzzling kisses, the soft caresses, the way his thumb smoothed over my nape.

My body warmed from the inside out, as if I’d been drinking something hot and sweet, and a different kind of heat built in my core just as slow and sweet as the kisses.

He made no move to take it further, not until I parted my lips and let my tongue touch his skin, encouraging him to open to me. Our tongues met, and paused, and played, and I sighed with satisfaction as I melted into him.

‘I should take you back,’ he murmured, pressing kisses to my jaw.

‘Should you?’

‘Are you cold?’ he asked.

I shook my head.

‘Getting eaten alive by mosquitoes?’

I laughed. ‘No.’

‘Hungry? Tired?’

‘None of the above.’ I kissed him again, biting gently at his bottom lip. ‘The view is too beautiful to go back inside.’

‘It is,’ he agreed, but he wasn’t looking at the sea or the sky.

I kissed him harder, lips and tongues sliding, my hands questing upwards until I could bunch my fingers in his hair.

It was softer than it looked, slipping like silk over my skin.

He made a surprised, approving sound when I tugged on some strands, his arms crossing over my back as I wrapped my knees around his waist.

I hadn’t realised how hot my body was, how tightly wound my core.

It had been building so gradually and gently, a backdrop to the emotion, to the connection between us.

His lips pressed a trail of kisses down my neck; I threw my head back to let him nuzzle at my collarbone, a moan escaping my throat as his tongue flicked out to taste my skin.

‘Byron –’

His breath fanned over my chest, warm and tickling, sending a thrill through my limbs. ‘Mmm?’

I squirmed on his lap. ‘I –’

He pulled back and I squirmed again, this time in disappointment. ‘What do you need, beautiful?’

I didn’t want to push too hard, not again. I pressed a lingering, closed-lipped kiss to his jaw. ‘Whatever you’re willing to give, alpha.’