‘Good luck!’
Crumpling the note, I stuck it in my pocket and knelt to do a quick check of the contents of the backpacks, intent on taking out anything unnecessary. Extra weight would only slow us down.
There was a creak behind me as Miles stepped inside.
“The bathroom is down the hall and to the left if you want to use it,” I offered.
He disappeared into the bathroom while I went through the second bag. Cameron had kept the contents down to almost the bare necessities. I pulled out one or two things I was confident we could get by without, then redistributed some of the weight so the heaviest pack by far would be the one I’d carry.
Miles reappeared, wiping his hands on his pants, just as I had finished and got to my feet.
“Ready?” I asked him.
He nodded and stepped forward as I held out the lighter pack. Once he had it on his shoulders, I helped tighten the straps to make it more comfortable.
“It’s not too heavy, is it?”
“No.”
I grabbed my own pack and led us out, locking the door behind me and returning the key to its hiding place.
“Okay, let’s go.”
Miles was a very quiet hiking companion. I was used to Blaise, Wyatt, and others telling stories and jokes to pass the time. The few times I tried to engage Miles in conversation it fizzled out after a sentence or two. How would we make a connection and form a bond if we couldn’t even hold a conversation?
It began to grow dark, but I kept us moving. We needed to create as much distance between us and civilization as possible. It was the night before a full moon and, with a cloudless sky, we had enough light to see by. But Miles was tiring and starting to lag behind.
I turned back to him. “Here, why don’t you walk in front of me.” That way he could set the pace and I’d be right there behind him if he stumbled.
But when I reached out to move him in front of me, he backpedaled, slamming into a tree.
He froze and so did I, both watching each other.
“Are you hurt?”
He shook his head.
“Good. Here, take my hand.” I held it out and waited.
Just when I began to think he wasn’t going to move, he did, placing his hand in mine and letting me tug him in front of me. I settled my hands gently on his shoulders, so he could feel their weight, their strength, before letting him go.
“I’ve got your back,” I said.
He glanced back at me over his shoulder.
“I’m not going to hurt you, you have my word on that. But I can and will protect you, for as long as you allow me.” And probably longer. If it came down to it, if he chose to go back, how would I ever let him go?
Chapter Twelve
Jethro
We stopped just after midnight and unrolled our sleeping bags. Miles seemed bemused by his.
“Have you been camping before?” I asked.
“I went to a summer camp, as a kid, but we slept in cabins.”
“This is a little more rough and ready. I have a tarp in here too, to keep off the rain, but it’s a clear night tonight so we won’t need it.”
He started to unzip his sleeping bag. I hesitated before I made my next request but it was something I suspected we both needed.
“Are you still cold?”
He shouldn’t have been. The temperatures had been hot during the day and hadn’t dropped all that much. Plus, we’d been hiking for hours. But if I was right, the coldness he felt wasn’t wholly to do with the ambient temperature.
“Yeah, a little.”
“Too cold to sleep?”
He pondered that for a moment. “Maybe.”
“Then I’d like to zip our sleeping bags together. Body heat should help.”
I was expecting an outright refusal if not pure panic. Instead, there was another moment of silent contemplation. “Okay,” he said eventually.
“Great.”
I got the bags set up, then we ate and drank something. It wouldn’t do to have hunger pains keeping us up all night.
Then we were ready for bed. I held the bags open.
“In you get.”
He stepped out of his borrowed shoes and wormed his way into the sleeping bag. I got in beside him and zipped up my side of it. We were lying side by side, staring up at the sky. There was a gap in the trees above us, giving a magnificent view of the moon and stars.
“It’s beautiful,” Miles murmured.
“It is.”
I turned on my side so I was facing him and watched him watch the sky. Finally, a yawn had his eyes closing and he rolled onto his side toward me.
As much as I wanted to reach out and touch him, I didn’t want him to recoil, didn’t want to see that look of fear on his face. Blaise had said they’d traumatized him, broken him down, so they could mold him into the Omega they wanted. How did I ensure that I didn’t do the same in my eagerness for him to be mine?
“Why did you come south for me? Wasn’t it very dangerous?”
Despite his yawning, Miles sounded very awake.
I decided to be honest, to tell him everything. Maybe that would be the start of trust between us.
“Five days ago, my mark turned on, so I knew you were out there. I sent a picture of it to our Alpha-Omega Allocations Center. They put in into their database and waited for a match to register.”
“But it didn’t, because I was in the South.”
“We expect that. In this state, almost two-thirds of our Omega are southern born, so most of our Alphas go unbonded. The South notifies us when they register a new Omega in a border area, so the Allocations Center doesn’t spend weeks fruitlessly searching. The next day, I saw you on TV, saw your mark.”
Miles ducked his head and even in the dark, I could see his cheeks turn pink.
“Then you heard what I said?”
“I heard you spout the same crap that your Intake Centers bombard your population with. You were toeing the party line, I get it.”
“I believed it. I think maybe I still believe it.” He looked up, his eyes fixed on mine. “So that makes me a traitor and a coward.”
“They tortured you, tried to force a bond on you.”
“I signed up, willingly. I walked in that door, happy and excited to do my duty.”
The self-recrimination was heavy in Miles’ voice and I tried to counter it.
“Did you know what they were going to do? Did you know what processing meant? That they’d put you in a dark, cold cell and force incompatible Alphas on you?”
“The one-Alpha, one-Omega movement is a lie, everyone knows that. Omegas are strong and brave and can strengthen whole teams.”
Miles’ powerful words weren’t matched by an equally strong tone. If anything, he seemed uncertain of the doctrine he was repeating.
“Only after they break you down, force your body to accept them.”
Miles tried to hide his face behind his hand.
“It hurt so much when he…”
“When he what?”
I could see the tears on Miles’ face, the light from above reflecting on them.
“One of the Alphas, he put his dead mark over my live one. It… the pain…”
Even recalling it seemed to hurt as Miles forced his eyes shut and shuddered.
“It’s so cold,” he said.
What had Blaise talked about? Bond shock, if an attempt to force a bond with an incompatible Alpha happened before the Omega was ready.
“I don’t think what you’re feeling is normal cold. I think it’s part of what they were doing to you. Maybe I can help?”
“How?”
“I don’t know exactly, except I’m your Alpha, your actual, compatible Alpha. There must be some way to make you warm again. Make you whole.”
I used my thumb to brush the tears from Miles’ cheeks. He blinked his eyes open, sighing at the contact.
“How will you do that?”
I was going by instinct, not knowledge
. Trusting what felt right.
“By replacing wrongness with rightness. How do you feel when I touch you?”
I let my fingers linger on his skin, a surge of happiness filling me when he relaxed into the touch.
“With them, I wanted to get away from their hands. I was cold, and they were warm but it felt wrong in a way I didn’t have words for. It made me feel cold deep inside.”
“And that’s what’s still there, right? That cold feeling.”
“Right. It’s like there’s a lump of ice here,” he pointed to his midsection.
“I want to touch you there.” I didn’t ask him, I told him, but waited for his nod before slipping my hand under the borrowed T-shirt he wore. His skin felt warm beneath my hand but underneath, I sensed what he was talking about, a coldness, a hardness. Not physical, exactly, but real enough to him and me.
I settled down next to him, holding my hand in place.
“Can you sleep like this?”
“I think so.”
He closed his eyes and, after a moment, I did the same.
Chapter Thirteen
Miles
I woke hugging Jethro’s arm, his hand still pressed to my stomach. The warmth from his skin was very pleasant and I let myself enjoy it a moment longer.
“The sun’s up and we need to be too,” Jethro said softly next to me. Embarrassed, I pulled my hands away and looked over at him. He was smiling and his hand on me flexed. “How’s the cold?”
“Better. Not gone, exactly, but less.”
“Good. We must be doing something right.”
He moved his hand and tugged down my T-shirt with a grin. “How about some breakfast?”
We ate quickly, just some crackers, cheese, and some tinned fruit.
“There’s trail mix, too,” Jethro said, holding it out. “But we can save it for later, as a snack.”
“How far are we from where we’re going?”
“About ten hours, give or take. Maybe closer to twelve. The last part of the journey will be the hardest but we need to do it in daylight, it’ll be too tricky otherwise.”
“Why?” I couldn’t imagine what would be so difficult we couldn’t traverse it with a full moon or the flashlights in our backpacks.
Jethro took me by the shoulders and turned me around, pointing at a mountain in the near distance. “Because we’re climbing that.”
We washed up at a nearby stream, the water cold. The day was warm though, the sun already heating the ground, so we dried off quickly as we got underway.
“So you don’t believe in one-Alpha, one-Omega?” Jethro asked as we walked.
“My father says it’s nonsense.”
“General Benson, right? He’s your father.”
“Right.”
“Nonsense, huh? Do you remember how old you were when you first heard him say that?”
It was an odd question, but I scoured my memory. “I was seven. A friend in my class at school, another Omega, loaned me a book, Stars and Crosses.”
“I know it. That’s the fairytale about the Omega locked away in a dungeon by the witch and all the Alphas try to rescue him.”
“Yes. Except the witch put a spell on the dungeon so only his true Alpha can free him. The other Alphas know they’re not his, so they try to break the rules to reach him but it doesn’t work. And they try to stop his own Alpha from coming to free him.”
“But his Alpha is brave and fearless. He frees him and they live happily ever after. It’s a good story. They made it into film a few years ago. I heard the South banned it. And the book too.”
“That was later. I took the book home and I read it. At the dinner table one evening I asked my mother something about it and Father overheard. He made me leave the table, go get the book, and bring it to his office. He tore it to pieces in front of me and threw them into the fire. He told me it was lies and trash and insisted I tell him who I’d got it from.”
I could still remember that fear inside me as he yelled and the awful sound of tearing pages. Then the hiss of the fire and the smell of burning paper as tears slid down my cheeks.
“What did you tell him?”
I hesitated. Would Jethro want to hear that I was a liar as well as a coward?
“I said I’d taken it from the free library beside the grocery store. I didn’t want to get my friend in trouble. Father wasn’t happy with my answer but he let it go.”
“Sounds like you got off lightly.”
“Not exactly. I got grounded for a week, and every Sunday after that my father would bring me into his office and have me kneel on the floor while I read and recited from the Omega Intake Center’s Handbook. He’d quiz me on what it meant until I could answer word perfect. Anytime something contentious came up, in school or in the media, he’d tell me how wrong it was and counsel me not to be foolish and fall for their lies.”
“He indoctrinated you.”
My head whipped around at his words. “What? No.”
“He brainwashed you, told you all the rhetoric about an Omega’s duty, never letting you hear anything but doctrine from the Intake Centers. You were seven, Miles.”
“Father says our first duty is to our country. And an Omega serves their country by submitting to their Alpha team.”
“Did he tell you that your Alpha team would lock you in a room and take turns forcing themselves on you?”
“They didn’t… they just put their hands on me.”
I tried not to think about the way that last Alpha had touched me.
Jethro slowed to a stop beside me, staring at me incredulously. “Didn’t you ever wonder why most Alpha-Omega stories are love stories?”
“I was never allowed read them after that first one. Father says people romanticize what is a functional bond.”
“The reason Alpha-Omega stories are romances is because the bond is inherently sexual. For an Alpha to get the benefits that come with bonding, they have to-”
I held both my hands up to stop him. I couldn’t hear this, I couldn’t.
“No. No. Father said people confused the bond, perverted it with emotions like love, with sexual ideas, he…”
But then I thought back again to that Alpha who’d straddled me, who’d pressed his mark to mine. I knew the truth. I’d known it from the moment the first Alpha had stepped into my cell.
“He lied to me. He… he was happy to let them…”
Those butterflies in my stomach were back, beating their wings hard. I felt myself go pale, felt my body sway, and then Jethro was diving toward me.
I threw up and fainted. Or fainted and threw up. The order didn’t seem important, not now. I came to, a low voice humming next to my ear, a wet cloth pressed to my forehead.
“Don’t try to move just yet,” Jethro cautioned me when I shifted in his arms. I let myself relax against him.
We were sitting at the base of a tree, our packs lying on the ground next to us.
“There are some things you need to know, things you should have been told long ago and things that you’ve been lied to about. The only trouble is, I’m not sure if you’re ready to hear them. Do you remember how Stars and Crosses ended, did you ever get that far?”
Nodding my head, I tried to make myself more comfortable. For being on the run, we seemed to spend a lot of time sitting around.
“I read to the end. That’s why I had questions.”
“Then I guess the easiest way to explain it is, witches and dungeons aside, the basic story there is true. There are Alphas and Omegas in this world, alongside normal everyday humans. Both Alphas and Omegas bear marks that lie dormant on their skin until one day they light up in a special pattern. The pattern is mirrored on an Alpha and Omega pair, just like ours. It’s there to help us find each other. When we see each other, the emotions between us are like a supernova, loud and bright.”
“Like lust.”
“Lust is definitely part of it, and there’s no shame in that. It’s part and parcel of what cements our con
nection to each other. It’s what’s under the lust that counts, that grows stronger after you’re bound to each other.”
“What’s that?”
“Love. An Alpha and Omega fall in love, they bond, create a family, and live happily ever after. I might be simplifying the happily ever after bit but I’ve never met an unhappy Alpha-Omega couple.”
“The Omega recruits the Intake Center showed, in their videos and brochures, they always looked happy. But it was all fake. They made me do a photo shoot just like that before they shaved my hair.”
I ran my hand over it, feeling lost again as my fingers felt my shorn scalp.
Jethro’s arms around me tightened. “They were stripping you of your identity, of the things that make you who you are.”
“How much of it was lies? All the things they told me, all the things my father taught me.”
“I don’t know exactly. We’ll have to check each piece of information as we go along, try to work it out.”
The ‘we’ surprised me.
“You’ll help me?”
“I’ve broken some pretty important laws to free you. Put in context, correcting some misinformation is no big deal.”
Maybe not to him, but to me it was. The foundation of who I was, of my purpose in the world, has been torn out from under me.
“We need to get moving again, Miles. Are you okay to walk?”
“I think so.” I got gingerly to my feet, happy when my legs held my weight.
A thought occurred to me, a worrying one. “How come the lust and stuff didn’t happen when we met? Am I… broken?”
His hand cupped my cheek. “You’re not broken. I think everything they did to you has confused your body, and mine too. It’ll be put right, I’m sure of it.”
“What if it isn’t?”
For the first time since I’d met him, Jethro looked uncertain. “It will be, I have faith in that.”
I didn’t know enough to have faith in anything. My beliefs were being turned on their head. But I suspected I already knew the answer to my next question. If things weren’t put right, and he and I didn’t or couldn’t bond, when the authorities caught up with us, I’d be sent back, sent south.
Love Before Dawn: An Omegaverse Story (Kindred Book 1) Page 6
