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“Val, talk to me, man.” Alex was pacing the length of Valerian’s room, a dark scowl on his face. He’d been that way since he’d dragged Valerian back from the woods in a wild state, filthy and hungry and confused.
Now Val’s head was clearer, but things weren’t looking up at all.
Fuck.
“Stop pacing,” he grunted. “You’re driving me crazy. Sit your ass down. Or better still, go back to Kai and the babies. They’ll be wondering where you vanished to.”
“I texted him. You know you’ve been a wolf too long when you forget there’s technology.”
“I wasn’t a wolf too long. Just one night.”
Alex stopped and scoffed, shooting him an incredulous look. “Val... you were gone three days. Why do you think Luke came to me, scared for your life? And for your mind, I might add.”
Three days.
No wonder his head felt stuffed with dirty, soggy wool.
“Where’s Luke?” he managed in the end, watching Alex drop into one of the armchairs and run his hands through his hair. “Is he okay?”
“Yeah, he’s fine. He was in wolf form for a day and a night, looking for you. Not long enough for any damage. You, though...” Alex shook his head and scowled.
“What about me?”
“Never mind. I forget sometimes that the damage was there from the start.” Alex rolled his eyes. “Dropped on your head as a baby, were you?”
Probably. And then flung against the walls repeatedly, if his alpha father’s later behavior was anything to go by. Yeah, alpha father wasn’t a saint, by any stretch of the imagination.
But his punishment was just, no matter how Val railed against it, how far he ran, how he shifted to escape it.
“Val...” Alex dropped his hands between his knees. “Is this about your father?”
Re-fuck.
“It’s hard to lose a father, I know,” Alex went on. “Especially since your omega father isn’t around anymore. I know how it feels, I’ve been there, too. You can talk to me—”
“This isn’t a bonding experience, Alex.” Val fought to control the growl in his voice. “Fuck the man. No, it’s not about him. Not really.”
“Stop beating around the bush. If it’s not about him, then what is this about?”
“It’s about Zach, fucking all right? God damn it.” Val scrubbed at his face with both hands. His eyes felt like they were filled with broken glass, and his head throbbed as if a drummer had taken residence inside it. “It’s about Zach...”
“What now? I thought you’d decided not to be with him, but then Luke saw you take off with him. Decide whether you want to be with him or not, my man. I told you, you can’t screw around with him. He’s a friend.”
“Fuck this shit, Alex, it’s not like that. I can’t be with him.”
“Why the hell not? What does that mean?”
“It’s all fucked up, damn it.” Val rubbed a hand over his face. “The problem is my father’s will.”
“What about it?”
“It’s shit, man. It’s fucking shit.”
“Val, breathe. Tell me what the will says.”
“It says that unless I Claim a certain omega or else, I’ll inherit nothing and I desperately need that money right now.”
A death sentence, it was what it was. Because Val’s heart sure felt as if it was shriveling inside his chest, crumbling to ash and dust.
“Do you know this omega?” Alex asked, frowning.
“Never met him.”
“Do you love him?”
“Love him?”
“Yeah, you are familiar with the word, right? The concept? That feeling when you can’t be without your omega, when your heart races once you see him, when you can’t help but knot him when you’re inside him, when—”
“Fuck you, Alex, you have no fucking clue. Zach is the one I want, the one I lov—” He bit his tongue. “Fuck.”
“You love Zach?”
Well, the cat was now out of the bag, wasn’t it? Why hide it anymore, right? “I do, fuck me but I do...”
Alex’s grin was huge. “Well, well... This is a pleasant surprise.”
Fuck no, it wasn’t pleasant at all. Who knew love could hurt like a raw, open wound with salt rubbed in for good measure?
Val grunted, scowling at the far wall. “Whatever.”
“I thought you weren’t capable of feelings.” Alex bared his teeth at him. “Now we know, what shall we do about it?”
“Nothing we can fucking do,” Val grated out. “Didn’t you hear a word I said? The will has dictated my life.”
“So fuck the will! What happens if you don’t do as the will says?”
“Then the inheritance goes to my uncle.”
“Wouldn’t your uncle help you? Give you part of the money?”
Val gave a bark of bitter laughter. “You serious?”
“What if you do Claim this omega and then break it up?”
“It’s not just a matter of Claiming the omega. Father wasn’t an idiot. It’s a matter of doing it properly and then staying with the guy for at least ten years and producing at least one child.”
“Fuck,” Alex said.
Finally, he got it.
Zach wouldn’t wait for him for ten years. Why should he wait for him at all? He wasn’t going to put a tag on the money. It wasn’t fair to Zach, it would defeat the whole idea of setting him free.
“Then leave the money,” Alex said. “Forget about the will and the inheritance. Isn’t Zach worth it?”
“He’s worth a lot more than that,” Val said quietly, exhausted, because no, Alex didn’t get it. “He’s worth more than anything in the world.”
“Then what’s the issue?”
“I have to pay for the auction, Alex. Where do you think I’m gonna get all that money? We’re talking tens of thousands.”
“Whoa.” Alex whistled, eyes widening. “That much?”
“And then there’s the matter of paying off his debts to Lotus academy and setting him free, whether I Claim him or not.”
“So you want to use your inheritance, the one you intended to use to start a company, to free Zach from his debts, his bonds?”
“Yeah,” Val muttered.
“The alpha who Claims him will do that.”
“But what if I can just free him now? Let him lead his own life. Not depend on an alpha he doesn’t know, maybe doesn’t even like, to buy him?”
“Val...” Alex shook his head.
“It’s not right.”
“And do you think he doesn’t want a family? An alpha to take care of him?”
“Fuck this shit.” Val shot up from the bed and stood there shaking. Last thing he wanted was to think of Zach with another alpha. But what choice did he have? “Of course he’d want that. But he can make his own choice.”
“True. Sit down before you fall over, Val. This is fucked up.”
“Told you.”
“You were right. It is.” Alex rubbed the back of his neck. “Why would your father do that to you? Is there some financial interest involved? Is the omega he chose for you the heir to a fortune, to a big company or something?”
“No, nothing like that. He was just punishing me.”
“That’s bullshit.”
“No, man, it isn’t,” Val said.
“Punishing you by making you Claim an omega for no reason? Bullshit, I say.”
“You don’t understand. It was my fault.”
Alex stared at him. “Your fault, how?”
“I made mistakes some years ago. Grave mistakes. Alpha father had to teach me a lesson.”
“Grave mistakes? Val, you’re nineteen. A few years ago, you were still a teenager, practically a kid. What mistakes could you have made that were so bad?”
“You have no idea. I’m an asshole, Alex. A selfish, sick fuck, and I got what I deserved. Zach, though... he’s innocent. He shouldn’t suffer in all of this. Which is why I am going to do all I can to help him, even if it means spending my life with an omega I don’t give two shits about.”
It was karma, after all. When you made your bed with shit, then you had to lay in it, and that was that.
***
Shifter funerals were a weird affair. Shifters in this part of the world, at least, believed in the one god and his angels, but deeper inside they believed in the Moon God of old and his wolf guardians.
Not that priests of the one God would ever deign to come into shifter country, a country whose inhabitants they considered to be soulless animals with no chance of ever entering heaven, who lived in a hell forced on them by their own animalistic nature.
Taking into consideration it was humans who created the shifter mutations, if certain sources were to be believed, then it was fucking ironic that the same humans wouldn’t touch shifters with a ten-foot pole.
Typical, though. So fucking typical, too.
So there they were, preparing to bury his alpha father in a weird mockery of the humans’ one God ritual, with a shaman chanting something unintelligible—in the place of the priests who wouldn’t come—and a small crowd in black, a flower arrangement on the podium and an air of defeat all around.
The people who’d gathered were strangers to Val, cardboard cut-outs, shadows on the wall.
Except for one, and Val felt cold, his face going numb, at the sight of him.
Please don’t let him come talk to me, he thought. Please, dear fucking God of the humans or the shifters. Let him stay away.
Fuck, he wished Zach were there with him. Stupid, wasn’t it, and cowardly, to wish for his omega to hold his hand when Val had left him yet again and planned on never going back to him, knowing the connection they shared.
Zach would get over him.
Val was the one who wasn’t sure he ever would.
“Who’s that guy staring at you?” Luke asked, because of course he’d insisted to come, and Val still wasn’t sure if he was grateful or damn annoyed about it. Luke and Alex. Best friends. Annoying like ticks.
“That’s my uncle.”
“Don’t talk to me about uncles...” Alex growled. Of course, his own uncle was a criminal, apparently working with shifter traffickers, a man who’d tortured growing up in ways Valerian didn’t even want to remember.
Whereas Val had been the abuser.
Funny how his memories were so fuzzy, how his brain wouldn’t give him the reasons why he’d done what he’d done, but he had it on good authority that he’d been the initiator, and the one to blame—the freak, the hungry predator.
A kid of what, thirteen? How old had he been when it had begun? Twelve?
Christ.
“Val, whoa.” Luke was holding him up suddenly as his knees started to fold. “What’s wrong, man?”
“It’s grief,” someone said. “It’s normal.”
Was it?
Was it grief?
Was it normal?
Was it grief for his father’s death or for himself—for what went down in the past and what was waiting for him now?
Then Alex was there, too, shoring him up, lifting him back to his feet with a curse and a worried look. Thank fuck his Mate, Kai, wasn’t there to see Val like that. An alpha could only show that much freaking weakness and not die of shame. It was bad enough that his alpha friends and the distant family milling in the cemetery got to see it.
The coffin was being lowered into the pit in the ground, and maybe others would really think it was why he broke down at last. That descent was final, inescapable.
His father was truly gone, taking with him the last of Val’s hope of being with Zach.