Page 3 of Knotting Before Them
She leaned over the table just as Owen dropped a pint of beer in front of me and another in front of her.
Her mouth opened in surprise, but she recovered quickly, mouthing a thank you before taking a big sip. I followed her lead.
“My parents were geniuses. They were so talented that the whole world is watching me now.”
“The whole world?” I repeated.
“The art world.” She waved it off like nothing else mattered. “They want to see what Julia Apaza is going to do next and…I’m… I’m stuck, Theo. Maybe I’m not good enough.”
Her big brown eyes swam with tears, and that shit broke me. A curse almost flew from my lips, a knot growing right in the middle of my chest.
Now her scent was everywhere. It didn’t matter if I tried to put distance between us. My head was dizzy with it, urging me to sniff her soft hair or the delicate skin of her neck.
It was the call.
It had to be the mating call.
What else would make me drunk on someone like this? My mouth hung open with the realization, but the girl kept going on and on about her parents and her new path in life.
She didn’t seem to know what was happening here.
She wasn’t from here, I was sure. We were a small community, dying out slowly. She seemed unaware of what we were, and while that was expected from tourists, none ever evoked the call on me.
Maybe it wasn’t the call.
I was almost forty years old, and I never felt it before, so maybe I just felt sorry for her. She was small, cute, and lost. She was still mourning her parents and clearly carried too much on her small shoulders.
“I know your cabin is going to help me,” she continued. “It’s where I need to be. I can’t explain, but I knew the moment I saw it.”
I took a sip to control my shaking hands, but my eyes never left her.
I wasn’t dumb enough to ask the other men. Owen was already suspicious, ready to tell everyone I was too soft, and let the beautiful stranger rope me into helping her.
They all pitted us, Wylder, Noah, and I. We were barely twenty when the last omega found her mates, and we’ve spent twenty years knowing we were doomed.
Our cabin was a sign of our solitude, right at the foot of the mountain, away from everything.
I came down to town regularly. I liked being around our people, but Noah couldn’t bear it. The loneliness ate him up the most, and he hid it all under a layer of grumpiness. He liked to growl and act like an uncivilized bear, but I knew him well enough to know it was all an act.
He always wanted a mate. He wanted to dote on someone, to be the big protector he was born to be, but when Marion settled down, he sunk into a depression that still gripped him to this day.
I wondered how would he react to Julia. Would he recognize the call?
Even as my heart started to beat out of my chest, I still had my doubts. She had no sign of recognizing us.
If wasn’t for her clear obsession with our house, I’d assume nothing called at her.
It was impossible, I knew. Our community was formed by the last alphas in Switzerland. We knew other countries still had them, but they usually kept to themselves, just like we did.
Kent, our leader, tried to build bridges with different communities across Europe before, maybe out of pity for us, but nothing ever came out of it.
“Where were you born?” I suddenly asked.
She didn’t seem too put off by my question. Rolling her shoulders, she replied, “America. My parents are from Bolivia. Ijust happened to be born when they were spending time in New York. I barely lived there.”
“You went back to Bolivia?”
Kent never contacted anyone outside of Europe. Maybe other communities around the globe were dying out too and wanted to set their omegas up with alphas. Maybe she was part of an outreach program or something.