Chapter Three

Zane West didn’t slam the door when Asher told him to get out. He simply closed it, as quietly as a breath, but rather than one would have assumed, there wasn’t the sound of steps retreating down the hall. That only meant one thing: Zane wasn’t going anywhere.

His white coat fitted perfectly around his broad shoulders as he stayed behind the door to the penthouse hospital ward, hellbent on waiting to do his job, but he didn’t expect to catch drifts of the conversation between his half-brother and his cockslut.

A wry smile twisted the corners of Zane’s lip as Liam’s conspiratorial whispers floated past the wood into his ears.

“...Is he your father’s illegitimate son?” That was distinctly the Omega’s voice.

Asher’s drawl soon came after. “Oh yes. He’s my father’s bastard….”

That was the last sentence Zane caught because his mind instantly zeroed in on that one word.

Bastard.

Lids lowering, he leaned the back of his head against the cool wall next to the door. 

The first time he heard that word had been almost two decades ago. His mother had just died, and a few weeks later, during her funeral, Charles West had come to collect him as though he were a briefcase left behind at the airport. 

The men in cheap black suits had just lowered the ugly brown box containing his mother into the ground, and the only people who were at the gravesite were just a woman in a mostly inappropriate short black dress that was suited more for a night club, the little boy, and a priest memorializing the burial. 

The heavens opened up and began raining down in torrents, drenching him to his bones until an umbrella suddenly covered his head. Teeth rattling from the cold, Zane had raised his small head, large eyes climbing up a man who seemed like a tree trunk because of how tall he was, until dark violet eyes eerily identical to his clashed with his. 

The man was clearly a stranger to Zane, but even though Zane was always skittish around strangers, the little boy had felt mostly nothing when the man placed his large, light brown hands on Zane’s small, bony shoulders. “Hey, son. Let me take you home.”

Zane, confused, scrunched up his brows and glanced at the woman in the short black dress. He knew her. Aunt Kiara. She was his late mother’s best friend and his godmother, after all. He looked at her familiar face in question. She nodded, biting back a burst of sobs before giving him one last hug. “Yes, dear. Your mother will want you to go with him.”

As the man took his hand and led him away, the little boy took one last glance at the burial ground, and his eyes welled with tears because he was leaving his mama there…in the ground. 

Throughout the drive with the strange man, Zane grew extremely silent in the backseat of the S.U.V, curled into himself as he stared out through the windows at the scenery whooshing past. The man kept glancing at him through the rearview mirror, asking at intervals if Zane was alright, but he didn’t say a word in reply. Even when the man stopped at Starbucks to get Zane something to drink, he was painfully quiet. 

Until the man pulled up in front of the tallest and most magnificent building Zane had ever seen. His brain could barely comprehend how anyone would live in a house so large and beautiful that he let out a tiny gasp.

When the strange man rounded the car and opened the door, Zane looked into those eyes that looked so much like his and asked. “Is this my new home?”

The man gave him a small smile and ruffled his head, nodding yes, then he took Zane inside.

Zane’s eyes were as round as saucers as he looked around the house’s interior. After seeing the golden chandelier in the foyer, he concluded this wasn’t a house, it was a castle. That would mean the man holding his hand was a king. Why was a king holding his hand, he thought? That thought kept running amok in his brain until the man took him through wide double doors to what Zane would later learn was the guest living room. It had a spiral staircase, and standing atop the stairs was a boy around Zane’s age.

Only that he didn’t look like any boy Zane had ever seen in his own years living with his mother. The boy had been like a golden beam of sunshine, well filled out and somewhat chubby in nice, clean clothes, where Zane’s skin barely stuck on his bony frame beneath the cheap, dirty suit he’d worn to his mother’s funeral service. His eyes drifted further down the boy’s body, taking in his pair of shiny leather shoes, compared to Zane’s shoes that had holes in them.

Zane had been intimidated and also enamored by the boy’s beauty, hungry to touch the boy’s spun gold hair or hell, speak to him until Asher opened his mouth.

“Is that the bastard boy?” The boy’s sapphire green eyes shone with pure hatred while his small hands tightly gripped the polished wood banister.

“Asher!” The man gasped. “Why would you ever speak to your brother like that?”

“He’s not my brother,” Asher, as Zane learned the boy’s name, cried in outrage and glared at Zane with poison in his eyes. “You’ll never be anything more than a dog begging at our feet.”

Then he stormed back up the stairs, stomping his shoes that Zane couldn’t stop staring at despite the lurch in his stomach at his ‘brother’s’ obvious disdain for him.

And that spelled the beginning of a tragic childhood bully story that lasted well after their adolescence. Ten great years of being treated worse than dog shit.

The hospital door clicking open suddenly yanked Zane back from his trip down memory lane, and he lazily raised his eyes to see Liam gawking at him, clearly stunned that Zane had been waiting outside the door the entire time.

“I…I…” He stammered, fear saturating his omega scent, making Zane’s nose twitch. The blood was draining so fast from the omega’s skin, and he looked like he’d seen a ghost. “D-Doctor West…”

Zane just stood exactly where he was, leaned back against the wall while watching the omega with dead, empty eyes.

Even an Alpha would be unnerved with that stare. Liam burst into full body shivers and turned away from Zane, walking away fast with his shoes squeaking against the tiles. It wasn’t until he hit the far end of the corridor that he started to actually run like a dog who understood exactly where it stood in a pack.

The corner of Zane’s lip lifted at the side, and he stood there for another beat, watching the omega almost hit his head into the elevator door as he struggled to get in and away from him.

When the hall was empty again, Zane opened the door to the penthouse ward and stepped inside.