The dread of losing Ryley to fate's cruelty—the same cruelty that had once torn through his life long ago—bled so openly through Clyde's terrified gaze that he failed to notice the one person standing only a short distance away.
A crossing he had spent so long trying to prevent had happened anyway, in a way he could never have foreseen.
Soren—the Omega who had once helped him endure those recurring nightmares of that same buried past, the one Clyde had deliberately cast out of the fragile heaven he built around himself, simply because he loved Ryley too desperately to risk the blond ever crossing paths with Soren again.
Not after that vision Ryley had once seen.
Not after the fear that if they met again, something terrible might finally come true.
And yet there Soren stood, rooted where he was, unable to move as he watched Clyde rush beside the gurney with a face stripped bare by panic—something Soren had perhaps never seen so naked before.
