Chapter 31
Rhys
She's laughing at something Finn said.
I don't know what it was. I stopped tracking the conversation about thirty seconds ago because she laughed and now that's the only thing in the room that matters.
She's standing at the stove with a dish towel over her shoulder, hair pulled back, cheeks flushed from the heat of the pan, and she's laughing with her whole face like she does when she forgets to be careful about it. Open. Unguarded. Real.
The universe gave her to me.
I sit with that fact like I sit with most things—turning it over, trying to find the angle where it makes sense.
I was a fighting ring alpha with a face full of scars and years of conditioning that made me dangerous in enclosed spaces.
I was the thing people crossed streets to avoid.
I was the reason Arden spent months building case notes, therapy frameworks and carefully structured exposure plans.
And the universe looked at all of that and decided: here. This one. She's yours.
My scent doesn't register to her like a scent match should.
I know that. The warping of my own scent warped the recognition.
But I recognized hers from the moment Arden brought me that blanket.
I recognized it so completely that I held onto that fraying scrap of fabric even after the scent had faded to almost nothing, because letting go of it felt like letting go of something important.
I have a name for it now.
She turns from the stove and catches me watching her. Her smile shifts—still warm, but a different kind of warm. The shy one. The one she gives me specifically.
I reach out as she passes the table and run my fingers along her forearm, just to feel the connection, and she doesn't pull away. She never pulls away. She just ducks her head slightly and keeps moving and I feel her pleasure through the contact in a way that’s clean and bright.
I've been touching her almost constantly since the nest.
I can't stop. I don't want to stop. Every time I lose contact with her for too long there's a restlessness in me that the years of therapy taught me to identify and manage but that I've never before had a reason to simply…
resolve. She's right there. I can touch her. It still doesn't feel entirely real.
"We need supplies," Finn announces, dropping into his chair with his coffee. He pulls up something on his phone. "Like, significantly. We've been burning through everything and nobody's restocked in two weeks."
Vee sets plates down. Eggs. Toast. She remembered that I take mine without butter, which I mentioned once in passing four days ago and haven't thought about since.
She remembered.
I look at my plate and then at her. She's already moved on, completely unaware of what that small thing did to me.
"I can go," Malcolm says, reaching for the toast.
"We should all go," Vee says. "I need to get out of this house for a while."
I look up.
"I want to go," I say. "If Vee's going."
The table goes quiet.
Alex and Malcolm are both looking at me with the expression they share sometimes. That specific version of are you sure, the one that has genuine care built into it but also a significant amount of concern.
Alex sets down his coffee. "Do you think you're ready for that?"
I hold his gaze. "Call Arden."
He reaches for his phone and doesn't argue. That's one of the things about Alex that took me years to trust and that I now trust completely. When I state a preference clearly, he takes it seriously. He doesn't override me. He checks.
He puts Arden on speaker and explains what’s going on.
"Rhys." Arden's sounds professional but warm. "You're wanting to go out."
"Yes."
"Alex," Arden says. "How did Rhys do when Drake arrived?"
Alex glances at me. "He restrained himself."
"And when Eli and Jasper came?"
Malcolm answers this one. "He went upstairs. Stayed there."
"And how does he seem around Vee generally?"
There's a pause. Then, from Alex: "Calmer than I've ever seen him."
Arden is quiet. I can hear him thinking. I know what that sounds like by now.
"I think he's ready," Arden says. "He's put in months of work and a grocery store run isn't a high-risk environment.
The key variables are crowd density and unexpected alpha contact.
" Another pause. "Keep Vee close. Within reaching distance at all times.
Don't let other alphas approach her. If things get tense or he feels overwhelmed, you leave and try another day. No shame in that."
"Understood," Alex says.
"Rhys." Arden's voice shifts. Direct now. Just to me. "You've done the work. You know your signals. You know what to do if it starts going sideways."
"I know," I say.
"One more thing." A beat. "If you're going to be in the world again—really in it—you need practice. And having Vee there is an advantage most people don't get." A pause. "She's good for you. You're good for each other. That matters."
He says goodbye and Alex ends the call.
We all look at each other.
"Fine," Malcolm says. He sounds like a man who has decided to accept defeat and is doing so without grace. "But I'm driving."
I don't fit in the second row of the SUV. My knees are at a difficult angle and I've had to turn sideways to accommodate my legs in any reasonable way.
Alex spent three minutes trying to convince me to take the front seat, but I wanted to be near Vee.
The guys agreed with the collective expression of men who find the situation unreasonable and endearing in equal measure. Malcolm's eyeroll was visible in the rearview mirror before we'd cleared the driveway.
Vee is next to me. I take her hand as we pull onto the road.
Her skin is soft in the specific way I've been cataloguing for the past several days, learning the texture of her like I learn everything I want to keep… carefully. With the intention of holding it in memory as long as I can. Her fingers lace with mine without hesitation.
I look out the window.
The world passes. Trees first, then road, then the outskirts of town. I breathe steadily and take inventory how Arden taught me. Heart rate: elevated but managed. Muscles: tense but not locked. Alertness: high. All of it within the range I've learned to function inside.
Vee's thumb traces a small circle on the back of my hand.
The inventory numbers improve.
The store is larger than I expected. Fluorescent lights. The ambient sound of carts and conversations and refrigeration units running. The smell of a hundred overlapping scents, which takes a moment to process before I can organize them in a way that’s manageable.
There's mostly betas here. Alex notices this before I do and I feel the small release of tension in his shoulders from across the cart.
There's a pack down one of the aisles—alphas with their omega, doing their shopping, perfectly ordinary. I clock them immediately and file them under monitored. They aren't a threat or a problem. I just need to know where they are.
We start moving through the store.
Vee walks beside me, close enough that our arms brush every few steps. I've noticed she's positioned herself slightly between me and the wider aisles, not in a way that's obvious, just in how she moves through space. She's learned what helps. She did that on her own.
I notice when she pauses to look at items.
It's a small pause. Half a second, maybe less. Her eyes resting on something before moving on. Most people wouldn't clock it.
I add it to the cart.
She turns back around and sees it and gives me a look.
I look at the cereal boxes directly in front of me. Reading the nutritional information with great interest.
"Rhys."
"Mm."
"I don't need that."
"It looked good."
"I was just glancing at it."
"You glanced at it for a notable amount of time."
She stares at me. I maintain my interest in the cereal boxes.
Eventually she turns back to the list Finn printed.
Later she tries to put something back. I watch her set it on the shelf and turn toward the next aisle. I pick it up and put it in the cart.
She turns back around.
I'm examining a display of pasta sauces with great focus.
"I saw that," she says.
"I have no idea what you're referring to."
Finn is making a sound behind us that he is unsuccessfully disguising as a cough.
I want everything on the shelf for her. I want to fill the kitchen with everything she's ever looked at for longer than a moment.
I know it's excessive. I know that the instinct I'm operating on right now is the one Arden identified in our sessions as provider behavior, the fundamental alpha drive to supply and resource, and that I should be applying my tools to modulate it.
I don't want to modulate it.
She's my omega and I want to provide for her. I'm willing to look like a complete fool to see her smile.
She catches me adding another item to the cart and makes a sound of exasperation that turns into a laugh. The laugh sends warmth through every part of me and I don't regret a single thing.
People stare.
They always stare. I'm aware of it like I'm aware of most background data—registered, filed, managed.
Betas mostly, pausing in the aisle to look at me with the same expression that I've been receiving since I was gifted these scars.
Calculation. Wariness. The involuntary response to a threat signal their bodies are sending without their minds understanding why.
I hate it.
I've hated it since I first understood what I'd become.
There's no anger in it anymore. Anger was one of the first things I worked on in therapy, learned to distinguish from other things.
To set it down when I didn't need it. But there's a grief that I've never fully worked through.
That I walk into a room and the first thing people feel is afraid.
Vee notices me noticing.