Chapter 4 Mo
Mo
You don’t notice it at first. It creeps in slow and quiet, easy to ignore if you stay busy enough—if you keep moving, keep hunting, keep telling yourself this is what freedom looks like.
But there are cracks. And they’re getting wider.
It’s the nights that get me. The days I can handle. There’s always something to do. Firewood to chop. Traps to set. A perimeter to check. But once the sun goes down and the fire burns low and there’s nothing left to do but sit there, that’s when it hits.
The silence.
Not the peaceful kind. Not the silence of a forest at rest. This is the other kind. The kind that presses in on you. The kind that makes you realize you haven’t heard another voice in weeks. That the last conversation you had was with a stick man named Charly.
I talk to him daily. I know how that sounds.
But when you go long enough without hearing another person’s voice, your brain starts to fill in the gaps.
You start needing something, anything, to talk to.
So you pick up a stick that vaguely looks like a person, give it a name, and tell it about your day.
After a while, it doesn’t even feel weird anymore.
That’s the part that scares me.
Some nights I dream of voices and laughter. The feeling of someone sitting next to me. Nothing specific, just the presence of another person. Warmth that isn’t a fire. A hand that isn’t mine.
I wake up angry. I blame myself for wanting it. For being weak enough to need something, I decided a long time ago I couldn’t have.
Connection. Trust. Those are luxuries I can’t afford. Not as an omega. Not after what happened to Sophie.
I caught myself doing something dumb last month. Almost as dumb as what I did yesterday. I’d found a campsite with two hikers, a man and a woman, probably in their thirties. They’d set up a small camp by the river, cooking dinner on a portable stove, talking and laughing.
I should’ve just taken what I needed and left. That’s the rule. Get in, get out, don’t linger.
But this time, I didn’t.
I sat in the trees and watched them for hours like some pathetic creep—two strangers eating, sharing wine, arguing about which trail to take in the morning.
I stayed until they fell asleep. Then I took a can of beans and a lighter from their supply bag and cried the whole walk back to my cave with my fist stuffed in my mouth so nothing in the forest could hear me.
Because that’s the thing nobody tells you about freedom: it isn’t free. You pay for it. Every cold night. Every silent morning. Every meal you eat alone on the ground with dirt under your nails and no one to talk to.
No one owns me. No one controls me. No alpha can put his hands on me or lock me in a cell, or sell me off. I can go wherever I want, do whatever I want. I answer to no one.
And it’s killing me.
My wolf feels it too. She’s restless, pacing inside me at all hours.
She wants a pack. Warmth. Bodies pressed close—the feeling of belonging somewhere.
Omega wolves aren’t built for this. We’re built for connection, for closeness, for being surrounded by people who give a shit whether we live or die.
I’ve been denying her that for three years, and she’s starting to lose patience with me.
Sometimes I let myself think about it. Not the alpha bullshit. Not the ownership, the commands, the submission. The other part. What would it be like to have someone who actually loved you?
Real love. The stupid kind. The kind where someone knows all the ugly parts of you and stays, anyway. Where you can fall asleep without one eye open. Where you can be sick or weak or scared, and someone is just there.
I think about that pirate book sometimes. Lady Bluebelle O’Reilly and her Captain Jackson. Ridiculous book. The plot makes no sense, the sex scenes are absurd, and the whole thing is so over the top.
But I’ve read it about four hundred times.
Because even though the story was ridiculous, something in it felt real. The idea that someone could be loved for exactly who they were. Someone loud, messy, and difficult. Someone like me.
Stories like that are written by women for women. I know that. It’s a fantasy. A fairy tale. But maybe that’s the point. Maybe we need the fantasy because reality is bleak as fuck. At least in a book, someone gets the thing we all want.
I shake my head. That’s not who I am anymore. I can’t afford to think like that. I’ve seen what happens when you trust the wrong people. When you let your guard down, it ends in pain and death.
So I pick up my stick man and tell him goodnight. Curl up in my pilfered bedroll on the cold ground and close my eyes.
And I tell myself and my wolf that this is enough.
Even though we both know it isn’t.