Chapter 22
TWENTY-TWO
Isobel
The doorbell rang mid-afternoon.
I was still in the library, wrapped in a throw blanket.
My hair was loose, my glasses crooked, and the smell of someone who’d been thoroughly loved was still on my skin like a second scent.
Bram had gone to shower. The water ran upstairs and the old pipes complained the way they always did, and through the cracked door I could see Cillian at the table with his tablet, tracking whatever the outside world had done while we’d been busy ignoring our phones.
Tuck got to the door first. I heard the floorboards creak under him, then a pause, the kind a man takes when he’s deciding whether something on the step is a threat. Then the chain slid back.
The voice reached me before the visitor did.
“For the love of God, tell me you have coffee that isn’t instant.”
Female. Sharp. The kind of cadence that treated vowels as optional.
And under the briskness, a scent rolled down the hallway, warm amber and dried fig, rich and not the least bit sorry about it, broadcasting omega with a confidence that made my own new biology feel like it was still learning to walk.
Sloane Alarie filled the doorframe the way she filled a page.
Completely. She was taller than she’d looked on our video calls, broad through the shoulders, her dark hair cropped close to her skull.
Leather jacket that had clearly seen a few countries.
Boots that could double as weapons. She had a box under each arm, one small, one large, both unmarked.
Tuck stood with his hand still on the door, caught somewhere between welcome and the territorial twitch of an alpha whose pack house had been breached two days into a bond. His cedar scent went sharp at the edges, then he caught it and pushed it back down.
“Sloane.”
“Tucker.” She looked him up and down. “You look like you haven’t slept in days, and you smell like you’ve been—”
“Coffee’s in the kitchen,” Tuck cut in. The tips of his ears went red.
She grinned, feral and warm at once, and stepped past him like she’d been walking through alpha-crowded rooms her whole life. She tracked straight down the hall to the kitchen, where Cillian sat.
He looked up from his tablet. “Alarie.”
“Tonewick. Your encrypted messages are a work of art. Your font choice is unconscionable.”
“It’s monospace. It’s functional.”
“It’s Courier New. We’ll discuss it later.” She set both boxes on the counter and turned toward the doorway.
Where I stood a little out of breath at just having yanked on leggings and a blouse so I wasn’t naked in front of a guest. I still had the blanket around my shoulders because the scent of it was too comforting for me to abandon just yet.
I was barefoot on cold tile, glasses crooked, my face probably still flushed from everything that had happened in this house.
Sloane’s expression changed. Not softer. Just focused, like she’d walked this exact ground and knew where every loose stone was.
“There she is.” Her voice dropped a register, still warm, still brisk, but with something underneath it. “The woman who broke the internet with a whine and a pair of overworked vocal cords.”
“Sloane—”
“Don’t.” She crossed the kitchen in four strides and pulled me into a hug that smelled like amber and fig and a body that had never once been ashamed of itself. Her arms were strong. She held on exactly long enough and not a beat past it.
“I brought supplies.” She pulled back, hands still on my shoulders, dark eyes going over my face like a doctor checking for fractures. “Small box is a new phone. Your old number’s compromised. Cillian’s been filtering, but it’s a sieve by now. New number, encrypted, only your pack and me.”
“And the big one?”
“Legal.” She tapped the lid. “Physical files, because I don’t trust digital for this. My solicitor handled my case when my designation went public. She’s expensive, she’s vicious, and she’s an omega who’s personally sued twelve production companies into settlement.”
The shower cut off upstairs. Bram’s footsteps, measured even on wet tile.
Sloane’s eyes tracked the sound, then came back to me. “How far into the nesting phase?”
The question was clinical. Omega to omega, about biology most alphas only understood in theory.
“I don’t—” I started, and the words came out in the new register. The real one. Low and warm, full in a way it had never been on our old calls. I watched her notice it, the change in my voice, the weight that hadn’t been there before.
“Early stage,” she said, answering herself. She let go of my shoulders and turned to the room. “All right. Everyone in here. I need all three alphas for this.”
Tuck was already against the counter, arms crossed, cedar gone protective at the edges. Sloane glanced at it, nodded once, and let it go. Cillian hadn’t moved from the table, but he’d angled his tablet toward her, ready to take notes.
Bram appeared in the doorway.
His hair was damp. A wrinkled shirt, which I knew had to pain him to put back on, but we hadn’t exactly had a lot of options.
There was no vest, no coat, none of the careful armor he usually wore into a room, which said something in and of itself.
His scent came in ahead of him, peppercorn, sharp and clean off the shower, threaded through with the honey note that hadn’t left his skin since the library.
His eyes found mine and held. The gray-green was steady. No analytical distance in it anymore. He looked like a man who’d stopped pretending he didn’t feel what he felt.
Then he looked at Sloane and read her in about two seconds flat.
“You’re Sloane Alarie.”
“I’m one of the women who has been lucky enough to have her entire catalog narrated by your omega.” She put out her hand. “Lovely to meet you in person, St. James. You look a lot less composed than your press photo.”
He shook it. The corner of his mouth moved. “That photo was taken before my world rearranged itself.”
“Omegas tend to do that.” She pulled out a kitchen chair and sat down like she was claiming it.
“Right. I’m going to talk. You’re going to listen.
Some of it’s going to make you uncomfortable, and you’re going to sit in that discomfort, because the woman at the center of this needs you to understand what’s happening to her body before it finishes happening. ”
Nobody said anything. Tuck by the counter, Bram in the doorway, Cillian at the table, me standing in the middle of all of them with a blanket around my shoulders and eleven years of hiding still stuck somewhere behind my teeth.
Sloane looked at each of them, then at me. Something in her face went private for a second.
“The nesting phase,” she said, “is not optional.”
She let it sit.
“Most people, most alphas, think heat is the main event. The dramatic bit. The part that sells books and gets three seconds of live airtime in front of millions of people.” She didn’t look at me when she said it.
I felt it land anyway. “It isn’t. Heat is the door.
The nesting phase is what holds the house up.
It’s where the bond stops being chemistry and turns into something that can carry weight. ”
Bram shifted. He understood that kind of language, and I watched him reach for it.
“Isobel’s body’s been denied this for eleven years,” Sloane went on. “She’s never nested. Never finished a heat cycle. Right now her system’s trying to do in days what should’ve taken a decade of natural cycles. The fever was phase one, the reset. The vocal cords were phase two. What’s next—”
She stopped, opened the larger box, and lifted the legal files out. Underneath were smaller packages. Tissue paper, soft fabric, the practical kit of a woman who’d built her own nest once.
“What’s next is the drive to build a den.
A physical space soaked in pack scent. Her instinct, and I mean instinct, not a preference, not something she can think her way out of, is going to be to gather things that carry all four of your scents and build a space her nervous system reads as safe.
Soft textures. Fabrics that feel good to her.
Some like it dark, some prefer light and airy. ”
Tuck straightened. His cedar had gone warm. Not sharp, not territorial. Something underneath that. “Like an actual nest.”
“Like an actual nest,” Sloane said. “And before any of you gets cute about the word, it’s not infantilizing and it’s not decoration.
It’s the mechanism. It’s how an omega’s nervous system finishes integrating the bond.
Without it, the bond stays on the surface.
Chemistry, no foundation. And Isobel’s got three alpha bonds setting at once after a decade of suppression—”
“So it has to be thorough,” Cillian finished. His eyes were on his tablet but he was all the way in the room. “It has to account for all three of us.”
Sloane pointed at him. “That one gets it.”
Cillian was already typing. “There’s a weighted blanket at my flat,” he said, without looking up. “Gray wool. Calibrated. It’ll be here inside the hour.”
Nobody asked why he had one. He didn’t explain.
“What do you need from us?” Bram’s voice was quiet. None of the professional register in it. Just a man who’d admitted he didn’t know enough and wanted to.
It took me a second to realize that he was looking at me. I didn’t get a chance to respond though.
“Everything that smells like you.” She didn’t hesitate.
“Shirts. Pillowcases. Whatever you’ve slept in.
St. James, that coat you wrapped around her in the booth, keep it close, she’ll want it.
Tonewick, whatever you’ve been wearing for the monitoring sessions.
Tucker, the flannel she’s swimming in is a good start.
She’ll arrange it herself. Don’t help unless she asks.
Don’t move what she builds. And for God’s sake, don’t clean anything until the phase is done. ”
A beat.
“How long?” Tuck asked.