23. Talya
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
TALYA
I woke up in a sweat, struggling to breathe. My eyes snapped open, and I looked around frantically, my heart racing, palms sweaty. I’d dreamed that I was being suffocated. It felt so real. Maybe because I’d lived through it and knew exactly what it felt like first hand?
“What’s wrong?” Colby asked, his voice gruff with sleep.
The room was still mostly dark. The sun was only barely lighting up the sky in the distance, which elongated the shadows while also making the room just a bit lighter. Taking a deep breath, I murmured, “Just a dream.”
He shifted, rolling toward me, and pulled me to his chest. His lips pressed against my forehead, lingering there. “It’s okay, my precious omega. It’s over now.”
It was. It was over. We were safe with new identities and everything, hidden far away from where we’d been taken and tortured.
Actually, I guessed I didn’t know that for certain. I’d lost track of where we were after the third airport. For all I knew, we could be in the middle of a wide river just miles away from home.
Except I enjoyed this new home in a way that was missing from my previous. Maybe it had only been a couple weeks, but there was something warm and comfortable about this home that no other had. We just fit here.
How ironic and cruel that we’d had to be nearly killed in order to find a pack that might want us both. It seemed unfair. What had I done to make karma so awful? It felt like every positive thing was matched with a far more exaggerated negative.
I was fortunate to meet my alpha when I was a teenager, so we got to begin sharing memories from a young age. We experienced all the high school things together.
And yet, a decade later, we’d been through roughly a hundred pack interviews and had only met the worst of the worst.
Karma then kicked us one step further and had us tortured, but to right the balance, she dropped us in the laps of a pack that might want to keep us. Both of us. Equally.
But that meant we were caught up now, right? In my opinion, we’d suffered far more darkness in the world than we had good. We should be set for a lifetime.
“What’re you thinking about?” Colby asked.
I took a breath and shook my head a little. “That we suffered an awful lot to get to where we are. I mean, I feel like we finally met a good pack, you know? But the only way to get here was to be nearly murdered for fun. That seems a little…”
“Horrific,” he said.
“Yeah. I just… It’s a lot, you know? But in order to get here, we had to lose everything . Like, literally our entire lives are gone now. My parents will never know what happened to me. There will never be that closure. I keep picturing Fenton coming home and finding that body in our room and us missing. What’s going through his head? He has to live with that.”
Colby sighed. “I’ve been thinking about that too. I wonder how I’d feel if I was Fenton, and I keep thinking that I’d feel guilty. Constantly questioning whether it would have made a difference if I’d been there. I’d keep looking for you for the rest of my life. I can’t imagine carrying around that weight until I died. And even then, I’d still never know what happened. It seems… beyond unfair.”
“And our families,” I added, “will never know. They’ll go through life not knowing what happened to us. They’ll just assume we’re dead, which I think might actually be better than the truth of that experience.”
“Except they also won’t know that we’re alive and… I’m almost afraid to say this, but we’re happy. We finally found the pack that we’ve been searching for.”
“At a very high cost,” I said.
Colby nodded. “Yes. The highest.”
“But…” I bit my lip as I considered the guys here.
I’d talked to a lot of omegas online over the years, and they always said how they knew right away when they met their pack. Their scents were the first things that felt different. Some scents were pleasant. Some were tolerable. Some were horrendous. But the scents of the pack that was yours were heavenly. Even when you couldn’t identify what you were smelling, you knew. You felt it in your tummy, in your chest, in your lungs. Everything about you just knew.
When they met their packs, everything felt right. Time didn’t matter. It could be three days spent together, but they already knew that they were there for a lifetime.
So, while I thought like I shouldn’t be feeling ready to settle here, especially not given everything we’d gone through—not just recently but with the packs over the last ten years—deep inside me, I just knew that this was my pack. Our pack.
I wouldn’t feel that way if they weren’t equally invested in Colby, but they were.
“But what?” Colby asked.
I blinked a few times before shifting to look at him. What had I been saying?
He chuckled and kissed my nose. “Lost the conversation, huh?”
Grinning, I shrugged. “I was thinking that… this feels remarkably like what the omegas described on Omega Forums. When you just kind of know you’ve met your pack because they instantly feel like home.”
Colby smiled. “I’ve been thinking that too, but isn’t it too soon to know that? I feel like we should be more cautious. Take it slow.”
“You mean like we did?” I asked with a smirk.
“That’s different.”
“Is it, though?”
Colby was quiet as he stared into my eyes. “Okay, maybe it’s not so different. I guess I’m just wary.”
“Me too. Because of all the horrible packs we’ve met.”
“We’d have already seen if they were horrible, though. They couldn’t hide it so well if they were.”
I nodded my head, agreeing. Did that mean we were going all in? My heart raced at the thought. Then again, maybe I was already there. I’d already agreed to be courted by Ainsley and Ronan. Didn’t that mean I was already all in?
My heart raced, but this time, it wasn’t because of the bad dream. It raced because what I’d been waiting for my entire life, this moment that Colby and I had been searching for, was finally within our grasp. We’d found it.
Right?
The pack was in the kitchen seated at the large built-in seat. I’d heard Blakely call it a breakfast nook, though it easily fit ten people or maybe even more, which I supposed was intentional. This was a plantation house with a dedicated nest. It was meant for packs like this.
I could see the formal dining room that we’d eaten in a few times, though unless it was threatening rain, we generally opened the wall of windows up and ate outdoors. The weather was perfect. Not so hot that you felt like you were baking. Not so muggy that you couldn’t breathe because the air was so thick and your hair instantly frizzed out. I thought it was probably the constant breeze that swept around the island that kept the insects minimal which made being outdoors pleasant.
We were greeted by smiles. Emerald was here this morning, but I wasn’t sure if that meant he’d spent the night or arrived before we came down.
“Morning,” Lohtus greeted.
“Morning,” Colby returned.
“Sleep good?”
I nodded as I made my way to the table while Colby headed toward the island where Lohtus, Blakely, and Kasen were preparing breakfast. I took a seat next to Ronan, and he shifted to give me more space then brought his arm around the back of the bench. I loved his smile. Small and secretive.
“You three are the designated cooks?” Colby asked.
“I don’t cook,” Kasen said, looking somewhat horrified. “I’d end up burning the house down.”
Blakely chuckled. He paused on his way by Kasen to kiss his head.
“Not always,” Lohtus said. “We tend to do the indoor cooking, while Ronan and Ainsley man the grill—which we use probably half the time. Kasen doesn’t cook, as he said, but he always helps us prep, and he’s a master of anticipating what we need.”
Kasen gave Colby a big smile that quickly turned shy before he went back to what he’d been doing.
Across the table, Emerald snickered. “Poor beta.”
Ronan’s deep, quiet chuckle made me grin.
“What about you? Do you cook?” Blakely asked.
Colby shrugged. “I’d say yes, but after eating what you’ve been preparing since we arrived, I’d say what I do is simply eatable.”
Both alphas looked at me as if for confirmation, and I shrugged. “I’ve never complained about my alpha’s food.”
“But you wouldn’t,” Colby said with a soft smile. “I have a feeling I could give you sawdust on toast and you wouldn’t complain.”
“I might complain a little,” I said, sniffing.
He grinned, turning his attention back to Blakely. “I’m not opposed to helping cook. I’d like to contribute.”
“Which foods are you best at?” Kasen asked.
“Sandwiches,” Colby answered.
Quiet laughter filled the kitchen.
The conversation continued, and there was a moment when I felt like I was standing outside the window looking in with a content smile. My heart felt full. This is it. This is the home and pack we’ve been searching for.
“What about you, omega?” Ainsley asked, pulling me from my thoughts.
I blinked at him. “What?”
He chuckled. “Do you cook?”
I glanced at Colby, wondering if this was a trick question. He watched me with an amused smile. “Sandwiches,” I said, echoing Colby. “I can… prepare some things, and I think there’s less of a chance that I might burn the house down.” Kasen flashed me a grin. “I don’t know that I’d call it anything less than a step above tolerable, but I can slap some things between two slices of bread pretty easily. Also… cereal. I’m pretty good with cereal.”
Laughter followed.
“That’s okay. Our omega doesn’t need to cook,” Blakely said, giving me a smile. “We’re going to enjoy cooking for you, darling.”
I liked that—a lot. I liked the way he looked at me, too. I liked that he referred to me possessively, as if I were his. I could hear it in his voice and see it in his eyes that it meant something different when he spoke the words than when my Colby called me his, but I enjoyed this equally as much.
Sighing, I leaned into Ronan. His arm tightened around me, securing me in his warm hold. I wasn’t going to take this for granted. There’d been so much about life that I’d misjudged or misunderstood, and I wasn’t going to do that anymore.
Now, it was time to live life to its fullest and appreciate every moment like it might be my last.