20. Jax
Chapter 20
Jax
I pace the length of the front porch, my thoughts racing. Calling Stone has left me with more questions than answers, and the raw desperation in his voice has set every alpha instinct on edge. Behind me, Ren leans against the wall, outwardly calm but radiating tension.
“He said ‘she’,” Ren says for the third time, working through it like a puzzle. “Who the hell is ‘she’?”
I shake my head, my jaw clenching. After everything that happened in the car last night, after all the pain we dredged up, this feels like another crack forming in our already fragile foundation.
Movement at the tree line catches my attention. Stone emerges from the shadows, and I stop pacing. Fuck. He looks…destroyed. He’s still dressed in his suit from the office, meaning he spent the entire night outside. It’s torn and dirty, and leaves and twigs are caught in his hair. What the fuck happened? There are scratches on his face and hands, and he’s moving with the heavy steps of someone who’s been running all night.
“Stone?” My voice is hard, a bit of alpha command in there even though I’m trying my damnedest to remain cool. Even though I’ve always been trying my damnedest to remain cool for the last two and a half fucking years.
Stone approaches slowly, as if every step costs him. When he reaches the porch steps, he stops, looking up at us with haunted eyes.
“I fucked up,” he says simply, his voice rough. “I fucked up so badly.”
Ren pushes off the wall, moving closer. “What happened? Who were you looking for?”
Stone sinks onto the bottom step, dropping his head into his hands. “Her name is Hailey,” he says finally. “She’s…she’s an omega.”
What…in the fuck? Beside me, Ren goes still.
“What?” The word comes out as a growl.
“I found her three or so days ago,” Stone continues, words tumbling out now. “She was running from something—some kind of facility. She was hurt, scared. I’ve been keeping her in the cabin, trying to gain her trust, trying to figure out what to do.”
The words turn over in my head like a surreal nightmare, the kind where you’re awake but nothing makes sense.
Stone’s confession hangs in the air. My mind races through the past three days—Stone’s distracted behavior, the way he kept disappearing, those mysterious calls he’d take in private. All this time, while we were dealing with our own demons, while we were tiptoeing around Finn, he’d been harboring this secret.
Through our bond, I feel Ren’s emotions spike—anger, betrayal, and underneath it all, a bone-deep fear. We all know what having another omega around could mean, what it could do to Finn. Just the scent of another omega on one of us could send him into a spiral.
“Three days?” I repeat, struggling to process this. “You’ve had an omega hidden on our estate for three days?”
“You kept this from us?” Ren’s voice is deadly quiet. “From Finn? ”
Stone flinches at Finn’s name. “I was trying to protect?—”
“Protect who?” Ren cuts him off. “Us? Finn? Or yourself?”
“I don’t know!” Stone’s head snaps up, eyes wild. “I don’t fucking know anymore. But she’s gone now. She ran, and I can’t find her, and she’s out there alone and scared and it’s my fault.”
The raw anguish in his voice makes something in my chest crack. Through our bond, I feel the depth of his distress—not just guilt or alpha instinct, but something deeper. Something that feels dangerously close to a mate bond beginning to form.
But that’s impossible. We already have an omega. And yes, things have been rough between us, but none of us would break our bond with Finn to form another. I’m sure of it.
I’m sure…right?
Fuck .
Have I lost hold on my pack so much that I wouldn’t know if one of us wanted to leave?
“Start from the beginning,” I say, forcing myself to stay calm even as my pulse thunders in my ears. “Tell us everything.”
Stone draws in a shuddering breath, his hands clasped so tightly, the cuts on his fingers go pale. When he speaks, his voice is raw, stripped of all pretense.
“I found her three days ago. She’d broken into the cabin—or basically let herself in. I never lock it. She was half-frozen, exhausted, and covered in mud and blood. When I opened the door…” He stops, swallowing hard. “I’ve never seen anyone so terrified. She fell to her knees before me. Complete submission. I think she wanted to run, but she was so tired, I doubt she could.”
The image forms in my mind: a frightened omega, cornered and desperate. My instincts surge protectively, even for someone I haven’t met. Beside me, Ren’s breathing has gone shallow, and I know he’s thinking of Finn—of finding him in similar circumstances, broken and afraid.
“She wouldn’t let me near her at first,” Stone continues. “Kept backing away. It was like finding a feral thing.” He paused, brows furrowing as if the scene was playing right before his eyes once more. “But her scent…” His voice cracks. “God, her scent. It was like nothing I’ve ever experienced. Even through the fear and pain, there was something…familiar. Something that called to me. To all of us.”
He runs a hand through his disheveled hair, leaving the sweaty strands standing on end. “I managed to convince her to let me help. Got her cleaned up, treated her wounds. Some of them were…” His jaw clenches. “Some of them were old, Jax. And in places that wouldn’t be obvious if she hadn’t been partially naked.”
“What?” Ren growls.
Stone lifts a hand to stop the obvious slew of fire about to head his way. “I didn’t strip her down. She was like that when I found her. She was in a thin lacy thing that looked like lingerie. No panties. No bra. It was ripped and torn and half hanging off her body.” He swallows hard. “That’s how I saw the old scars.”
His voice drops to barely above a whisper. “Thin, precise lines across her lower back, and over her ass. They wrap around her hips, her upper thighs. Some were old. Others were newer, still pink.” He draws in a shuddering breath. “They were placed where clothing would hide them. Where no one would see unless…unless she presented like she did before me.”
Silence settles between us. I can only stare at Stone, unable to believe what he’s fucking saying.
“Like…like Finn’s scars?” Ren almost chokes.
Stone shakes his head immediately.
“Naw, dude. Those scars were from no accident.”
Ren makes a sound like he’s been punched, and I feel his rage through our bond—hot and sharp and deadly. Even he is angry for this mystery omega. That’s to say something. But despite that, we can’t get in over our heads here.
“What else?” I cross my arms over my chest, otherwise, I’m going to form fists like Ren.
“She wouldn’t tell me much at first,” Stone says. “As a matter of fact, she wouldn’t talk. Not conversationally, at least. Not until I started asking direct questions. Then she’d answer. It was just fragments. Something about a Reform Academy, but I can’t find any record of it. Every lead I’ve followed has gone nowhere. It’s like it doesn’t exist.” His frustration bleeds into his scent. “But the things she did say… They kept her there for six years.” He looks up, tortured gaze meeting mine then Ren’s and then mine. “I think…I think someone was making money off her pain.”
My stomach turns. Beside me, Ren has gone deathly still. There’s no fury on his face. No cold rage in his eyes. Suddenly, there’s nothing.
He staggers away, heading to the tree line where he leans against a yellow birch, breathing hard.
Since the accident, I’ve seen him have panic attacks. Times when his heart races and his blood pressure spikes, like what happened last night in the SUV. But this looks different.
“Each day, she’d trust me a little more,” Stone continues, gaze downcast again. “She’d eat what I brought her. Let me check her wounds. Yesterday, she even smiled.” The memory softens his voice before grief overtakes it again. “I thought…I thought I was doing the right thing. Giving her time to heal, to trust, before bringing her here. Before complicating everything.”
He looks up, eyes raw with guilt. “But every time I left, I could smell her fear spike. She’d try to hide it. She didn’t fully trust me yet, but… She thought I wouldn’t come back. That I’d abandon her out there.”
“And now she’s gone.” The words sound like ice coming from my lips. No alpha command and Stone winces. He meets my gaze, anyway.
“She’s ours,” he says finally, the words seeming to cost him. “ All of ours. I felt it the moment I scented her—that pull, that recognition. She’s our scent mat?—”
“No.” I cut him off, the single syllable cracking like a whip through the pre-dawn air. “Don’t you dare say what I think you’re about to say.”
Stone stiffens but holds his ground, jaw set. “You can’t deny what’s right in front of us, Jax. I know you don’t want to hear it, but?—”
“Scent matches are rare,” I snarl, taking a step toward him. “Once in a generation rare. The kind of thing that happens in fairy tales and romance novels. And you’re telling me that after we’ve found Finn, after we’ve bonded with him, after everything we’ve been through, suddenly there’s another one?”
“I know how it sounds?—”
“ Do you ?” My voice rises despite my attempts to control it. “Because it sounds like you’re saying I made a mistake. That when I chose Finn, when I marked him, when I bound our pack to him, I somehow got it wrong.”
From the tree line, Ren’s ragged voice carries. “Finn wasn’t a mistake.” His words are punctuated by heavy breaths, but there’s steel beneath the panic. “He’s ours. He’s always been ours.”
“Exactly,” I say, latching on to Ren’s words. “When I marked Finn, it wasn’t temporary. It wasn’t a trial run. I was sure . We were all sure.” I turn back to Stone, fury building in my chest. “And now you’re trying to tell me that somehow, impossibly, there’s another omega out there who’s our scent match ? When we’re already bonded ?”
“I’m not saying Finn was a mistake,” Stone protests, his own voice rising to match mine. “I would never say that. But this is different?—”
“Different how ?” I demand. “Different because you found her? Because you’ve been playing savior for three days? Because you’ve convinced yourself that your attraction to her means something more?”
Stone’s face darkens. “You haven’t scented her, Jax. You haven’t felt what I felt. If you’d just?—”
“If I’d just what, Stone?” I cut in. “Trust your judgment over mine? Over what I know in my bones to be true about our pack? About our omega?”
“This isn’t about trust!” Stone shouts, finally losing his composure. “This isn’t about judgment or leadership or who made what choice! This is about something that transcends all of that!”
“Nothing transcends pack bonds.” Ren stands straight, facing the trees. Whatever caused his panic attack must have eased. I watch him take a deep breath before turning to face us. “Nothing transcends the marks we chose to make, the commitments we chose to keep.” Then lower. “I should know.”
“You’re not listening! Both of you.” Stone runs his hands through his hair, pulling on the strands in frustration. “I’m not saying our bond with Finn isn’t real. I’m not saying your choice was wrong. I’m saying that somehow, impossibly, there’s room for both.”
“That’s not how this works,” I say, but Stone barrels on.
“When I found her, when I first caught her scent…it was like finding a piece of ourselves I didn’t know was missing. The same way?—”
“ Don’t ,” I warn, but he persists.
“The same way we all felt with Finn. The same thing.” He draws in a ragged breath. “But I was afraid. Of this, I guess. Of hurting us. Of hurting Finn. Of making everything worse than it already is.”
The admission hangs between us. Another omega. Another mate. In any other circumstance, it would be a blessing. But now, with our bonds already strained to breaking point, with Finn still healing, with Ren’s words from last night still raw in our minds…
“So you hid her,” Ren says flatly, but I can feel the dark energy from the emotion just beneath his words.
“I was wrong,” Stone admits, and the self-loathing in his voice is painful to hear. “Fuck, how many times do you want me to say it? I was wrong. Alright?! I should have trusted you—trusted us. Should have brought her home immediately. ”
“Yeah,” Ren agrees, but there’s less bite in his tone now. “You should have.”
“None of that matters if we can’t find her,” Stone bites back. “She’s gone. She’s out there alone, thinking we’ve abandoned her. Thinking she has to keep running, and we’re here wasting time arguing.” He runs his hands through his hair again. “Fuck, if you won’t help me, I’ll do it alone.”
He’s already storming toward the back, probably to get supplies from the shed, when I call out to him.
“Wait!” I look at the brightening sky, my mind racing through possibilities. We can’t leave an omega—even if she’s not ours (though Stone believes she is)—alone in these woods. But we also can’t leave Finn alone, not after spending the entire fucking day away yesterday. Not again. The complexity of our situation threatens to overwhelm me.
“We need to organize a proper search,” I say finally, falling back on practicality when emotions become too much. “The three of us can cover more ground if we do this systematically.”
“What about Finn?” Ren asks, voicing the question we’re all thinking. “He’ll wake up soon.”
Fuck. How do we explain this to our omega? How do we tell him we’ve found another potential mate when we can barely hold together what we have?
“We tell him the truth,” I say finally. “All of it. About the accident, about why everything changed. And about her.”
“It’ll destroy him,” Ren whispers, and I hear the echo of his words from last night in the car. The guilt that’s eating him alive.
“No,” Stone says suddenly, turning to face us once more. “It might save us all.”
We both look at him, and for the first time, I see a glimmer of hope in his eyes.
“What do you mean?” I ask.
His throat moves, Adam’s apple bobbing. “There’s something about her… She’s different, Jax. The way she responds to my sc ent, I…I tried not to make it obvious I noticed but, it’s like she’s meant to be part of this. Part of us.” He runs a hand through his hair again, dislodging some leaves. “I’ve been so afraid of breaking what we have that I couldn’t see what we might gain.”
“Or what we might lose,” Ren counters.
Stone’s jaw clenches.
“Alright, listen.” I point toward the back. “You get supplies. Anything that will help us comb the forest. And Ren, you bring the SUV around.”
The air stills.
Fuck. I’m a fucking asshole.
Wincing, my gaze shoots to Ren. He’s gone still again. Two years of carefully navigating around this, of pretending we don’t notice how he walks the long way around the garage, how his hands shake at the mere mention of driving, and I just blurted it out like it was nothing.
“Scratch that.” I try to backtrack. “Stone, you get the car. Ren, you head to the shed.”
Ren swallows hard enough that I see it. For a long moment, he doesn’t say anything and then his shoulders stiffen. “I can do it.”
I blink at him. “You’re sure?”
“It’s just from the garage to here. I’m not an invalid, Jax.” The words come out sharp, but there’s something else there—a thread of steel I haven’t heard in his voice since before the accident.
He storms off before I can say another word, and when I glance back at Stone, he shrugs. But I catch the way his eyes follow Ren’s retreating form, the same careful hope I’m trying to suppress reflected in his gaze. Even with everything else threatening to tear us apart right now, even with an omega possibly dying in our woods, we both know what this means.
We just have the good sense not to mention it.
“The omega,” Stone says.
“We’ll find her,” I say firmly. “We’ll find her. We’ll bring her home. And then I’ll deal with whatever comes next. ”
Stone hesitates, watching me. “ We’ll deal with it. You may be pack leader, but you don’t have to carry all the weight on your shoulders, man. That’s why you have us.”
His words hit a note; a part of this that I just don’t want to face right now.
I nod, turning toward the house as I pull out my phone, pulling up a map of the surrounding property. “We’ll grid search. Stone, you’ll take the north section—you know her scent best. Ren will take the east. I’ll cover the west. We meet back here in two hours.”
“What about Finn?”
I check the time—barely past dawn. “He usually stays in the nest for a while longer after we’ve been gone all night.” The words taste bitter, reminding us all of how much distance has grown between us and our omega. “We have some time.”
As if to mock my words, a light flicks on upstairs. We both freeze, watching the window of the nest room. A shadow moves across it—Finn, probably checking if we’re home.
“Go,” I tell Stone. “Start searching. I’ll handle this.”
He hesitates only a moment before heading toward the shed. I watch him go, then turn to face the house once more. My heart is pounding as I climb the porch steps. How do I explain this to Finn? How do I tell him that we’ve found another omega—one that might be meant for all of us? What does that even mean when we already have an omega? What does this even mean for Finn?
If he asks, I won’t be able to explain.
My footsteps feel heavy, as if my legs have ten-ton weights strapped to them. By the time I reach the landing, I’m still not sure what the hell I’m about to say.
As I reach for the door handle, I stop short, a heavy breath pushing through my nose.
I swallow hard, lifting a hand to knock instead.
“Finn?”
The room is silent. There’s just the slightest whimper that makes every instinct in me come alert .
“Finn?” I’m grasping the doorknob now, all hesitation and uncertainty leaving my mind. My omega is in distress and every cell in my body screams at me to get to him, to gather him close, to fix whatever’s causing him to whimper.
I crack the door open when something stops me. Finn’s voice. Loud and distinct.
“Don’t you fucking come in here.”
It’s dark in the room. He’s turned off the light.
I blink, a lump forming in my throat. My hand tightens on the doorknob, caught between the desperate need to protect and the absolute command in his voice. He doesn’t want me. He’s hurting, and he doesn’t want me.
“Finn, I…there’s something…”
“Just go, Jax!”
The alpha in me rages, claws at my insides, demands I ignore his words and go to him anyway. I’ve been measuring myself so much. Measuring my reactions, measuring my voice, measuring my instincts, even the very commands that I give. And for what? Everything seems to be falling apart around me, anyway. Some great pack leader I’ve been. Ren thinks he’s the cause of us all splintering when the truth is…it’s me. I’m the reason for all this.
With great effort, I force my fingers to release my tight hold on the doorknob. Force myself to step back. Force myself to respect Finn’s boundaries even as everything in me screams to do otherwise.
But as I pull the door closed, air pushes out from the room and something snags on my senses. A scent—faint but distinct. Something sweet and vanilla, mixed with…
Honey.
Omega .
My head snaps up, nostrils flaring as I stare at the closed door. That’s impossible. But there it is—Finn’s sage-and-rain scent, tangled with something else. Something that makes my instincts surge with recognition .
She’s not in the forest.
She’s here.
In our house.
With our omega.
“Oh, fuck,” I breathe, and for the first time in two and a half years, I feel something shift in my chest—not quite hope, not quite fear, but something vast and unknowable that threatens to overwhelm everything I thought I understood about our pack.