Chapter 7
CHAPTER SEVEN
Mia
The smell hits me first when I open the back door: sun-warmed grass, clean cotton, and that faint metallic tang from the clothesline poles I installed yesterday with a ridiculous amount of pride.
I step out onto the small slab of concrete that pretends to be a patio and breathe deep.
This is it. This is the suburban high.
A slight breeze, a bird somewhere yelling at another bird, the distant thwack of a tennis ball from the courts near the park.
My white sheets billow on the line like a commercial for eco-friendly detergent. My jeans hang in a row, legs folded up with clothespins. A dish towel with lemons on it flutters cheerfully, like it’s auditioning for content on a homemaking blog.
I did this.
I strung the line yesterday afternoon between two metal T-posts left lying near the hedge by the previous owners. I measured it twice, knotted it properly, even Googling “best way to hang laundry on a line”.
The sight of it scratches some deep, weird itch in my soul. The one that likes lists and checkboxes and tidy corners. The one that has been chanting boring, boring, boring like a prayer for months.
It’s so…ordinary. So domestic. So offensively wholesome.
If I squint, I can almost see the version of my life I wanted when I signed the rental agreement: Mia, Responsible Omega, hanging laundry while her sensible pack mows the lawn and one of her gentle alphas brings her iced tea.
No chaos. No server racks. No tech bros with dangerous shoulders and abs.
Just…this.
The bin-cleaning incident… Fine, the bin-cleaning gift is still humming in my chest like a sugar rush. Every time I think about the clean, lemon-scented plastic and the perfectly re-stenciled “124,” my insides do a complicated thing I’m choosing to label as “gratitude” and not “bond-hungry.”
Yes, it was too much. Yes, it scrambled my rules. Yes, Eli told me to stop keeping score in a voice that made my toes curl.
But for the past few hours, I have been riding that weird high straight into peak Suburban Fantasy Mode. I vacuumed. I put up wallpaper. I made a quiche. Who makes a quiche? Apparently I do.
And then, feeling like the world’s most aggressively wholesome homemaker, I decided to do laundry and hang it out like some kind of 1950s pamphlet for “How to Be a Good Omega Wife,” minus the smiling alpha in a tie.
It felt like a declaration.
I can manifest this. I can manifest the dream.
The sheets snap gently in the breeze, and I smile like an idiot.
“There you go,” I murmur to the laundry. “Look at us. So functional. So…offensively boring.”
I am not thinking about the four men next door. I am absolutely not imagining them seeing my laundry and thinking ‘Wow, what a domestic, stable omega’. My brain would never.
I turn back into the house, leaving the back door propped open with a brick, letting the air move through.
I have work to do. Always. My inbox is a hungry beast. I settle at the dining table with my laptop, determined to channel my energy into something monetizable: an article on “Ten Low-Stress Ways to Romanticize Your Routine.”
The irony is not lost on me.
I type about slow mornings, soft lighting, and mindful chores while my own laundry dries ten feet away, my subconscious clearly taking notes.
Every so often, I glance out the back window, just to check that a rogue gust hasn’t sent my lemon dish towel flying into another ZIP code. The line stays steady. The clothes sway like they’re nodding along to some quiet song.
Domestic bliss.
I’m halfway through a paragraph about brewing coffee when my phone buzzes with a calendar alert.
“Grocery pickup,” I read, and groan. Right. I booked the time slot yesterday.
Fine. Food is important. Especially when my default under stress is “forget to eat until dizzy.”
I close my laptop, grab my keys, and take one last look out the window. Still there. Still swaying. Still screaming, Look at me, I’m a stable adult, I hang things on lines instead of draping them over my furniture like a gremlin.
I’m gone forty minutes, tops.
The store is ten minutes away. The pickup lane is fast. The teenager who loads my groceries into the trunk smells faintly like coffee and omega, and he gives me a sweet, distracted smile when I tip him.
I roll back into Sweetwater Pines with three paper bags and the smug internal glow of someone who has chicken, lettuce, and three different kinds of cheese.
I envision myself putting everything away in my shiny fridge, wearing socks and humming something mellow, my laundry dry and sun-scented when I bring it in.
I back into my driveway with all the confidence of someone who hasn’t yet realized their day is about to go catastrophically sideways.
The first sign that something is off doesn’t register right away.
As I walk up the path, bags in hand, I clock the neat line of my bins by the house, my freshly swept porch, the neighbor kids’ chalk drawings on the sidewalk; a unicorn, a hopscotch grid, a very angry-looking flower.
Normal. Good. Safe.
The second sign is smaller. Quieter.
The breeze shifts as I push open the back door, carrying the smell of sun-baked cotton into the kitchen. It’s familiar and comforting. But there’s a faint…wrong note. A tiny dissonance I can’t place. Like a song missing a chord.
I set the groceries on the counter, rational brain engaged. Unpack the cold stuff, Mia. Then you can go bask in your domestic masterpiece.
Milk in the fridge. Eggs on the middle shelf. Cheese in the drawer. Lettuce in the crisper. Chicken in the bottom. Yogurt. No, not the yogurt that expired last week, that goes in the—
I’m halfway to the trash when it hits me.
The smell.
It’s not there.
Not the smell of trash. That, blessedly, is gone thanks to the Great Bin Purge of 126/124 Pine Lane. But the smell of…fabric softener and skin and faint floral detergent that should be pouring in from the yard.
Instead, the air smells…different. Thinner.
My heart gives a weird little skip.
I toss the yogurt, wash my hands, and tell myself I’m being weird. Maybe the wind shifted. Maybe the line is just…less dramatic now that the clothes are dry.
“Calm,” I mutter, wiping my hands on a dish towel. “You are calm. You are not the heroine in a thriller.”
I cross the kitchen and step back out into the yard.
The sunlight is bright enough to make me squint. The grass tickles my ankles. The clothesline stretches across the corner of the yard, poles standing straight and proud.
The sheets are there. Two big, white rectangles, flapping lazily beside my towels. My favorite soft t-shirt is there. My jeans. My leggings. That lemon dish towel. A couple of pairs of socks, pegged side by side.
But the line looks…half-full.
My stomach drops.
No.
I move closer, squinting as if distance is the problem.
Sheets. T-shirt. Jeans. Leggings. Socks. Dish towel.
And then…nothing.
The entire middle section of the line is empty. The wooden clothespins are still there, clamped onto nothing, swinging uselessly in the breeze. Just a bare stretch of rope where, forty-five minutes ago, there had been…
No.
Nope.
I close my eyes because somehow that feels less insane than what my brain is trying to show me.
When I hung the laundry, I did it in an order. Socks at the end, jeans, leggings, towels, then the delicate cycle in the middle so they wouldn’t get overshadowed. My nice bra. The camisoles I sleep in. And…
My lace.
My throat goes dry.
I open my eyes.
They’re not there.
The lace thongs I bought in a moment of late-night weakness. Three for one sale, an ad that said things like “Treat Yourself,” me with my laptop and a glass of wine thinking, Someday I’ll have someone to appreciate these. Those lace thongs are gone.
Not fallen on the grass. Not snapped off the line and caught on a bush. Not dangling pathetically from a fence post.
Gone.
Every conservative, practical piece of cotton in the load is present and accounted for. Every dish towel, every pillowcase.
But the ribbon-strapped, sheer-backed, barely-there underwear I hesitated to even hang outside? Missing.
My heart starts pounding in a steady, sick rhythm.
“Oh,” I whisper. “Oh no.”
The first thought that should occur to any woman in any situation like this is obvious: perverts.
A rogue breeze plus an opportunistic creep. Stolen underwear. Gross. Classic.
My brain does not go there.
My brain, deeply steeped in romance novels and ABO think-pieces, goes straight to territorial.
Alphas.
I see my gleaming bins. My re-stenciled address. The way they moved around me at the barbecue like I was in the center of some complicated gravitational field.
My heart thuds harder. The sound rushes in my ears.
No.
No, they wouldn’t.
Would they?
I didn’t see anything. Wind is a thing that exists.
But my omega is very unhelpfully rifling through every alpha-coded interaction of the past week and slapping red string between them on a mental corkboard.
They called you ours.
They cleaned the bins.
They fed you.
They hovered at the barbecue.
She purrs, like this is all deeply hot.
I, inhabiting the part of my brain that likes not being murdered, am less thrilled.
“Okay,” I say, too loudly, as if I can startle my thoughts into order. “Options. We’re going to list options and not jump straight to ‘my neighbors stole my underwear as some kind of territorial marking ritual.’”
Option One: Wind.
I scan the yard.
Grass is short, thanks to my lovely beta property manager who gave the place a nice cut before I moved in. No lacy turquoise or black or blush-pink caught on the blades. No hint of fabric peeking out from under a shrub.
I check the hedge. Nothing. The little tree near the corner. Nothing.
If the wind took them, it took them hard and in one very specific direction.
Option Two: Wildlife.
A very ambitious squirrel. A bird with expensive taste in nesting materials.