Chapter 8
CHAPTER EIGHT
Rhys
By the time I step out onto the patio, the sun’s slid lower, turning the yard that soft gold Mia seems made of.
Knox is still by the hedge, arms braced on the top like he wants to rip it out of the ground. Declan is at the table with that cardboard box and his dumb guilty posture.
But it’s not them that hit me first.
It’s her.
Strawberries and soap and this thin, bright thread of adrenaline that tastes like a live wire in the back of my throat.
I stop in the doorway.
“What did you do?” I ask, voice quiet.
Two heads snap my way. Knox’s mouth opens. Declan’s shuts tighter, like he realizes he’d better pick his words.
Knox recovers first. “Nice to see you too, little brother.”
I ignore that. “Why does she smell like that?” I move closer, breathing in the wake of where Mia stood a minute ago. It’s fading fast, but the shape of it’s clear: embarrassment, fear, stubbornness on top like a lid.
Something scared her.
Someone.
Knox drags a hand through his hair, making it stick up. “Her laundry,” he says. “She said stuff’s missing off her line. Underthings.” His tone flattens. “Delicate ones.”
“Missing,” I repeat.
“Yeah.”
My shoulders lock. “From her yard.”
“Where else would she hang them?” Declan mutters. Then, when I look at him, he shrugs. “I know what you mean. I know.”
The scent of Mia’s distress digs claws in all along my spine.
Someone was close enough to her line to pluck lace off it? Close enough to smell her the way I do right now?
My jaw goes tight enough to ache. “She thinks it was wind?”
“She says it might be the wind,” Knox answers. “But she smelled like she wanted to set something on fire, so I’m going to go with no.”
I turn that over in my head. No visible panic out here. No trembling. She stood in front of two alphas and made herself say “underthings” without bolting.
Brave girl.
Smart omega.
Under all that, she’s scared.
My throat goes rough. “You tell her we’d look?”
“She told us not to make a big deal out of laundry,” Declan says, glancing toward her house as if he can still see her. “We’re going to make a big deal out of laundry.”
“Obviously,” Knox says.
I finally look at Declan properly. His elbow is still at that weird angle, shoulder tense. “What,” I ask, “are you hiding?”
He freezes. Then his mouth twists. “It’s not what you think.”
“I’m thinking if you pull lace from behind your back right now, we’re going to have a problem.”
Slowly, he brings his arm around.
It’s…a can. Silver and blue, sweating with condensation.
A beer. And not a nice, local craft brew, either. It’s a cheap domestic lager, the kind you buy in a thirty-pack for a frat party.
I stare at it.
“That’s your contraband,” I say flatly.
Declan shrugs, defensive. “We were hiding the goods. We didn’t want her to think we were day-drinking degenerates.”
Knox huffs. “You look like a freshman trying not to get caught in the dorm.”
“We just convinced her we’re mostly functional adults,” Declan points out. “I didn’t want Polite Mia to look over the hedge and catch me pounding cheap beer in the middle of a Tuesday. It ruins the aesthetic.”
My mouth wants to twitch. I don’t let it.
“You’re an idiot,” I tell him, purely out of habit. My real anger is too busy coiling around the fact that someone was in her yard.
“She didn’t care about the beer, Dek,” Knox says, pushing off the hedge. “She said things were missing.”
Something in my chest snaps into place.
“We’re done letting it be theoretical,” I say. “Someone was in her space.”
Declan’s expression shifts. The last of the easy brightness drains out and something colder settles in.
“Yeah,” he says quietly. “We are.”
The box on the table scrapes as he sets the beer in it and shoves it aside, forgotten.
For a beat, none of us talk. We just stand there and let the implications sink in: an unknown body at her fence. Hands on her clothes. Eyes on her nest.
My molars grind together.
There’s a possessive instinct in alphas that makes people nervous. They’re not wrong to be wary. Territorial, they call it, like we’re going to piss on fire hydrants.
I’ve spent a lot of years with my teeth sunk in that instinct, hauling it back from the edge every time we scaled, every time success brought more attention, more threats, more chances to go too far.
This?
This doesn’t feel like “too far.”
This feels like baseline.
“Could be a kid,” Declan says finally, but he doesn’t sound like he believes it. “Stupid prank. You know how bored they get in subdivisions. Underwear theft is, like, a ritual.”
“Could be someone from outside the neighborhood,” Knox counters. His voice has that edge now, low and rough. “Some asshole who cuts through the neighborhood, smells unbonded omega, decides to…collect.”
My shoulders stay locked. “We have cameras front and side. None on the back yet.”
“That changes today,” Eli says from the doorway.
All three of us look over.
He’s leaning against the frame, arms crossed. He must’ve come up while we were snarling at each other. Quiet. Steady. The way only Eli can be.
“How much did you hear?” Declan asks.
“Enough,” Eli says. “Missing underwear. Mia trying to downplay it. You two doing a shit job of not making her more nervous.”
Knox inhales slowly. “She was already nervous.”
“Yeah,” Eli says, eyes flicking toward the hedge. “I smell it.”
We all do.
He pushes off the frame, comes down the steps, gaze moving over the yard like he’s overlaying a mental grid. “We put rear cameras up tomorrow. Tonight, we walk the line.”
“I’ll do it,” I say immediately.
Three pairs of eyes cut to me.
Eli raises an eyebrow. “We, Rhys.”
“You’ve been up for twenty hours,” I remind him. “Someone has to sleep if we’re going to fix this app before it eats itself. I’ll walk.”
“I’m not leaving it to one of you alone,” he says, voice even, but I see the brief flicker in his jaw.
He wants eyes out here himself. Beta doesn’t mean softer. It just means he’s got more practice looking like nothing rattles him.
Knox rolls his shoulders. “We can take shifts. It’s one fucking night.”
Declan nods. “Yeah. We do it like we do launches. Someone’s always online.”
I look toward Mia’s house.
The lights are on now, glowing soft behind the curtains even though it’s early evening. Kitchen, living room. Her bedroom window on the second floor is dark for now.
“She thinks it was us,” I say quietly.
Declan flinches, just a fraction. Knox’s scent flashes sharp.
“She didn’t say that,” he argues.
“She didn’t have to. She came over smelling like fear. Asked if you’d seen anything blowing around and wouldn’t look you in the eye.”
There’s silence.
Then Eli sighs. “Can you blame her?”
No.
I can’t.
We moved in loud. We took up space. We left packages in her yard and drilled into the night. We called her our omega in front of Carol like we’d already staked a claim. We cleaned her trash cans.
We’re a lot.
“Doesn’t matter what she thinks about us,” I say, surprising myself with how flat it comes out. “Whoever was out there, they weren’t us.”
I meet each of their eyes in turn. “I’m not letting some dickhead with a panty fetish work up the nerve to come back for more.”
Eli’s shoulders drop a fraction, some tension leaking out. That’s his tell: he relaxes when one of us says the thing he was gearing up to argue for.
“Fine,” he says. “But we do it my way.”
“Your way sucks,” Knox mutters.
“My way keeps this pack away from citations,” Eli says mildly. “You want to improvise on this, be my guest. But if you scare her worse, you’re sleeping in the garage with the servers.”
Declan shudders. “Cold,” he says. “Rude. Effective.”
“What’s your way?” I ask, because we’re going to end up doing it regardless.
Eli looks at the hedge. “We don’t go near her property, but one of us stays out at all times. Stay in the shadows. If you see anything, smell anything that isn’t us or one of the neighbors we know, you call it in. No hero shit.”
“That’s adorable,” Knox says. “You think I listen when you say ‘no hero shit.’”
Eli’s gaze hardens. “I am dead serious, Knox. If it’s some kid from the next street over, fine. Drag him to his parents and make a learning moment out of it. If it’s an adult you don’t know, you don’t hit first. You don’t make a hole we can’t patch.”
Knox opens his mouth.
Eli doesn’t raise his voice. “She already thinks we’re capable of crossing her boundaries without asking. You get arrested in her backyard for assaulting some idiot, you can kiss any chance of changing her mind goodbye.”
That lands.
Knox’s jaw works. He looks away, exhaling hard through his nose. “Yeah,” he says. “Okay.”
“Dek,” Eli says. “You take first pass around midnight.”
“Copy that,” Declan says, already half-checking his phone for time. “I’ll finish the hotfix, nap, then patrol. See if there are any convenient bushes I can jump out of with a flashlight and a stern lecture.”
“Absolutely not,” Eli says.
“I’m only half-kidding,” Declan says.
He’s fifty percent kidding at best.
“Knox,” Eli continues. “You take the second half. Two to four. Less likely to hit human traffic, more likely to run into the local wildlife.”
“I’m going to introduce the raccoons to the concept of consent,” Knox mutters. “Looking forward to it.”
Eli looks at me. “You take the early slot. Sunset to midnight. Walk it while she’s still up. Let anyone watching see there’s a reason to keep their distance.”
There’s a twist at the base of my skull.
“You don’t want her to see us,” I say.
“I don’t want her to feel watched,” he corrects. “By us.”
“She already feels watched,” I say quietly. “We’re big. We’re obvious. We exist. She feels us every time she walks past a window.”
“Yeah,” Eli says. “And that’s enough for one week.”
He walks over, pats my shoulder once. It’s not comforting, exactly. It’s… grounding. We all split when he does that; it’s our version of dismissed.