Chapter fourteen
Lily
Gabriel tells me at breakfast, like he’s asking me to pass the butter. “The Carr pack wants to meet you. Tomorrow evening. I’ve arranged dinner.”
My fork clinks against the plate as I set it down. My stomach’s been off all week.
“I know the timing isn’t ideal,” Gabriel says, staring into his coffee. “But they’ve been interested for a while and I think they’d be a strong fit. Their lead, Jeremy Carr, is someone I’ve worked with. Good reputation.”
Miles sits at the far end of the table, watching. His eyes flick between me and Gabriel. I feel like a bug pinned for study.
“Okay,” I say. Because what else is there? “No” isn’t even on the table. It never was—not for me.
“Good.” Gabriel stands, chair scraping. “Garrett will give you the details later.”
Then comes the morning ritual. I hate it, but I sit through it anyway.
Gabriel always goes to Miles first. He cups Miles’s jaw in one hand and kisses him, slow and deep, like he does every morning. Miles melts, fists bunching in Gabriel’s shirt, tugging him closer. When they finally break apart, Miles’s lips are swollen and his mouth curves, smug. He wants me to see.
Cyrus cuts through the kitchen next. He stops behind Miles, hand sliding to the back of his neck—always that spot—and leans down to kiss his temple.
Miles tips his head, eyes fluttering shut.
Cyrus murmurs something too soft for me to catch, and Miles lights up with a real smile. A smile I haven’t seen from him before.
Last is Garrett. He stops in the doorway. The look he gives me is almost a physical ache: I want to come to you and I can’t and it’s killing me. He doesn’t move. He just stares until I have to look away.
He goes to Miles instead, ruffling his curls and dropping a kiss on top of his head. “Be good,” he says, with that easy warmth.
“Define good,” Miles shoots back.
They all laugh, the three alphas and their omega. Private jokes. History. Ease you can’t fake. It’s a wall I can’t climb, no matter how hard I try. And they don’t even realize they built it.
Then they’re gone. Doors slam. Engines turn over. Tires on gravel, then silence.
I’m alone with Miles. Again.
I go to my room because what else should I do?
Two hours. That’s how long I last. I lie on my bed, stare at the ceiling, can’t focus enough to read on Garrett’s tablet. The headache is a dull throb today instead of the usual pounding. I’m restless. This is what passes for a good day now.
I head for the living room.
Miles is there, obviously. He’s curled up on the couch with his sketchbook, knees tucked, pencil moving fast. He doesn’t look up, but his pencil stops for half a second. He knows I’m here.
I sit as far away as I can get and turn on the TV. Something mindless. A home renovation show, people arguing about tile colors.
We sit. The tension between us hums, but I’m not going anywhere. I’m done letting him chase me out of every room. This is my house too, for now, and I’m tired of giving ground just because he expects me to.
Ten minutes go by. Twenty. The couple on TV argues over a beige kitchen island. Miles sketches. I pretend to care.
“So,” he says finally, pencil still moving. “The Carr pack.”
I don’t answer.
“I know Jeremy Carr. Everyone does.” He keeps sketching. “He’s old school. Omegas should be seen, not heard, blah blah. His pack runs a construction company, so they’re all big, rough types. Hands like sandpaper.”
I pick at a loose thread on the cushion.
“His packmate, Michael, is worse. He’s the one you need to watch for. He’s the kind of alpha who makes you feel stupid for even breathing. If you thought Ren was bad, wait until you meet Michael.”
“You don’t know what Ren was like.” It comes out barely a whisper.
“I know enough. But the Carrs make the Whitfields look like therapy dogs.” He sketches something, frowns, erases it, redraws. “They had an omega a few years ago. She lasted eight months. Nobody says why she left, but rumor is she turned up at the registry with unexplained bruises.”
My stomach turns. “Gabriel said he trusts them.”
“Gabriel trusts everyone. It’s his only real flaw.” The pencil finally stops. “He trusted the Whitfields, too. That went well, didn’t it?”
I don’t know what to say. He’s not wrong about Gabriel. If he’s lying about the Carrs, I have no way to tell. That’s the thing about Miles—he laces truth and venom together so tight I can never pull them apart.
That’s the worst part. I have to trust someone.
And everyone has a reason to lie.
“Are you trying to scare me?” I ask.
“I’m trying to prepare you. Not the same thing.” He glances up, glasses catching the light. “But if you’re scared, that’s your problem.”
He goes back to his drawing. I go back to the TV. They’re arguing about bathroom fixtures now.
I make it another twenty minutes before the urge to move wins. My skin is too tight. If I don’t do something I’ll crawl right out of it so I stand up.
“Where are you going?” Miles doesn’t look up.
“To clean something.”
“How domestic.”
I start in the kitchen. It’s always a disaster by this time of day.
Dishes, crumbs, sticky counters. I load the dishwasher, wipe the counters, scrub the stovetop.
Making things shine smooths out the frantic edges in my brain.
When the kitchen’s done, I move to the living room.
Dust the shelves, straighten the magazines, fluff the throw pillows Cyrus crushes with his morning sprawl.
If I keep everything perfect, maybe nothing else will break.
Miles watches me, sketchbook forgotten.
I vacuum the hallway. Mop the kitchen floor. Clean the bathroom sink. With every swipe and scrub, the knot in my chest loosens. It’s the closest I’ll let myself get to nesting.
I’m wiping down the kitchen table when I realize Miles has moved. He’s in the kitchen, standing at the counter I just cleaned, dragging his finger through the ring of leftover coffee from his mug and smearing it along the granite.
I freeze.
He doesn’t look at me. Just drags another line of coffee across the counter.
“What are you doing?”
“Making coffee art.”
“On the counter I just cleaned.”
“Did you clean it? Could’ve fooled me.”
I grit my teeth, walk over, clean it again. He waits, watching. The second I turn toward the dining room, a cabinet opens behind me. Something heavy hits the counter.
I go back. He’s pulled every mug from the cabinet and lined them up across the counter, all the handles facing different ways.
“Miles.”
“What? I’m looking for the right mug.”
I put them back. One at a time. He leans against the fridge and watches before disappearing.
When I get them put up and finally turn toward the living room, I hear the thump of throw pillows hitting the floor. One, two, three.
He comes to the doorway, face blank. “They fell.”
“They didn’t fall.”
“Are you calling me a liar?”
“I’m calling you a child.”
His eyes narrow with something—interest, satisfaction, I can’t tell.
“Careful, Stray. My alphas will believe me over you. Because I belong to them. And you don’t.” He steps closer. His voice drops. “I’ll tell them you had one of your little breakdowns and trashed the house. They’ll buy it. They’ve seen how unstable you are.”
It hurts, because he’s right. I’ll never win against him, not here. He’s pack and I’m not. If the alphas have to pick sides, I already know how it ends. I don’t even have a nest. Nothing to call mine.
So I pick up the pillows and put them back. When he knocks the magazines to the floor, I gather those, too.
It goes on like this. An hour, maybe more.
He messes up the bathroom: towels on the tile, soap dispenser tipped over.
I clean it. He stomps through the kitchen in muddy shoes, right across the floor I just mopped.
I mop it again. He fills a glass with water and pours it onto the hallway floor, then leaves.
This isn’t about cleaning anymore.
This is about obedience.
I should let him wreck the house. I should refuse to play. But he’s right — they’ll believe him. Even if Garrett saw through it, it would start a fight, and Gabriel would use it to send me away. I’ll end up back at the registry in Brennan’s reach or with some random pack like the Whitfields.
So I clean. Kneeling on hardwood, wiping up water. It’s humiliating. He knows it. That’s the whole point.
I hate that I’m still doing it.
I hate that I don’t stop.
He comes back with coffee this time. Stands over me while I scrub the baseboard.
“You missed a spot,” he says.
“I see it.”
“Do you? Because it looks to me like you’re not very good at this.”
I scrub harder. My knees ache, my shoulders burn, but I won’t let him see me cry. Not today.
“You know,” he says, casual as anything, “this is what it’ll be like with the Carrs.
On your knees, cleaning up after alphas who don’t see you as a person.
At least here you’ve got Garrett making you soup and Cyrus looking at you like you hung the moon.
With them?” He sips his coffee. “You’ll be a maid with a mating mark. ”
“Shut up, Miles.”
“Or what? You’ll cry about it? Go ahead. You’re good at that.”
I stay silent.
“What, you don’t think I know you cry alone at night?
” He scoffs. “The walls are thin, Stray. Gabriel and I heard you just last night. Sobbing into your pillow doesn’t muffle it as much as you’d think.
And do you know what else? Gabriel apologized to me for having to hear it.
He didn’t care that you were crying. He didn’t want to go comfort you.
He only wanted to make sure it wasn’t bothering me. ”
I stare at the floor. I know Gabriel doesn’t care about me. He only cares that I’m an inconvenience to his pack. He only wants me when he’s close enough to scent me. That’s all it is.
I knew that.
But hearing it out loud, from Miles, with that satisfied edge in his voice, is different.
It hurts. And it’s humiliating knowing that such a private moment of my life wasn’t as private as I thought it was.
I’m about to stand, about to walk away from him and this whole fucked up scene—
And then I look up.
The angle’s wrong, or maybe it’s exactly right.
He’s standing over me, looking broader from down here than he has any right to, jaw set, eyes on mine like he’s waiting for me to break.
The line of his shoulders is squared. His weight is forward.
He’s looking down at me with the steady, unhurried cruelty of someone who knows he’s already won.
He looks like an alpha.
He doesn’t look like Miles the omega in oversized hoodies and glasses who sketches on the couch. The shape of him right now—looming, hard-jawed, satisfied—reads alpha to every part of me that’s been starving for one.
And my body responds before my brain catches up. It doesn’t care what he is.
It only cares what he feels like.
Heat blooms low in my belly. Slick threatens. The omega in me lurches toward the shape above me without checking the dynamic attached to it.
Then I notice his scent. Burnt sugar and hot iron, layered with something feral I’ve never smelled on him before. Then I see his cock thickening against the line of his sweats.
He’s hard. Because I’m kneeling in front of him.
The two facts hit at the same time: I’m responding to him. He’s responding to me.
I should be disgusted. I should look away and get up and walk out.
But my scent spikes—I can feel it pouring out of me—and his nostrils flare. His pupils blow wide, brown swallowed by black.
We stare at each other.
Neither of us moves. Neither of us breathes. The air is thick with sugar and ozone, iron and peach, our arousals tangled up in a way that shouldn’t even be possible for two omegas. My heart hammers so hard I’m sure he can hear it. His chest heaves.
He looks at me, really looks, and it’s not cruel now. No sneer. No cutting remark. For the first time since I met him, Miles is unguarded—confused, turned on, terrified. I’m not looking away. I can’t. The slick is pooling and I can’t stop that either.
A second. Five. Ten. Long enough that this becomes something that can’t be erased. Even if we never speak about it again.
And then it’s over. The horror sets in. His eyes drop to the bulge in his sweats, then back to me. I’m still on my knees, still staring up at him.
“No.” It comes out raw. Like he’s saying it to himself, not me.
He spins and leaves. Doesn’t look back. The pack room door slams so hard the walls shake.
Silence.
I stay on the floor. My knees ache. My hands are wet. My heart won’t slow. The air is both of us. It should be wrong. It isn’t.
I finally stand. My legs are shaky. I finish drying the floor, because if I stop now I’ll have to think about what happened, and I’m not ready.
I clean the rest of the hallway. I clean the kitchen again. The bathroom. If I stop moving, I’ll have to feel it. I wipe and scrub until there’s nothing left to fix.
I picture the look he gave me. It wasn’t hate or disgust. It was as if he’d found something he didn’t want but couldn’t let go of.
I wonder about how I responded. How I shouldn’t have.
Omegas aren’t supposed to crave power. He does.
We aren’t supposed to get off on being made small by another omega.
But I did. I do. Even if in that moment, I wasn’t seeing him as an omega.
I was seeing something else. I don’t know what to call it or what it means for the handful of days I have left in this house.
And tomorrow night, I have to meet the Carr pack. Four strangers who’ll see only omega, only vacancy. I’ll sit across from them and pretend to imagine a future, try not to picture what happened here, on the floor, with Miles.
I go back to my room. I sit on the bed, listening to the hush of the house and, far off, the sound of Miles pacing behind a closed door.
His scent clings to my clothes, sugar and iron. I should shower it off.
I don’t.
Not yet.