Gabriel
Chapter nineteen
Ileave at dawn, before the house can wake and catch me.
Maybe if I leave early enough, I can outrun what I did.
There’s a hush over everything, the quiet that follows too much pain.
The hallway is black and still. Miles is curled in the nest, finally asleep, his breath still uneven from hours of sobbing against my chest. Cyrus is beside him, a silent, stubborn shadow, refusing to leave even when I told him to go to his own bed.
Garrett’s door is closed. I don’t knock.
I can’t—not after what I said to him, not after the truth I spat like poison.
I drive to the office with the windows down. The truck still reeks of her, even after all this time. It’s soaked into the fabric, the dashboard, even the air. Every inhale cuts me—a reminder of what I’m trying to excise. My alpha claws at the inside of my ribs. Hungry. Furious. Refusing to let go.
I want to roll the windows up but I won’t let myself.
Last night, standing in Garrett’s doorway, the need was so clear it bordered on violence.
I saw her curled up against him, her scent blooming in the dark under his purr.
I wanted her so badly my hands shook. It wasn’t anger.
It was desire—the old, brutal ache that makes sense only to bodies, not minds.
To cross the room and take her, to wrap her up and add my scent, to build something nothing could break.
Instead, I called her nothing. I looked at my scent match—the woman my biology has been reaching toward since the moment I caught her scent at that gala—and told Miles she was nothing. Biology. A nuisance to be overcome.
I knew it wasn’t true when I said it. It isn’t true.
But I said it anyway.
The look on her face.
I grip the steering wheel and breathe, letting the ache burn through me. It doesn’t fade. It just moves deeper, out of reach, getting comfortable somewhere I can’t touch.
I pull into my parking space and turn off the truck. I sit there a while, letting the time tick by.
My office is on the third floor of a building downtown, a building I own a quarter of.
It’s too early for anyone else; the floor is dark, the lights still off.
I let myself in, sit at my desk, and stare at the phone for eleven endless minutes before I pick it up.
Each second is another chance to change my mind. I don’t.
Jeremy Carr answers on the second ring. “Gabriel.” He sounds relaxed, unrushed, the voice of a man who got a full night’s sleep. “Good to hear from you.”
“Jeremy. I’m calling about Lily.” I keep my tone flat, professional. This is business. A transaction.
“I figured.” He pauses, not filling the silence. “She was great. My whole pack liked her. She’s… special.”
“I’m glad to hear it.” I dig for neutrality, for distance. “I wanted to follow up on your interest. Things have changed here. Lily needs to move sooner than we planned.”
He’s quiet, measuring the words. “How soon?”
“Immediately, if possible.”
“That’s a shift from last week. What happened?”
“Her presence is causing significant distress to my omega. It’s in everyone’s best interest—including Lily’s—for her to transition to a permanent pack as soon as possible.”
There’s a longer pause. I check the screen to make sure we’re still connected.
“I hope you didn’t say it like that to her,” he says.
The words hit. I feel them all the way down. I let them cut me from the inside out, because I deserve it. But I keep going anyway.
“How I communicate with my household is my concern.”
“It is. But how you treat a vulnerable omega in your home is everyone’s concern.” His voice is still calm, but there’s steel under it now. “She’s not cargo, Gabriel.”
“I’m well aware of what she is.”
“Are you? Because ‘her presence is causing distress’ makes her sound like a broken table. Or something you can just move to storage and leave to rot.”
I shut my eyes and pinch the bridge of my nose. “Miles has a history of severe trauma. Lily’s presence—even without intent—is triggering reactions that could undo his recovery. My job is to protect him. That comes before the comfort of an omega I’ve only known for a few weeks.”
“I understand the priority. I’m asking about the method.”
“I’ll do whatever it takes to keep Miles safe. He’s my priority. He matters more.”
“More than your scent match.”
“Yes.”
He’s silent. Then: “Can I ask you something? Not a challenge. I just need to understand.”
“Go ahead.”
“If Miles is your priority, if you’re committed, why haven’t you claimed him? A claiming bite would dissolve the scent match with Lily. Wouldn’t that solve everything?”
It’s a raw nerve and I almost hang up. “That’s not your business.”
“You’re right. I apologize.” He backs down instantly, no ego, just smooth retreat. “I only wanted to see the whole picture before we make decisions about Lily.”
“The picture is simple. Lily needs a pack and your pack liked her. I need her gone. Will you take her?”
“Has Lily agreed to come?”
“She’ll go.”
“That’s not what I asked. Has Lily said she wants to be with us?”
“She enjoyed her time with you. She said she’d like to see you again.”
“Liking a date isn’t the same as agreeing to be claimed, Gabriel.” Jeremy’s voice cools, just a little. “She’s not a pet you hand off when you’re done.”
“I’m not treating her like a pet.”
“You’re calling me at seven a.m. to take her off your hands because she’s disrupting your household. What would you call it?”
The silence stretches between us.
Jeremy sighs. “Tell me what happened. Specifically.”
So I tell him. I give him the brief, clinical version even though he already knows most of it from her file.
I tell him about Lily’s health, the suppressant withdrawal, the touch she needs and can’t have.
Garrett breaking the rules. Miles walking in and seeing them together.
Miles screaming until I had to hold him down and bite-hold him into calm.
Me telling Lily she was leaving tomorrow.
When I finish, Jeremy is quiet for a long time.
“She went to Garrett because she was in pain,” Jeremy says at last. Not a question.
“Yes.”
“Physical pain. The kind her doctor warned you about if she didn’t get alpha contact from her scent-matched pack.”
“Yes.”
“And your response was to tell her she’s nothing and that she’s leaving.”
I don’t answer.
“Gabriel, I need you to hear this the way I mean it: with respect.” He pauses.
“She shouldn’t be punished for trying to survive.
She’s an omega. She’s sick, she’s touch-starved, and she’s trapped with three alphas who smell like home but won’t help her.
What she did wasn’t betrayal. It was instinct.
It was her body trying to repair itself. ”
“I know what it was.”
“Then you know she didn’t mean to hurt Miles. It had nothing to do with him.”
“It doesn’t matter. The result is the same.”
“Intentions always matter.” Jeremy’s voice is steady, relentless. “Let me ask: if Miles were in Lily’s position, somewhere else, sick, surrounded by alphas who wouldn’t help him, wouldn’t you want someone to show him mercy? Wouldn’t you want them to help him, even if it was complicated?”
The question is a stone dropped into my stomach.
“It’s not that simple,” I say.
“I know. I don’t envy you. But listen: we’re not going to take Lily unless she asks for it.”
“What?”
“My pack talked it over after the date. We like her. But we’re not going to be the place you send her when you’ve had enough. She deserves to choose. If she comes to us, it’ll be because she wants to, not because you made her life so miserable that anything else is better.”
I want to fight him. I want to tell him that time is a luxury Lily doesn’t have, that choices are a privilege her body can’t afford. But I remember her face last night—the devastation when I called her nothing, the resignation when I told her she was done—and the words die before I can say them.
“We’re out of town for the next couple of days,” Jeremy says. “Family thing. When we’re back, we’d like to see her again. Dinner, something low-key. But Gabriel—you have to let her breathe. Let her choose. You owe her that.”
“I don’t owe her anything.”
“You owe her the basic decency of being treated like a person. That’s not a debt, it’s the baseline. I’ve known you a long time, Gabe. She’s your fucking scent match. How can you even stand hurting her like this?”
I end the call before I can say something I’ll regret.
Afterward I sit there, listening to the building come alive around me. The hum of the vents, the distant elevator, someone arriving early on the floor below. All the normal sounds of a world that doesn’t care if my house is coming apart at the seams.
Jeremy is wrong about one thing. I don’t owe Lily. I took her in, fed her, housed her, paid for her care, spent every day since she arrived trying to find her a future that doesn’t involve Brennan Foster. I’ve been extremely charitable when I could have just left her at the registry from day one.
But he’s right about everything else. I know it, and knowing is a wound that won’t close.
Her face. The look in her eyes when I said she was nothing. Not just hurt, but acceptance—like she’d known all along and I was only saying what she’d been waiting to hear. As if that was her place in the world: nothing. Nothing. A lone omega in deep water, no rescue coming.
That quiet, exhausted acceptance is what I take home with me. She looked the same way Miles looked when he found her in Garrett’s bed. Like everything they both feared had come true.
She truly believes she’s a burden, and I did that. I built it, day by day, every rule, every refusal, every time I walked past her door and didn’t stop.
Miles believes he’s losing his grip on the family that three years ago he never dared to hope for.