Chapter 20 #2
“It felt real,” Mason agrees quietly. “Everything about her felt right.”
“Because it was,” I insist. “Yeah, she was lying about Ash, but when she was herself? That was genuine. I’d stake my life on it.”
Slater is still at the window, his back to us, shoulders tense.
“We all felt it,” I continue. “And scent matches don’t come around twice in a lifetime.”
“No, they don’t,” Slater states without turning around, his voice rough. “But how do we trust her after this? How do we know she won’t lie again when things get difficult?”
“We don’t,” Jasper answers. “We can’t know for certain. Trust is a leap of faith.”
I stand up, unable to sit still anymore. “Who here hasn’t done shit they regretted? We’ve all fucked up and made mistakes.”
I stare at each of them. “Mason, you nearly worked yourself to death trying to save a failing business rather than ask for help. Jasper, you pushed away every person who tried to care about you for years because you were scared of being hurt again. And, Slater…”
Slater turns to look at me, and I see the pain in his eyes.
“You walked away from your first pack because you didn’t stand up for your Omega when you should have,” I finish quietly. “And you’ve been carrying that guilt ever since.”
“That’s different,” Slater says.
“Is it? We all have shit in our past. We’ve all made choices we wish we could take back.
” I shake my head. “Trust me, if she felt nothing, she wouldn’t be so devastated right now.
She wouldn’t have been sitting there crying, feeling all alone.
Especially after her last pack rejected her.
” I pause, letting that sink in. “And here we are, treating her just as shitty. Basically rejecting her too.”
Mason’s face crumples slightly.
“We can’t rush this,” Slater says.
“I’m not saying we rush it,” I argue. “We think about what we’re doing. Can we trust her again? And can we really let our scent match walk away without even trying?”
“I’m with Dylan on this,” Jasper adds.
“Me too,” Mason says.
Slater’s hands are clenched into fists at his sides. “I should have trusted my instincts.”
We all watch him.
“This morning,” he continues, still facing the window. “When she came in as Ash and I reprimanded her for being late…”
“You mean you used your dominating voice?” Mason says with a slight smirk despite the tension.
Slater rolls his eyes but doesn’t deny it. “Anyway, I swore Ash was aroused. I thought maybe he even orgasmed while I was telling him what I expected from my employees.”
I burst out laughing despite everything. I can’t help it. Mason does the same.
Jasper is grinning now too. “Well, she admitted she’s a massive fan of your romance narrating. So yeah, she probably did.”
“Fuck.” Slater rubs a hand over his mouth. “It made no sense at the time. I ignored it because Ash was just so weird about everything. But now it all makes perfect sense.”
“Sounds like you have quite the impact on her,” Mason mutters. “So what are we going to do, then? Let her get away? Make her suffer? Let ourselves lose our scent match? Or what?”
Slater is quiet for a long moment, staring out at the darkening sky. Snow is starting to fall, small flakes at first that will probably turn into a blizzard by nightfall.
“I don’t fucking know,” he finally admits, and his voice is raw with emotion.
“I already lost an Omega once. Let her slip through my fingers because I was too weak to stand up for what was right. And it almost destroyed me.” He lifts his gaze to us, and I notice the fear in his eyes.
The vulnerability he rarely shows. “I don’t want to make that mistake again,” he admits out loud.
“But I also don’t want to make the mistake of trusting someone who’ll betray us, especially after those other Omegas stole from us. ” He sighs.
We fall into silence again.
My chest feels hollowed out from the inside. Not pain exactly, but something worse. The kind of emptiness that comes when you’ve already seen the life you want and know it might never be yours.
I can see it with brutal clarity. Her tangled in our sheets, barefoot in the kitchen with paint on her fingers, her beautiful voice drifting through the house late at night, her laughter cutting through the quiet in a way that makes everything feel warmer, safer, whole.
I don’t just want her in our bed. I want her in our lives.
“She was it for me,” I say quietly, the words heavier than I expected. “That first night at the bar. Watching her hustle us at pool like she had nothing to lose. I remember thinking I’d never met anyone like her.”
Mason lets out a slow breath beside me. “For me, it was the café when she sneezed all that powdered sugar on me.”
“The ferry,” Slater adds.
Jasper’s jaw clenches. “I knew the second I kissed her. There wasn’t a question after that. There was just her.”
“So what now?” I ask, because wanting her doesn’t solve anything. “How the hell do we move forward from this?”
Mason rubs a hand over the back of his neck. “We talk to her and see how everything feels now that the truth is out.”
Jasper’s gaze drops to the floor. “Could any of us even let her walk away for good?”
The idea lands like a blade between my ribs.
“Fuck no,” I answer, mirrored by Mason and even Slater.
“Could you actually do that?” I ask him. “Walk away and never see her again?”
“No.”
I nod, because none of us could. “She belongs with us,” I state. “And whether she knew it or not, we belong with her. That doesn’t disappear because everything got complicated.”
“I need to decide if I can trust what I felt,” Slater says. “If I can believe it wasn’t all built on something false. But I’m not walking away,” he says. “I’m not ready to step forward yet either.”
And that’s enough for now.
The snow continues to fall outside, and I can’t help but wonder where Anita is right now. If she’s warm enough, safe, crying alone in her apartment.
My chest aches at the thought.
She might have lied to us and broken something fragile between us. But she’s still ours. And I’m not ready to accept a world where we don’t fight for her.