Chapter Twelve
Kev
The rearview mirror is a problem.
I adjusted it three blocks ago. Told myself I needed a better angle on the traffic behind us.
A lie so transparent even my hindbrain isn't buying it, and my hindbrain will believe almost anything if it gets me closer to my mates.
My mates. Plural. Two of them, curled together in my backseat like the rest of us don't exist.
Lex shifts beside me. His long fingers tap against his thigh in a rhythm that means he's thinking too hard.
He's watching the mirror too. We all are, except Ezra, who's turned halfway around in the middle row to keep direct eyes on them.
Sera sits rigid beside him, her basil-and-blood-orange scent spiked with something that reminds me of the moment before a witness breaks on the stand.
Nobody speaks. The silence should be suffocating.
It's not. It's worse: four alphas who all know the world just tilted sideways and will never be the same way again.
I keep my eyes on the road. Force them there. Every time my gaze drifts to the mirror something locks up in my chest, not pain, just pressure, the kind that says you're doing this wrong, and I unclench my hands from the wheel and remind myself I'm driving. I’m responsible for keeping everyone safe.
Aubrey clings to Espie. That sentence keeps rewriting itself in my head, rearranging the words like maybe a different order will make it make sense.
Aubrey. Is. Touching. Her. His thumb traces slow circles on the inside of Espie's wrist, right over the pulse point.
She's pressed into his side with her fingers threaded through his hair, her face tucked against his throat.
Both sleeping now. But before that they whispered to each other.
Fragments of sound, nothing intelligible, but I heard his voice.
His actual voice, broken and rasping from months of silence, but there.
My eyes sting and I blink hard, keep my gaze on the road.
He's back. After six months of nothing, Aubrey is back.
Touching someone. Holding someone. Whispering to someone.
He rocked in that chair while Ezra spooned broth into his mouth.
Lex read him Neruda and Rumi never giving up.
I started to wonder if we'd lost our scent-matched omega forever.
If the male Axel broke was gone for good, we were just tending a body.
But he's not gone. He's right there, in my backseat, with his chin resting against the top of Espie's head and his arms around her like he's the one keeping her from dissolving. Whispering to someone he met an hour ago. To her, not to any of us. I should be grateful. I am grateful.
I tighten my grip on the steering wheel. I ease off, check the mirror again. Traffic, Kev. You're checking the traffic.
Their scents have started to merge. Gardenia and clover from Espie.
Cedar and chamomile from Aubrey. Together, they turn into something dense enough to seize my lungs on the inhale.
Saliva floods my mouth. My cock presses heavy against my thigh, slow and inevitable, and there’s no shutting it down.
This isn’t choice. It’s instinct stripped bare.
Something ancient waking up after thirty-nine years spent locked inside a cage.
This scent.
My mates.
Filling the car with something that bypasses thought entirely and lands somewhere deeper. Somewhere primal.
Lex, Ezra, and I had already accepted what our lives would be. Three alphas. No mates. Growing old side by side because there’d never been another option. We built something good anyway. Quiet. Steady. A life that worked.
Now it feels like we were only waiting for this.
Thirty-nine years of waiting, and it turns out it fits in our SUV.
I've wanted for six months. Longer, really.
Wanted since the moment I walked into that warehouse looking for Leah and found Aubrey kneeling at Axel's feet with a gun pressed to his temple and nothing in his eyes.
Cold concrete and dripping water somewhere behind a wall.
Him, so still, like he'd already decided it didn't matter.
My whole life rearranged itself around that image.
Around him. Around the absolute certainty that I would get him out of there or die trying.
“Kev.” Lex's voice is pitched low. “You're doing seventy in a forty zone.”
I don't answer.
“Kev.”
Shit.
I ease off the accelerator. Lex exhales beside me.
He doesn't say anything else. Neither do I.
Everything I could say would come out wrong.
My foot doesn't want to cooperate. Every instinct screams go faster, get them home, wrap myself around them and never let go.
My hindbrain has conveniently forgotten that neither of them has any reason to trust an Alpha who shows up scenting like want.
Slow down. Breathe. Drive like a normal person.
My phone buzzes in the center console. Adrian Blackwood. A text with an attachment.
Sera Vidal's file. She's solid. Trust her.
Trust her. Easy for Adrian to say. He's not the one bringing a strange alpha into his house. Into his pack.
I mark the message for later and keep my eyes on the road. I can't think about Sera's credentials right now. Can't think about Adrian vouching for her. All I can think about is the two omegas in my backseat.
Selfish. That's what this is. Aubrey has finally come back to us after six months of disappearing by inches, and all I can think about is that someone else reached him first.
Espie survived years in a place that broke her apart, and instead of focusing on that, part of me is still twisted up over the fact that she's curled against Aubrey instead of one of us.
I know how ugly that is.
Doesn't make it less true.
Sera's scent shifts in the middle row, her blood orange going bitter.
“I know this isn't—” She stops. Starts again. “I'm not here to make it harder.” Her voice is low. Aimed at me, or maybe at the road ahead.
“I know.”
I don't look at her. Looking at her means acknowledging that she has the same claim I do, and we're going to have to figure out how to build something with no precedent and four alphas who've never met each other, sharing two omegas and one house and, eventually, a life.
In that order, probably. One impossible thing at a time.
Alphas don't scent-match to other Alphas.
You match to an Omega, and if you're lucky, the Omega matches back, and you build a pack from there.
Simple. Clean. The way it's supposed to work.
Nobody told us what to do when four alphas all match to the same two omegas and none of us have ever met before.
There's no chapter in the handbook for this.
“Don’t forget to turn,” Lex says.
I snap back to the present and make the turn I almost drove past. Our neighborhood is quiet, old-growth trees, big houses, the kind of street where you wave at your neighbors and none of you ever actually talk.
The kind of street where pack families raise their children behind closed doors and everyone extends the courtesy of not asking questions.
The house sits at the end of the block exactly as it always has. Brick walls. Three floors. The porch stretching wide around the front. Familiar. Safe.
Except now I can’t look at it without imagining what it would feel like to walk inside believing there’s no way back out.
Home to us.
A whole life lived inside those walls with Lex and Ezra — shared meals, routines, years spent building something steady after we gave up expecting mates to ever find us.
I'm bringing my mates home. After a lifetime of telling myself this day would never come, after watching my friends pair off while I threw myself into work and pretended it didn't sting, after building a pack with Lex and Ezra, the three of us understanding quietly that some people just don't get the fairy tale, I'm bringing them home.
Plus one terrified alpha we barely know.
It should feel triumphant. I should be over the goddamn moon. I'm not. I'm terrified. One wrong move and this shatters.
They're here, though. Maybe that's enough to start with.
I pull into the driveway and put the car in park, hands staying on the wheel.
“We need to get them inside.” Ezra, from the middle row. “They're cold.”
I know they are. I didn’t bring a blanket with me and part of me knows I’m failing already. My body just doesn't want to move. Moving means opening that door and facing whatever comes next, and I have no idea what comes next.
Lex's hand covers mine on the steering wheel. “One thing at a time, Kev.”
One thing at a time. Right. I nod once and open my door.
The house-scent hits me as soon as I step onto the driveway.
Oakwood and bergamot and fresh linen, layered over years of meals cooked and evenings spent together.
My scent and Lex's and Ezra's, soaked into the walls and the furniture and the very bones of the place.
Maverick said it would help. Said pack-scent registers differently to an omega than stranger-scent, that the match changes something at the biology level, that eventually it would feel like safety instead of threat.
I'm holding onto that. Right now it's the only thing I've got.
I circle to the back of the car and open the door. The Omegas blink up at me from their tangle of limbs. They look so small. Espie's violet eyes are huge in her thin face, and Aubrey's hazel-green gaze is focused, present in a way it hasn't been in months.
They don't move.
“We're home,” I say, and the words come out rougher than I intended. I clear my throat. “This is home. Our home. Your home, if you'll let it be.”