Chapter Seventeen
Kev
Iwalked into the kitchen a minute ago with Ezra right behind me, and Espie froze mid-step.
Her shoulders locked. Aubrey's hand fisted in her sleeve.
Four alphas in a house that's supposed to be safe is still four alphas.
I saw the flinch. Made the call. Told Ezra and Lex to stay outside with them, give the omegas room to breathe.
Sera said she'd grab the smoothies they'd left on the counter and be right out.
She's still here beside me, staring at our omegas through the kitchen window.
Espie and Aubrey walk the perimeter of the garden.
Espie pauses near the flower bed. She reaches toward a white bloom, then stops.
It's a white gardenia, wide open. Her shoulders lock.
Ezra moves slowly, every step telegraphed, giving her plenty of time to track him.
He picks the bloom and holds it out to her. She takes it slowly. Carefully.
Ezra's smile breaks across his face, brilliant, unguarded. I haven't seen him smile like that in months. I stop breathing for a second. Such a small thing, a flower, and Ezra looks like somebody just handed him a miracle.
“Holy shit.” I'm not sure I meant to say it out loud. My throat's tight. I'm not going to cry in my own kitchen over a flower. I'm not. “When's the last time either of them saw the sun, do you think?”
“Haven records logged her as deceased seven years ago. Wallace took her and she wasn't seen as a person. Just inventory. Property doesn't get sunlight,” she says.
Property doesn't get sunlight. The phrase sits in the kitchen like a body.
“Has she said anything about what happened to her?” I’m almost afraid to ask, but I need to know.
“She doesn’t need to.” Sera gives me a side glance. “I've seen bad. I've seen worse. That place was something else entirely. Not to mention the scars all over her body.”
“Fuck.” I clench my fists so I don’t punch the countertop.
Aubrey's still so broken. They both are. They both are, and every instinct I have screams at me to wrap them up and hide them away. Build walls so high nothing can touch them again. That's not healing. That's just a prettier cage.
She watches me for a beat. “You're allowed to be angry, Kev. I’m fucking enraged.”
A special kind of evil goes after the people who can't fight back, and our entire society makes space for it.
Makes it easy. We've designed it easy. None of this should have happened.
Not to her. Not to Aubrey. Not to any of the most vulnerable people in our world.
We built the walls around the wrong people and dusted our hands.
“How is she not like Aubrey? After what you just described. After what they did to her. How is she walking around in my garden right now and not... gone. Wherever Aubrey went.” I shake my head. “Nothing we did got through to him. Until her. So how is she still in there?”
Espie's still holding the flower, Aubrey pressed close to her side with an actual smile on his face.
Sera doesn't answer right away. The basil in her scent shifts, softens at the edges.
“I ask myself that every day. I don't have a good answer.” Her voice is quieter.
“I've got a theory. I don't love it. Their scent-match is doing things I haven’t seen before.
Biology isn't supposed to work that way.
And yet here they are, settling each other in ways no alpha in this house has been able to.
I keep wondering if being broken the same way rewired them.
I don't know. I want to ask David Maverick.
He's seen more omega survivors than anyone I know.
If anyone has a frame for this, it's him.”
She just laid out the whole theory and left herself out of it. Like she wasn't the one who pulled Espie out of that facility, like she wasn't the reason any of this is happening at all.
“He let you touch him.” I keep my voice even. “When you brought them in. He scents for you when you leave a room. Espie watched you too.” I let that sit. “Don't erase yourself out of the story. They’re both healing because of you.”
“How long do you think they take to heal? If at all.” She crosses her arms, clearly ignoring what I’ve said.
“Do you think they’ll ever be…” I want to say, normal omegas, but I already know the answer. “Sorry, that’s stupid and I shouldn’t say anything like that. I just want them whole and healed. I wish the things that happened to them never did.”
I want them to look at us and see safety instead of threat. I want them to choose us back.
“You and me both.” Sera closes her eyes a second. “We learn triggers. Respect boundaries. We love them through all of it anyway. Which is more than either of them had before.”
The clock ticks somewhere behind me. A bird calls outside. Espie hasn't moved from the flower bed. She's still holding the bloom in both hands now, careful like it might break.
“Their biology was used against them. Every time their bodies respond to an alpha now, they're going to fight it. Hate it. Hate themselves for wanting something that's been used to hurt them.”
“And we're their alphas,” Sera agrees. “Which means we get to be the ones who prove that not every alpha is a monster.”
Out in the garden, Espie steps closer to the back fence, the gardenia still in her left hand, her right hovering near Aubrey's elbow. Lex and Ezra walk with them, standing back.
“Starting with Wallace,” Sera's scent shifts. The basil sharpens to a point. “I'm going to eviscerate him. They can't heal while he's still breathing the same air as them. They'll always be waiting for him to come back. So I'm going to make sure he can't.”
Her scent burns and Gods, I don't know what's happening to me but my cock thickens against the seam of my jeans.
I shift my weight, hoping she won't see the tent in my pants.
Get it together, Dawson. The last two days have been Espie and Aubrey, only Espie and Aubrey.
I haven't had room in my head for anything else.
Sera's been the alpha who brought them home, and that's been the entire size of her in my mind.
Now the omegas are in the garden taking a flower from Ezra, they're healing, and my body's using the space for this.
I’m really seeing her now. The sharp line of her jaw. The pulse fluttering at her throat faster than she wants anyone to notice. The tiny scar cutting through the edge of her right eyebrow. The way the basil in her scent warms and softens whenever her guard slips.
I’m looking at Sera Vidal as a woman, not a problem to solve or a person to protect.
My hindbrain recognized her long before the rest of me caught up.
Later. I push it down. Later, later, later. It doesn't go down very far.
“Sera, this…you being here…this isn't a temporary arrangement.” I keep my voice level. “I'm not asking you to leave the omegas. I'd never ask you that.”
Her gaze slides past me, out the window, to the omegas walking barefoot through grass. There’s a pause about her I don’t like.
“They'll heal here. You'll give them what they need. You and Lex and Ezra. They've got the right alphas in this house.”
“What do you mean? We’re the right alphas for them,” I say.
She doesn't look at me.
“Sera.” I wait until she does. “What do you mean?”
“What do you think I mean, Kev?” She sighs. She looks tired. When was the last time she slept? I’ve been so consumed with the omegas, I’ve forgotten about her too. She needs help and she has no one. That ends now.
“You're pack, Sera. Not a guest. Pack.”
Her brows rise. “Pack? With a female alpha.” Her tone says she doesn’t believe me and I feel like I’m losing something precious.
“Sera—”
Her phone vibrates in her back pocket. Sera glances at the screen and her whole body goes still. When she answers, her voice is flat, professional.
“Where?” A pause. “When?” Another pause, longer. “How certain?”
Sera ends the call and turns to me.
“Levi has a lead on Wallace.” She keeps her voice controlled but the tension runs underneath it. “A contact in Silverpine spotted someone matching his description near the county border. Could still be nothing. Or it could be something.”
She's already thinking it through. Her jaw sets. Her gaze has already moved, not to the window, not to the omegas, but to the middle distance where she's running scenarios.
“Leave it to Levi. We need you here.”
She purses her lips, crosses her arms and faces me. “I didn't take you for being stupid, Kev.”
“Sera—”
She picks up the smoothies. Two glasses, one in each hand. “I can at least make sure they're nourished. If nothing else.”
If nothing else.
She walks past me toward the back door and steps onto the patio.
I made her feel unwanted before.
And I have a sick feeling she believed me.