Chapter Twenty-Three
Lex
Iflip the egg once the white sets and the yolk starts to harden.
Years later, we're still using a chipped spatula.
The bacon hisses in the second pan. Fat smell. Toast smell. The kettle ticks on the cooling element. My glasses fog from the steam and I push them up my nose with the back of my wrist. None of us slept.
Forty-three trials.
Stop.
“You get any sleep at all?”
Ezra. Behind me. Voice rough.
“Maybe an hour. I gave up around four and came down here. You?”
“Less than that, I think. Couldn't get my brain to stop.” He moves past me to the kettle, pours the cold pot down the sink, starts a fresh one. “How long has Kev been like that?”
Kev's at the table with both hands wrapped around a coffee cup, looking out at the patio to where our omegas cuddle under a blanket on the patio chair.
“Since I came down. He hasn't said a word and the coffee in his hands has gone cold twice.”
I cross to him. Set the cold cup aside. Pour him a hot one from the fresh pot.
“Coffee's hot, Kev. Drink it while it's still good.”
“Yeah. In a minute.”
“Drink it now. I'm not taking another cold cup out of your hands this morning.”
He huffs once, low in his chest, and drinks it. Sets it down. His hand stays on the cup.
“I can’t stop thinking about them watching them walk up the stairs after... She told us...” He wipes his hand over his face. “Fuck.”
“I know. I was in the chair next to you watching it happen.”
“They kept looking back at us the whole way up. And I kept thinking, she's three feet from me. I could close the distance. I could pick her up. She wouldn't have to be doing this,” he says.
Ezra's behind me now. His hand brushes Kev's shoulder on the way to the toaster. Doesn't grip. Just lands and goes.
“I want to undo their trauma too,” Ezra says. “But healing isn’t simple. It’s one step forward, two back.”
“I know,” Kev says. “It’ll be that way until it’s two steps forward and only one back.”
I pull the bacon off the heat. Plate it. Crack two more eggs into the pan, because none of us is going to eat less than three.
Their scent drifts through the open window.
Gardenia and clover and cedar and chamomile, woven so deep into each other I can't pull the threads apart. But there’s a new layer this morning.
A layer I caught a breath of yesterday and talked myself out of.
Today I am sure because my cock thickens against my zip and I brace my hand on the counter and breathe through it.
Don't. The bacon. Look at the bacon. Look at the chip in the spatula handle. Don't think about the layer.
I'm thinking about the layer. Their heat is coming.
Ezra is at the window. I follow his gaze to our omegas. Always to our omegas.
Aubrey rises onto his elbow and looks down at Espie like he doesn't quite believe what he's looking at, like she might evaporate if he blinks. He traces her cheek, then kisses her temple. She tilts her chin and he kisses her. Slow and deep.
The kiss of two people who've kissed each other enough times in the last two nights that they've stopped being careful and started being good at this with each other. Her hand climbs the center of his chest. Traces over his sternum, collarbone, throat, hair. His fingers thread through her dark waves and tighten there. The blanket I gave them shifts around them as they move and his head tilts to find a better angle and his eyes close. His hips start to move under the blanket, pumping up and down. A sound comes through the window. Low. A whimper. Hers, or his. I can't tell from here. There’s no hiding what they’re doing.
“Fuck. Look at them.”
Neruda comes to mind. I love you as one loves certain dark things, secretly, between the shadow and the soul.
Kev's chair scrapes as he gets up. He crosses the kitchen. His hand lands flat on the counter and he doesn't say anything. He just stands there. Watching them.
“Seeing our omegas like this is a privilege,” he says.
Their kiss breaks. Espie tucks her head under his chin and burrows in. They settle deeper into the chair and their scent rolls in through the open window thick as honey. The way they move tells me they're still connected. I drag my brain back to the kitchen. My hands. My pan. The eggs.
“I think they’re going to go into heat soon,” I say.
Neither Ezra nor Kev says anything to contradict me.
“They’re going to need a nest, and they haven't looked twice in the house nest,” I say.
“Bedroom, then? They sleep there. They've made love there. They'd at least be familiar with it,” Ezra muses.
“They sleep there, but they’re not nesting. Not like…” I trail off.
Not like the patio chair with the fluffy blankets they’ve piled around the edges. An article of Kev clothing peeks between a weave of throws I had over the couch. It hits me so hard I almost laugh.
“They've already chosen. We've been calling it the place they like to be in the mornings like idiots, and the whole time it's been their nest.” I gesture to the two most precious beings on the planet outside the kitchen. “That's their nest. They've been building it under our noses.”
“You're right, Lex. Patio isn't where alphas put a nest in our heads. That's why we missed it,” Ezra says.
Kev has gone quiet beside me. “We can't have them go through heat out there as it is. It's spring but the nights still get cold. The fence is high, but there are sightlines from three properties. It’s not safe enough.”
“So we build what we need around them.” The relief that goes through me is something physical. Action. Finally.
“We enclose this whole side of the house. We use that special glass where they can see outside, and then make it opaque when they need privacy.” My mind races. They’ll need heating. A bathing area. We can connect it to the kitchen so I can cook when they need to eat.
Kev pulls his phone out of his pocket. “Blackwood keeps a build team on retainer for omega-secure renovations. I can have framers and glaziers on this property by lunchtime if I make the right calls before nine.”
While he’s typing…
“We need to do something for the garden too, while we're at it,” I say.
Kev lifts his head. “What about the garden?”
“You've watched them out there, Kev. Have you actually been watching them, or just looking at them? Espie walks the rows every afternoon. She's been pulling weeds. And where Espie goes, Aubrey follows.”
“So we build her a glasshouse too. Heated, year-round, big enough to walk through. We can put it at the back of the garden, that way they can have the whole space,” he says.
I lean against the counter. The eggs have gone past where I wanted them. I move the pan off the heat. Plate the eggs. Drop bread into the toaster. We’re quiet as we each think through the plan.
Kev sets the phone down for a beat. Looks out the window, and his voice is quiet when he speaks. “Espie said Wallace forced her heat forty-three times, Lex.”
I close my eyes against the reality. Ezra makes a sound at the back of his throat that I have never heard him make.
“I want to be the one who puts him in the ground. I want my hands around his throat and I want him to know whose hands they are before the light goes out of his eyes,” Kev says.
“You'll have to fight Sera for him.”
“She can have what's left.”
Kev huffs once. Not a laugh. Closer to a release.
Aubrey's hand has drifted to Espie's lower back under the blanket and he's stroking her there, slow circles, his eyes closed again, his face pressed into her hair.
“Speaking of our alpha, has anyone else noticed she hasn’t come out of her bedroom for two days, other than eat?” I say.
“Of course I have. She's been on the phone the whole time, Lex.
Levi, the county sheriffs, Adrian's cross-county liaison, the Silverpine forensic team.
Every contact she has. I've heard her through the wall. She is running a whole operation from a closed bedroom and she has not taken a single break,” Kev says.
“That is not right, Kev. It’s not one person’s job. She should be out here. We should be helping her,” Ezra says.
“We should. And why aren't we?” Because we’ve been so caught up worrying about our omegas, we’ve forgotten about Sera. Not good enough. We haven’t been nearly good enough. “She's carried this case from the beginning, and we've let her.”
“Fuck,” Ezra says, as the full implications hit him. Fuck indeed.
Kev's jaw works. “She probably thinks she has to.
What if she thinks doing it alone is what she's good for.
What if she thinks that's the only part of her we want around.
The cop on the case, the woman who gets results, the one who walks into facilities.
What if she thinks the rest of her isn't on the table here.”
“We've been treating her like an omega,” Ezra jams his fingers through his hair. “Too soft. Too pliant.”
“And she's not an omega,” I say.
“Ronan told me she lives alone. There has never been a pack for her.” Kev rubs the back of his neck. “Ronan said she's the best cop he's ever worked with and she's also the loneliest woman he's ever known.”
“Gods, Kev. That's heartbreaking. We’re fucking fools.”
“Lex. Don't catastrophize.”
“I'm not catastrophizing. Every time she stood in the doorframe instead of coming into the kitchen. I let her. I thought I was being patient. I wasn't. I was a coward.”
“I don’t think she expects different treatment from us,” Ezra says.
“I think she expects to be dumped, is what I think,” I say. She’s held back for a reason. She looks at the omegas as though it might be the last time she’s going to see them. She thinks she’s on a time limit.
“She’s fucking not. I’m not going to give her up. Her scent, it’s… under my skin. She’s under my skin,” I say.
“She's down the hall right now and I know where she is, the same way I know where the omegas are, and I don't know when that became true but it's true,” Ezra says.
“Necessary's the word,” Kev says. “That's the right word for what she's become.”