Chapter 36
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
AVA
Ethan didn't carry me to his study. He asked.
"Would you come with me?" He stood in the doorway of the living room, green eyes watching me from behind his glasses, one hand extended in invitation.
"There's something I'd like to show you.
" It was such a stark contrast to Caleb's wordless scooping, to Mason's commands, to Leo's chaos, that I found myself agreeing before I could think of a reason to refuse.
"Okay," I said, setting down the book I'd been pretending to read and taking his hand.
My fingers trembled slightly as they met his, betraying the nerves I was trying to hide.
His fingers closed around mine, warm, steady, precise.
Everything about Ethan was precise. The way he moved, the way he spoke, the way he held my hand like he'd calculated exactly how much pressure to apply.
Not too tight, not too loose. Just right.
He led me through the cabin to a room I'd only glimpsed before, a closed door at the end of the hallway that I'd assumed was storage or a closet.
When he opened it, I realized how wrong I'd been.
The study was smaller than Caleb's workshop but no less impressive.
Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves lined three walls, packed with medical texts, research journals, and thick binders labeled with dates and subject headings.
A massive oak desk dominated the center of the room, its surface organized with almost obsessive neatness, laptop centered perfectly, papers stacked in precise piles, pens arranged by color in a ceramic holder.
It was the fourth wall that made me stop breathing.
Charts. Graphs. Photographs. All of me.
My medical records from childhood, annotated in Ethan's neat handwriting.
Growth charts tracking my development from age twelve to eighteen.
Hormone panels with certain values circled in red.
Photographs from family gatherings, zoomed in on my face, with notes about pupil dilation and skin pallor scribbled in the margins.
"What the hell is this?" I breathed, my hand going slack in his grip. Ethan didn't let go. If anything, his fingers tightened slightly, keeping me anchored.
"Research," he said simply, his green eyes meeting mine without flinching. "On you. On your biology. On what the suppressants were doing to your body."
"This is..." I pulled my hand free, stepping closer to the wall, my eyes scanning the documents. "Ethan, this is insane. You've been studying me like I'm some kind of experiment."
"You're not an experiment." His voice was quiet but firm, and I heard him move closer behind me, felt the warmth of his body at my back. "You're the woman I love. And I watched you poison yourself for six years while I had no way to stop it."
I turned to face him. At twenty-seven, Ethan was all sharp angles and controlled intensity — high cheekbones, a strong jaw, dark hair kept short and neat.
His green eyes were the only thing soft about him, and even those could turn clinical in an instant.
Right now, they held something I rarely saw from him: vulnerability.
"Show me," I said, surprising myself. "Explain it to me. All of it." Something flickered across his face, relief, maybe, or gratitude. He nodded once and moved to his desk, pulling out a thick binder and setting it on the surface between us.
"Sit," he said, gesturing to a worn leather armchair positioned beside the desk. "This will take a while." I sat. He pulled his desk chair around to face me, close enough that our knees almost touched, and opened the binder.
"I've been tracking your health since you presented," Ethan began, his long fingers flipping to the first page, a chart showing hormone levels over time. "You presented at fifteen. And within months, you started taking suppressants."
He pointed to a sharp decline in one of the lines. "This is your estrogen. This is your progesterone. And this—" He tapped a red line that dropped like a cliff edge. "This is your overall reproductive health index."
"I knew the suppressants had side effects," I said quietly, staring at the damning data. "Headaches, nausea, fatigue. But the doctors said it was normal."
"The doctors," Ethan repeated, and there was cold fury in his voice.
"You mean the parade of doctors you went through because none of them would keep prescribing?
" He flipped to another page, a list of names, dates, prescription records.
"I tracked it all, Ava. Fourteen different doctors in six years.
Some wouldn't prescribe at all because they didn't believe Omegas should suppress their nature.
Others would only give you a year before cutting you off.
So you kept switching. Kept finding whoever would write the prescription. "
My stomach turned. I remembered those desperate searches. The clinics that turned me away. The doctors who lectured me about my "biological purpose." The ones who agreed to help but only for a limited time, forcing me to start the hunt all over again.
"I took whatever I could get," I admitted, my voice small.
"Whatever you could get," he echoed flatly.
"Different brands, different dosages, different formulations.
No consistency, no monitoring, no one tracking how the medications interacted or what they were doing to your body long-term.
" He flipped to another page — this one showing organ function over time.
"The lowest-quality suppressants on the market, half of them.
Black market pills when legitimate doctors wouldn't cooperate.
You were poisoning yourself with whatever random chemicals you could get your hands on. "
My stomach dropped even further.
"Your liver function was declining," Ethan continued, his voice clinical but his eyes dark with old fear.
"Your kidneys were showing early signs of stress.
Your bone density was decreasing at an alarming rate.
Six years of inconsistent, unmonitored suppressant use.
If you'd continued on that path for another twelve to eighteen months. .." He trailed off, jaw tightening.
"I would have died," I finished, the words hollow in my mouth.
"Organ failure," he confirmed, his green eyes holding mine with painful intensity.
"Slow. Painful. Completely preventable, if you'd had proper Omega care.
If you'd had Alphas who could provide what your body needed.
" He paused, his hand reaching out to rest on my knee — light, present, asking permission rather than demanding. "If you'd had us."
I didn't pull away from his touch. "You could have told me. Before. You could have shown me this data and—"
"Would you have believed us?" Ethan interrupted gently, his thumb tracing a small circle on my knee. "Would you have come willingly if four Alphas you were running from showed up and said 'your suppressants are killing you, come live with us instead'?"
I thought about it. Really thought about it. Six years of fighting my own biology, three of those years spent running and hiding, would I have listened?
"No," I admitted, the word bitter on my tongue, hating how true it was. "I would have thought it was a trick. A manipulation."
"Exactly." Ethan closed the binder and set it aside, leaning forward in his chair until his face was level with mine, his green eyes intent on my face. "So we did the only thing we could. We watched. We waited. We tracked your health from a distance and planned for the day we'd have to intervene."
"Intervene," I repeated flatly, my voice hardening. "You mean kidnap me."
"I mean save you." His voice didn't waver, his gaze steady and unapologetic.
"And yes — keep you. Because you're ours, Ava.
You've been ours since the day you presented, and watching you slowly kill yourself was the hardest thing I've ever done.
" I didn't know what to say to that. The evidence was right there in front of me — years of meticulous research, all pointing to the same conclusion.
I had been dying. Slowly, invisibly, but dying nonetheless.
And they had known. They had watched and waited and planned, and then they had taken me.
"Why?" I asked finally, my voice small. "Why go through all of this? The research, the waiting, the... everything. Why not just find another Omega? One who wanted to be claimed?"
Ethan was quiet for a long moment. Then he leaned back in his chair and removed his glasses, rubbing the bridge of his nose in a gesture that made him look suddenly younger, more human.
"Do you know anything about my mother?" he asked, and the question was so unexpected that I blinked.
"No. I don't think anyone ever mentioned her."
"They wouldn't have." A bitter smile crossed his face, there and gone. "She's not exactly a point of pride for the Harper family." He set his glasses on the desk and met my eyes directly. Without the lenses between us, his gaze was startlingly intense, green as sea glass, deep as the ocean.
"Her name was Madeline," Ethan said, his voice carefully controlled. "She was a Beta. Met my father at a charity event when he was thirty-two. She was twenty-five, beautiful, ambitious. They were together for almost two years."
"But they never married," I said, remembering what little I knew about David Harper's complicated romantic history.
"No. And he never marked her." Ethan's jaw tightened, a muscle ticking beneath his skin. "Betas can't bond the way Omegas can, but marking still means something. Commitment. Possession. Permanence. My father refused, and she resented him for it."
"What happened?" I asked, leaning forward slightly in my chair.