A Knotty Spring (Violet Bay Packs #1)

1. Freya

Freya

The last bus set me down at the top of the harbour and left without me. Good. I'd come home with one bag, a knife roll, and nothing worth a fanfare.

Thirty years old. Ten years gone. Home with my tail between my legs.

Below me the town poured down to the water the way it always had. Pastel cottages. Smoke off the chimneys. A gull on the wall told me what it thought of me, and the bakery sent up a long warm breath of hot sugar to find me at the top of the hill.

Exactly as I'd left it. That was the cruel part.

Nobody down there knew yet. Nobody knew the kitchen I'd half killed myself for had finished the job, or that the grand plan had quietly come apart. To Violet Bay I was still Sian's Freya, home from the city. The town would be glad to see me. That was going to be the hard part.

Because this is the town you send your omegas to. The soft place to land, when the world has been too much. Three counties' worth of us have washed up here over the years, and nobody has ever once asked us to earn the keeping. I'd spent ten years making sure I'd never be one of them.

So much for that.

I went down before I could think better of it. Past the chandlery. Past the dark café front beside Mum's chip shop, blinds drawn, sign gone soft and grey with weather. I gave it about as long as a tooth takes to twinge, then kept walking.

The chippy smelled of hot fat and vinegar and the whole of my childhood. A bell I'd heard ten thousand times let me in.

"Well," Mum said, not looking up from the basket she was shaking. "Took your time."

Ten years. Two cities. One spectacular flame-out. And she greeted me like I'd gone for milk and dawdled.

She came round the counter and got hold of me anyway. Mum hugs the way she does everything. Briskly. Completely. No intention of letting go before she's done.

"You're thin," she said into my hair. "Thin, grey round the eyes, and you smell of buses. Sit. I'll feed you."

"Mum…"

"Sit. Down."

I sat down.

She fed me chips straight from the fryer, too hot and too salty, and asked me nothing. Not why. Not how long. Not what had become of the job the whole street had been proud of. Somehow the silence was worse.

"Café's still shut, then," I said, before I could stop myself.

Her hands paused over the next basket. Just for a beat. "It's still there," she said. Which wasn't an answer.

Then the door banged hard enough to knock the bell half off its bracket.

"NO!" A voice full of pure delight. "No. Tell me it isn't."

I didn't have to turn round. Exactly one person alive packs that much joy into a single syllable. Miles Tregown. Alpha to the bone, and not the brooding sort. The kind that comes into a room like weather. And where one of the harbour pack turned up, the other two were never far behind.

He had me off the stool and spinning before I could swear at him.

"Put me down, you great lump."

"Not a chance. You left." He set me down, grinning like it was his birthday. "You left, you never wrote, and I hear it off Dilys you're so much as coming. Do you know what that does to a man?"

"Builds character?"

"I've ample character. I don't want more."

He smelled of salt and warm rope, the same as ever. Easy. Familiar. Asking nothing of me.

Hudson came in behind him. Slow, the way he comes at everything.

He never says much to start with. He looked at the bag, the road on me, the grey round my eyes Mum had already listed.

Then he lifted the strap off my shoulder where I hadn't noticed I still gripped it, took the weight like it had always been his, and said, "Alright, Freya. "

"Alright, Hudson."

A beta's quiet. With Hudson it was always plenty.

Then the room changed temperature.

Rhys came in last. No fuss. He stopped just inside the door with his cap turning in his hands and looked at me like a man looking at something the sea was meant to have kept. The quiet boy I remembered had become all shoulders and stillness. He didn't say my name. He didn't say anything at all.

What he did, without either of us getting a vote, was let his scent into the room.

I had no guard left to put up. Ten years of holding the line, and I'd come back worn down to nothing. So it reached me the length of the shop, under the fat and the salt and the vinegar. Warm. Green. Sage gone soft in the afternoon sun.

An alpha's scent. Not just any alpha's. One pitched to the exact shape of me, sliding into a lock I'd have sworn I didn't have. Thirty years an omega, and nothing had ever once done this.

Compatible, my body said. Helpfully. Far too late.

He smelled like the one thing I'd spent ten years making sure I'd never need again. He smelled like home.

I put it down fast, the way you drop a pan that's caught.

"Rhys," I said, level as anything. I'd had practice. "You got tall."

The corner of his mouth moved. Barely. "You got mean," he said, low enough that only I caught it.

"I was always mean. You just got tall enough to notice."

They laughed, all three. Mum put the kettle on. Someone dragged a second stool over the lino, and the harbour folded me back in like I'd never gone.

I let myself be glad. Four seconds, maybe.

Then I caught myself in the dark glass of the door. Thin, grey, tired. An omega with a knife roll and a borrowed sort of gladness, in the one town on the coast built to take her in and never let her go.

One visit. See Mum right. Sort my next move, then go.

That was all this was. That was all it was going to be.

I drank my tea and told myself I believed it.

I didn't. Not for a second.