An Unclaimed Omega's Debt

Chapter 1

A month is long enough to forget the smell of your own home.

That's the thing I keep thinking on the bus, then the three-block walk, then the sixteen stairs I count without meaning to because counting is a thing my legs do whether I ask them or not.

A month of bleach and bad coffee and the particular gray of a room where the lights never fully go off, and now I'm climbing toward a door that's going to smell like old carpet and the onions somebody's always frying on the second floor, and I want it so badly my eyes sting.

I didn't know you could be homesick for a place that was never safe.

Turns out you can be homesick for anything, if they keep you away from it long enough.

Being stuck in the hospital will do that.

My mother didn't come. Not once. Twenty-nine days and not one visit, not a card, not a voice on the phone telling the nurses she was my mother and she'd like an update.

For the first few days I watched the door of my room the way you watch for weather.

After that I stopped, and something in my chest that the monitors couldn't see got quieter, and I let myself understand what it meant.

She's gone. Not gone-gone—Starla doesn't leave, Starla relocates her attention—but gone into the new thing, the big one, the one she told me about before the last spell put me in the hospital.

I found a good one, baby. That smile she gets when the mark is rich.

Vincent. An alpha, real money, the kind that doesn't run out.

And then the part that was meant for me, the only part that's ever meant for me: Stay out of sight. He doesn't need to know about you.

He doesn't need to know about you.

I've heard a hundred versions of that sentence in twenty years and they all translate the same: You're the thing I keep in the other room.

And the strange, shameful truth—the truth I'd never say out loud, the truth I held onto in that hospital bed like a coal—is that I was glad.

Because when Starla has someone else to shine herself at, someone else to perform for, someone whose money and whose bed and whose good opinion she's chasing, then she isn't home.

And when she isn't home, I get to find out what I'm like when no one's deciding what I am.

I have plans for that. Embarrassing ones.

Come home, put my bag down, stand in the quiet and just—breathe.

A shower no one knocks on. My own bed, the window cracked.

Waking up when my body wants to instead of when a cart rattles past at six.

A whole apartment, empty, for as long as her fairytale lasts.

That's more wanting than I usually let myself do in a day.

The apartment door opens under my key and the tension in my shoulder releases.

I step inside and set the bag down by the couch.

The good lamp, the throw, the framed nothing-photos of a life we don't really have—all hers. All Starla’s.

But the air is mine for once, and I stand in the middle of it and breathe in, and I almost laugh.

It worked. She's off being someone's wife-to-be in a house I'll never see, and I'm here, and the math of my life comes out in my favor for once.

For fucking once.

I deal with the shower first. Warm, not hot—hot is bad for my heart—one hand on the tile, because a month flat on your back makes a body forget how to stand.

I don't look at the marks the water runs over. Looking just invites the memories to come snaking back in and that’s the last thing I need right now.

I scrub the hospital off, then pull on my too-big house shirt, clean boxer briefs, and the sweatpants with the hole. My comfiest combination.

Then, I take my pills at the sink. The heart one goes down first, small and easy.

Then the other—a fat white tablet from the strip I've swallowed every day for as long as I can remember, big enough that I have to work it down with two glasses of water and my chin tipped back, the way I've done it since I was a kid.

Mother started me on these before I was old enough to ask what they were for, and I've never once been allowed to skip one. Now I know… suppressants. They keep my omega nature tamped down so it’s one less thing I have to worry about.

I press the foil and count what's left out of habit.

Fifteen-ish. A little over two weeks, give or take.

I don't let myself think about what happens when the strip runs out, because there's always another one waiting; it's the single thing she never forgets.

The one leash Starla never lets go slack.

By the time I fold back the blanket on my bed, I'm so tired my bones hum. I reach to crack the window—

There’s a sound at the door. A key rattling, that specific impatient scrape of metal on metal—

Her.

And it's stupid how fast the peace drains out of me, how my whole body reorganizes itself in half a second into the shape it lives in when she's home: smaller, quieter, ready.

The fairytale's over already. She's back, and I brace for it, the door, the Sonny?

Sonny, where are you, the inspection, the list of everything I did wrong by being in a hospital while she had a wedding to—

But the door doesn't open.

It breaks.

It comes off the latch with a crack that goes straight through me, and then the apartment is full of them—noise and scent and bodies, three threads braided cold and hot and dark, alpha, alpha, alpha, more of it than I've ever stood in at once.

The pills flatten my senses, but I can still get the shape of them.

One cold and old, like polished wood and something poured over ice.

One hot, a struck match, metal held too long in a fist. And a third underneath both that doesn't announce itself at all—clean, green, cool as outside air—the kind of thing you don't notice until it's already standing close.

Three strangers. Three men. Not Mother. In my home, between me and the only door out.

I launch myself into motion, desperate to get away from the fury on the three men’s faces.

I make it to the back window in two steps and shove at the sash, but a month shut has swelled it into the frame and my hospital-weak arms can't move it. I grunt as I throw my entire weight into yanking it open but it doesn’t budge.

Footsteps cross the apartment fast and heavy, coming straight for the sound of me. I give up on the window and throw myself toward the bedroom doorway instead, for the hall, for the broken front door, for anywhere—

I get exactly two more steps until a hand closes around the back of my neck.

I scream but the sound is muffled by the massive hand.

It lifts and turns me like I weigh nothing, like I'm a kit being moved by the scruff, and slams my back to the wall, and a face comes down into mine—young, sharp, a grin with a furnace behind it.

Up close he's all smoke, and under it that hot copper-penny smell, like something just fired.

His other hand on my throat isn't squeezing, not really, but it doesn't have to; the size of it is the threat, the ease of it, the way I can feel how little effort it would take to crush my windpipe.

My feet are barely on the floor. My heart goes off like an alarm with the wires crossed, too fast, too hard, instantly too much, and gray rushes the edges of everything.

"Who the hell are you," a voice roars—not the one in my face, an older one, deeper, from the middle of the room. The older alpha–the silver-templed one who’s all ice.

I try to answer. I want to answer, answering keeps you alive in this situation, right?

But there's no air. The hand. The fear. My heart slamming too hard, too fast, tearing itself apart.

I make a sound, like a cowering whimper and try to blink away the fading edges of my vision.

"He was running," the one holding me says, delighted and disgusted at once. "Look at him. Guilty as sin."

Another voice, calm, moving—a third man, going room to room, fast and thorough, doors, closet, the bathroom still fogged from my shower.

He comes back and stops in the bathroom doorway, steam billowing out around him.

Built like his brother and wearing it completely differently—sleeves pushed up, hands empty, nothing about him in a hurry.

"She's not here." A beat. "Nobody's here but him. "

Her. The word reaches me through the gray.

"My—" I get half of it out, thin, strangled, both hands up around the wrist at my throat, trying to pry away any bit of space. "My—mom?"

The room changes. I feel it more than see it. The hand at my throat goes still. The older man steps closer, into the edge of my vision, silver at the temples, a coat that costs more than everything my mother and I own, and his eyes do something—a sharpening, a click—and his brows go up, slow.

"You're her—"

"I'm her son." My voice cracks over the last word so I say it again. "I'm Starla’s son. Sonny. Let me go!"

They came for her. I understand it now, pinned to the wall with three strangers' fury filling the room—they came for my mother, and they got me instead, and until ten seconds ago they didn't know I existed.

The older one's face flickers a fraction. Something crosses it fast and then locks down hard, and he stares at me like I'm a line in a ledger he thought he'd finished reading. "A son," he says, and it isn't to me. "She has a son."

"She never said a word about a kid." It's the young one, the one whose hand is still on my neck. The grin is gone; what's underneath it is worse. "Not once. The whole time."

"Because a kid wasn't part of what she was selling.

" The calm one has stopped in the bathroom doorway, and he's looking at me with that flat, patient attention that feels like being weighed.

"Look at him. He's grown—twenty, maybe. She didn't hide a secret for a few weeks, Dad. She hid a whole person. For a year."