Chapter Thirteen
AVERY
The thing about being biologically useful was that it messed with your head in very specific ways.
I knew the stabilizing thing was real. I'd known it since the fundraiser, since Dean's breathing had evened out in the coat-check break room, since the first time I'd understood what was happening and immediately started trying to figure out how to not let it define our relationship.
I'd been told my whole life that betas were practical.
Useful. Good in a crisis. What betas were not was essential.
What betas were not was irreplaceable. What betas were not was loved, in the specific, biological, law-recognizable way that alphas loved omegas and omegas loved alphas and everyone in between was a companion, a helper, a person retained in a personal capacity.
I was processing all of this at my kitchen table at eleven at night, two days after the Meridian Rooms meeting, with Dean asleep on my couch because he'd shown up after a stressful advocacy session and asked if he could stay and I'd said yes because I always said yes to Dean because I was apparently incapable of self-protection when he was involved.
My laptop was open. My work was on the screen. I had a deadline in the morning and I'd been staring at the same paragraph for forty minutes.
My phone lit up with a notification from Marin: Read this when you have a minute.
The message had a document attached.
I read it in the kitchen, standing up, because I'd learned early that bad news was better received standing.
It wasn't exactly bad news. It was — complicated news, which was maybe worse.
The Mate Integration Recognition framework.
A narrow legal path — barely existing, rarely invoked — under which a beta could be recognized as a formal pack mate if certain conditions were met.
Sustained biological necessity markers. Witnessed consent from all pack members.
Medical testimony confirming that the beta's regulatory effect was genuine and not replaceable by artificial means.
A legal petition supported by the recognized alpha/omega pair.
Avery, Marin had written at the top. This exists. You should know it exists. I'm not recommending anything. Just information.
I read it twice.
Then I sat down at my kitchen table and thought about what it meant to have your body become a legal document.
What it meant to have the most private and complicated and terrifying parts of your life turned into evidence.
What it meant to have the thing that made you biologically useful also become the thing that could either free you or reduce you to a liability waiting to be contested.
The case it described required sustained documentation. Which meant that the nights I'd spent managing Dean's pre-heat, the mornings I'd stayed when I should have left, the specific way Micah's rut had settled when I was near — all of that became not just private experience but potential testimony.
I was going to be evidence.
Or I was going to remain legally invisible.
Those were the two options. Both of them felt like losing something.
I closed the laptop. Put my phone down. Went to the living room doorway and looked at Dean, who was asleep with his shoes still on, curled on his side with his face relaxed and his breathing even in a way it only was when he was either unconscious or near me.
Near me.
I went back to the kitchen and made tea. Something to do with my hands while I thought.
Isaac had asked me how I felt about being useful.
I'd said complicated. The real answer was something in the vicinity of terrified, specifically because useful was a category that ended.
Useful ended when the need ended, or when a better solution was found, or when the law found a way to formalize the non-beta version of the same thing.
Useful was not the same as wanted. Useful was not the same as chosen.
I needed to know if this was useful or chosen.
And I needed to know that before I let myself be documented.
The tea went cold while I was thinking.
Dean moved in the living room — I heard him shift, the small sound of someone surfacing from sleep. Then quiet.
"Hey," he said, from the doorway.
"Hey."
He looked at me for a moment. At the cold tea and the closed laptop and whatever was happening on my face. "Marin sent you something."
"How did you know?"
"Because you get a specific expression when you're reorganizing your whole view of your situation."
"Flattering."
"It's not a bad expression." He came into the kitchen and sat across from me. "Tell me."
So I told him about the Beta Exception. The Mate Integration Recognition framework. The conditions and the requirements and the specific way it felt to read a legal document that described your biology as evidence for your own existence.
He listened. He didn't try to fix it while I was still talking, which was one of the things I loved about him even though I wasn't supposed to be cataloguing the things I loved about him.
When I finished, he said: "What do you want to do with it?"
"I don't know yet."
"Okay."
"I need to know something first." I looked at him.
"I need to know if what's happening between all of us — the pack, or whatever we're building toward, or whatever this is — I need to know if it's because of the biology.
If the reason any of this exists is because my body regulates yours and theirs and that's where it starts and ends. "
"Avery—"
"I need an honest answer."
He was quiet for a moment. The kind of quiet that meant he was actually thinking, not searching for the reassuring response.
"I fell for you," he said finally, "in a break room at a fundraiser while you talked about artisanal salt.
I wasn't in pre-heat then. I wasn't looking for a stabilizer.
I was talking to you because you were funny and smart and you didn't treat me like a designation category.
" He met my gaze. "The biology is real. And it came after the feeling, for me. Not before."
I believed him. I wanted to believe him, which I recognized as a risk, but I also knew Dean well enough to know that he didn't offer comfort that wasn't true.
"I'll think about it," I said.
"That's all I'm asking."
"I said that to Micah," I noted.
"I know. You're allowed to say it twice."
I pulled the mug toward me even though the tea was cold, just to have something to hold. "Go back to sleep. You have an early meeting."
"What about you?"
"I'll work for a bit. I'll be fine."
He stood up, came around the table, and pressed a brief kiss to the top of my head. Not romantic — something more fundamental than that. Something that said I see you without requiring an answer.
"You're allowed to want things, you know," he said. "You're allowed to want this."
He went back to the couch.
I sat in my kitchen with my cold tea and my laptop and my legal document and thought about wanting things.
I hadn't been particularly good at that. Wanting things required believing you could have them, and I'd spent a very long time not believing that.
I opened my laptop and got back to work.
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