Chapter Two #2
I didn’t know what to say to that. Nobody had ever said anything like that to me at this company. Not once in three years. My throat did something tight and embarrassing, and I swallowed it down before it could reach my face.
“Thank you,” I said.
He nodded. His eyes moved over my face, slow and intent, like he was memorizing me. Like he was cataloguing every detail the way Declan had catalogued the conference room, except there was nothing cold about this. It was warm and careful and so focused it made my skin prickle.
“You should be on the transition team,” he said. “Not just managing the logistics. On the team. Making decisions.”
“I’m the office administrator.”
“You’re the only person in this building who seems to know how it actually runs.”
I opened my mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. “I... that’s not really how things work here.”
Something shifted in his expression. Not anger, exactly. Something harder. Something that looked like it had opinions about how things worked here and none of them were polite.
“Things work differently now,” he said.
We stared at each other. The air between us was doing that thing again, that alive, electric thing that I couldn’t explain and couldn’t ignore. My fingers were tingling. My heartbeat was doing something irregular and inconvenient.
Someone coughed behind me. I didn’t turn around, but the spell cracked, just slightly, and Kieran blinked. He took a step back from the counter. Then another.
“Thank you for the timeline,” he said. His voice was rougher than it had been a moment ago.
“Anytime.”
He turned and walked away, and I watched the back of him, the breadth of his shoulders, the tattoo creeping above his collar, the way people in the hallway instinctively moved out of his path, and I thought: I am in so much trouble.
· · ·
My apartment was quiet.
It was always quiet. That was the thing about living alone as a beta in a city full of packs and bonded pairs.
You came home to silence and it felt normal because it was.
This was the life. This was what betas got.
A reasonable apartment in a reasonable neighborhood with reasonable rent and a silence so complete you could hear the refrigerator hum from the bedroom.
I showered. Made pasta. Ate it standing at the kitchen counter because I’d never gotten around to buying a dining table, which felt like a metaphor I didn’t want to examine.
Then I sat on my couch with my laptop and did the thing I’d been thinking about doing all day.
I Googled “scent match beta.”
The results were thin. A handful of forum posts on omega-centric websites, most of which dismissed the idea outright. Betas don’t have scent profiles. It’s biologically impossible. You’re probably confusing attraction with designation dynamics.
One post, buried on page three of the results, was from an anonymous user who claimed their alpha partner had scent-matched with them despite being a beta.
The replies were split between people calling it fake and people calling it wishful thinking.
The original poster hadn’t responded to any of them. The post was four years old.
I found one academic paper. Published thirty-two years ago in a journal I’d never heard of, by a researcher whose university page no longer existed.
The title was “Atypical Scent Profile Expression in Beta-Designated Individuals: A Preliminary Investigation.” It had never been peer-reviewed.
It had been cited exactly twice, both times in papers that were themselves obscure and forgotten.
The abstract said that in rare cases, fewer than one in ten thousand, a beta could develop a latent scent profile that was undetectable to all but a single biologically compatible match. The mechanism was unknown. The sample size was three.
Three people. In the entire history of this research, three.
I closed my laptop. Opened it again. Reread the abstract. Closed it.
This was insane. I was a beta. I’d been a beta my entire life.
I’d taken the designation test at fourteen, same as everyone, and the results had come back with the same unremarkable verdict that seventy-five percent of the population received.
Beta. No scent profile. No heat cycle. No rut.
No biological fireworks. Just a normal human being in a world that had decided normal wasn’t enough.
I thought about Kieran Ashworth standing at my desk with white knuckles and dark eyes and a voice that turned my name into something sacred.
I thought about the hum in my chest that still hadn’t faded.
I thought about the way he’d said things work differently now, and how, for one reckless, terrifying second, I’d believed him.
My phone buzzed on the couch cushion beside me. Sadie.
you ok?
I picked up the phone. Put it down. Picked it up again.
Yeah. Just a weird day.
understatement of the century
get some sleep. tomorrow's going to be weirder.
I plugged my phone in and lay back on the couch, staring at the ceiling. The refrigerator hummed. The apartment was quiet. Everything was normal and reasonable and exactly the way it always was.
Except for the warmth in my chest that wouldn’t go away.
Except for the feeling, irrational and impossible and stubbornly persistent, that something had shifted today. Something fundamental. Something I couldn’t put back even if I wanted to.
I pulled a blanket over myself and closed my eyes and tried very hard not to think about dark eyes and tattooed hands and the sound of my name in a voice like smoke and gravel.
I failed completely.