Chapter Three #2
I wanted to push. I wanted to grab all three of them by the collar and drag them out to her desk and say, Look at her. Really look at her. Tell me you don’t see it.
But I knew my pack. I knew Declan needed data and logic before he could accept anything that disrupted his carefully maintained order.
I knew Rhys needed time and space before he could let anyone new past his walls.
And I knew Jonah was already on my side, which meant the battle was half won, because Jonah had a way of shifting the current that even Declan couldn’t resist forever.
“Fine,” I said. “We focus on the acquisition. But I’m not pretending she doesn’t exist. And I’m not staying away from her.”
“Kieran...” Declan started.
“She’s my match, Dec. I’m not asking for your permission. I’m asking for your patience.”
The room was silent. Outside the glass wall, I could see Nora at her desk, her back straight, her eyes on her screen, her fingers moving across her keyboard with a quiet competence that made my chest ache.
She didn’t look up. She didn’t need to. I could feel her from here, a warmth at the edge of my awareness, steady and constant, like a light left on in a window.
Declan pulled out his laptop. “Let’s look at the financials.”
I sat down. I opened my files. And for three hours, I pretended to focus on profit margins and client retention rates while every cell in my body strained toward the woman on the other side of the glass.
· · ·
Declan and Rhys left the conference room at noon to take separate calls.
The door closed behind them and the room went quiet and Jonah, who had spent the last two hours being the steady, diplomatic center of a fractured pack, let out a breath that seemed to take the shape out of him.
His shoulders dropped. His hands, which had been still and composed on the table, found each other and twisted.
I knew that tell. Four years of loving this man and I knew every one of his tells, and twisted hands meant he was holding something that hurt.
“Jonah.”
He didn’t look at me. “I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine. Look at me.”
He looked at me. His green eyes were bright, not with tears exactly, but with the effort of not letting them form. My chest cracked.
I was out of my chair and across the room before I’d made a conscious decision to move. I pulled the chair next to his, sat down, and took his face in my hands. His skin was warm under my palms. His jaw was tight.
“Talk to me,” I said.
“I defended you in there,” he said. “I meant every word. If she’s your match, she’s pack. I believe that.”
“But.”
He closed his eyes. When he opened them, the composure was thinner.
“But I need to hear you say it. I need to hear you say that this doesn’t change us.
That what you feel for her doesn’t... replace what you feel for me.
Because I know how scent matches work, Kieran.
I know the biology. And the biology says it’s the most intense bond an alpha can experience, and I.
..” His voice caught. “I need to still matter.”
The sound that came out of me wasn’t words.
It was something lower, something instinctive, the sound an alpha makes when his omega is hurting and every cell in his body is screaming fix it.
I pulled him forward and pressed my forehead to his, and he exhaled shakily, his breath warm against my mouth.
“You are the center of this pack,” I said.
Low. Fierce. “You were the center before she existed and you will be the center after. Nothing about what I feel for her diminishes what I feel for you. Nothing could. Do you understand me? You are not replaceable. You are not secondary. You are Jonah, and I have loved you for four years, and if you think a scent match, no matter how powerful, could make me love you less, then I have failed you, and I need you to tell me how to fix it.”
His hands came up and wrapped around my wrists, holding me there, holding my hands against his face. His eyes searched mine, looking for the lie, looking for the crack in the certainty.
He didn’t find one. Because there wasn’t one.
“Kiss me,” he said.
I kissed him. Not gently. There was nothing gentle about the way I needed him right now, nothing careful about the way his mouth opened under mine and his fingers tightened on my wrists and a small, desperate sound climbed out of his throat.
I kissed him like I was writing a promise with my body, and he kissed me back like he was accepting it, and for a few seconds, the conference room and the acquisition and the impossible scent of a beta at the front desk fell away, and there was just this. Just us. The foundation.
When we pulled apart, his lips were flushed and his eyes were clearer. The brittle edge was gone. In its place was something steadier, something that looked like Jonah when he was sure of himself, which was the most formidable version of Jonah there was.
“Okay,” he said. “I believe you.”
“Good.”
“Also.” He straightened in his chair, and I watched the composure click back into place like armor, except this time there was a glint in his eye that I recognized.
Mischief. The particular brand of Jonah mischief that usually preceded something that made Declan pinch the bridge of his nose.
“I’m going to make her love me too. Just so you know.
I’m not going to sit on the sidelines while you have all the dramatic tension.
I’m going to win her over so thoroughly that by the time you two get your act together, she’ll already be half mine, and nobody will feel left out. ”
I stared at him. Then I laughed. A real laugh, the kind that came from somewhere deep and surprised, the kind I hadn’t felt since before the elevator doors had opened this morning and rewritten my entire existence.
“You’re terrifying,” I said.
“I’m an omega. We’re the most dangerous ones.
Everyone just forgets because we’re pretty.
” He stood up, smoothed his shirt, and walked back to his seat with the easy grace of a man who had just reclaimed his footing.
“Now. What do you think about starting with the coffee machine on the second floor?”
“The coffee machine?”
“The betas have been drinking what I can only describe as caffeinated despair. If I fix that, I’m a hero. Heroes get lunch invitations. Lunch invitations become conversations. Conversations become...” He waved his hand. “You see where I’m going.”
“You have a strategy.”
“I always have a strategy. You alphas just never notice because you’re too busy growling at things.”
The conference room door opened. Declan walked back in, phone still in hand, Rhys a silent shadow behind him. Declan looked between us, at the flush still visible on Jonah’s mouth, at whatever expression was on my face, and his eyes narrowed slightly.
“Do I want to know?” he asked.
“No,” Jonah said sweetly. “Financials?”
· · ·
At 4:47, I broke.
Three hours and twelve minutes. That’s how long I lasted.
I’d call it restraint, but the truth was less flattering.
I’d run out of willpower the way you run out of air, gradually and then all at once, and by the time I found myself standing at her desk with my hands in my pockets to keep from touching her, I’d already lost the argument with myself.
I made up an excuse about the transition timeline. She saw through it instantly. I could tell by the way her mouth twitched, just slightly, like she was choosing not to embarrass me. Which meant she was kind, on top of everything else, and that realization hit me harder than it should have.
I told her about the transition checklist. About how Declan had called it thorough.
Her expression when I said it, the brief, startled openness, like someone had handed her something she’d stopped expecting to receive, made me want to find every person who’d ever overlooked her and explain to them, in detail, how profoundly they’d failed.
I told her she should be on the transition team. She told me that wasn’t how things worked here, and I watched her say it with the resigned acceptance of someone who’d been told no so many times she’d stopped hearing it as a decision and started hearing it as a fact.
I wanted to burn this place down. Not literally. Mostly not literally.
Things work differently now, I told her.
And I meant it. God, I meant it with every fiber of my being.
Because she was sitting there in her sensible blouse and her ergonomic chair, running this entire operation with no title and no credit and no recognition, and the world had looked at her and stamped BETA on her file and decided that was all she was.
Someone coughed behind her and the moment broke and I made myself walk away, which took more self-control than the Chicago incident.
More self-control than anything I’d ever done.
Because walking toward Nora Whitfield was the most natural thing my body had ever attempted, and walking away from her felt like pulling against gravity.
· · ·
The penthouse was quiet when we got home.
Our place occupied the top floor of a building downtown, all open space and floor-to-ceiling windows and the kind of aggressive square footage that Declan had negotiated to a price that still made the realtor look vaguely traumatized.
It was home. Four years of home, built piece by piece.
Rhys’s guitar in the corner. Jonah’s blankets on the couch.
Declan’s bookshelves, organized by subject and then by author and then, I suspected, by some third metric that only he understood.
My leather jacket on the hook by the door, because I never hung it in the closet no matter how many times Dec asked.
We moved through our evening routine the way we always did.
Declan at the dining table with his laptop, already rebuilding the Whitmore financials into something he could work with.
Rhys in the kitchen, cooking, because Rhys cooked when he was processing and he was clearly processing.
Jonah on the couch, pretending to read, actually watching all of us with those careful green eyes.
Nobody mentioned Nora. The name sat in the room like a held breath.
I showered. I stood under the water for a long time, letting the heat pound the tension out of my shoulders, and I tried to scrub her scent off my skin. It didn’t work. I could still smell her, faint but persistent, like she’d seeped into my pores. Warm linen. Honey. Rain.
When I came out, Jonah was in our bedroom. Not the shared pack room, where all four of us slept most nights, but the smaller room Jonah kept as his personal space. His nest. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, waiting for me.
“Tell me about her,” he said.
I leaned against the doorframe. My hair was still wet. I was wearing sweatpants and nothing else because I couldn’t stand the feeling of fabric against my skin right now, everything too sensitive, everything turned up too loud.
“What do you want to know?”
“What does she smell like?”
I closed my eyes. “Like clean linen. Like honey. Like rain before it falls.” I paused. “Like coming home.”
When I opened my eyes, Jonah was looking at me with an expression I’d never seen before. Something tender and awed and a little bit sad.
“You’ve never described anything like that,” he said softly. “In four years, I’ve never heard you talk about anything the way you just talked about her.”
“Are you jealous?” I asked, and I needed to know the answer. Jonah was my omega. He was the heart of this pack. If this hurt him...
“No.” No hesitation. No flinch. “I’m not jealous, Kieran.
I talked to her today. Just for a few minutes, at her desk.
And she...” He trailed off, searching for the words.
“She looked at me like I was a person. Not an omega, not a pack asset, not a curiosity. Just... a person. Do you know how rare that is?”
I did. I knew because I’d watched people look at Jonah for four years, and they always saw the designation first. Soft. Sweet. Compliant. They never saw the steel underneath, the sharp intelligence, the quiet stubbornness that could outlast anyone in this pack, including me.
“She noticed the coffee maker,” Jonah continued.
“The second floor has this terrible broken machine and the third floor has an espresso setup. She told me about it and she wasn’t even bitter.
She was just... matter-of-fact. Like of course the betas get the broken one. Of course that’s how the world works.”
My hands curled into fists at my sides.
“I’m going to fix that,” Jonah said. “The coffee thing. First thing tomorrow.”
Despite everything, despite the roaring need in my chest and the impossible situation I’d walked into and the fracture I could feel forming in the foundation of my pack, I smiled.
Because that was Jonah. Someone was being overlooked and underserved and his first instinct was to fix it, quietly, without fanfare, because it was the right thing to do.
“She’s going to love you,” I said.
Something flickered across his face. Quick, unguarded. He looked down at his hands. “I liked her, Kieran. I liked her immediately and that almost never happens to me.”
I crossed the room and sat beside him. He leaned into me automatically, his head finding the curve of my shoulder, and I wrapped an arm around him and held on. My omega. My pack.
And somewhere across the city, in an apartment I’d never seen, a woman who smelled like everything I’d ever wanted was sitting alone, and I couldn’t go to her. Not yet. Not until she was ready. Not until I’d earned it.
“Bring her home,” Jonah said quietly, his voice muffled against my shoulder.
“Not yet.” I pressed my lips to the top of his head. “She has to choose it. I won’t take that choice away from her.”
“I know.” A pause. “But soon?”
I thought about Nora Whitfield and her steady voice and her shaking hands and her brown eyes that saw everything and expected nothing.
“Soon,” I said. “I hope.”
Outside the window, the city burned with light.
I held my omega and smelled my match on my own skin and thought about all the things I was going to have to do differently, all the patience I was going to have to find in a body that had never been built for patience, all the gentleness I was going to have to learn for a woman who deserved more of it than the world had ever given her.
I’d spent my life being the thing people feared.
For her, I was going to learn to be the thing she trusted.
Even if it killed me.