Chapter Six #2
“I know. I know it’s complicated. I know Dec is resisting and Rhys is.
.. whatever Rhys is doing right now. I know the timing is terrible and the politics are impossible and she’s a beta and none of this is supposed to work.
” He took a breath. “But I don’t care. I want to know her.
I want to keep having lunch with her and talking about books and making her laugh.
And I want to do it because I choose to, not because the bond is telling me to. ”
That was the thing that hit me. The choice. My connection to Nora was biological, involuntary, a scent match that had bypassed my rational brain and rewritten my chemistry. I hadn’t chosen it. It had chosen me.
But Jonah was choosing. Without a scent bond, without biological imperative, without anything except his own heart telling him that this woman mattered. He was choosing her.
That was worth more than anything my alpha instincts could offer.
“Keep having lunch with her,” I said. “Keep talking to her. Be the bridge, Jonah. Show her that this pack is more than two skeptical alphas and a man who scares people.”
He smiled. Small, warm, the private smile he saved for the pack. “I’m already doing that. You don’t need to ask.”
“I know. I’m asking anyway.”
He reached across the desk and took my hand. His fingers were warm and sure, and the pack bond hummed between us, steady and familiar, a four-year foundation that I would protect with my life.
“We’ll get there,” he said. “Dec will come around. He always does, once the data supports what his gut already knows.”
“And Rhys?”
Jonah’s expression shifted. Something careful entered his eyes. “Rhys is going to take longer. You know why.”
I did. I knew better than anyone.
· · ·
Rhys was a ghost.
He’d always been the quietest of us. That was part of who he was, part of what made him good at his job and steady in the pack. Rhys listened when others talked. He watched when others acted. He held the space that the rest of us were too loud to occupy.
But this was different. Since the day we’d arrived at Whitmore, since the moment I’d told the pack about Nora, Rhys had pulled back. Not from Jonah, not from Declan, not from me. From the idea. From the possibility. From the risk.
I’d watched him during the crisis today.
He’d been flawless. Managing the other accounts, keeping the non-crisis work running, doing everything that needed to be done with the same quiet efficiency he brought to everything.
He’d passed through the war room once, and I’d seen him near Nora’s station, and for one second, one unguarded second, something had crossed his face that looked like recognition.
Then it was gone. The wall came back up. He’d taken his printout and left, and Nora had watched him go with an expression that she’d probably thought she was hiding but that I’d read like a headline.
She’d felt it. His absence. His deliberate, careful indifference. And it had hurt her.
I wanted to go to Rhys and shake him. I wanted to say, She sees you. She notices you. She caught a date error on a document you were working on because she was paying attention to your work even though you’ve given her nothing. Don’t you understand what that means?
But I knew Rhys’s history. I’d been there for the aftermath.
Three years before he’d joined our pack, Rhys had been bonded. A small pack, three people, formed when they were barely out of college. Young and in love and stupid with it, the way you can only be when you haven’t learned yet that love isn’t always enough.
It had fallen apart slowly and then all at once.
Incompatibility that deepened into resentment.
Bonds strained past breaking. One partner left.
Then another. And Rhys was alone with two broken bonds in his chest, which was, biologically speaking, one of the most painful things a bonded person could experience.
The severing of a pack bond doesn’t just hurt emotionally.
It hurts physically. Neurologically. It rewires your brain’s attachment system and leaves you with a void that your body interprets as a wound.
It had taken Rhys two years to be functional. Another year to let Declan and me close enough to form a new bond. And even then, even four years into our pack, there were nights when he woke up reaching for people who weren’t there.
He wasn’t being cold to Nora. He was being terrified. And I couldn’t fix that for him, no matter how badly I wanted to.
· · ·
The penthouse. Late.
Declan had gone to bed an hour ago, after sending the follow-up email.
I’d read it. It was perfectly crafted, as everything Declan wrote was.
An acknowledgment of additional contributions.
Nora’s name, among others, with a specific mention of the tracking system she’d built.
Enough to be meaningful. Not enough to raise flags.
It wasn’t what she deserved. But it was a start. And from Declan, it was an admission that he’d been wrong, which was rarer than a solar eclipse and approximately as disorienting.
Rhys was in his room with the door closed. Guitar, faintly, through the wall. Something slow and melancholy that he probably didn’t realize told me everything about his state of mind.
Jonah was on the couch beside me. We were supposed to be watching something on television, but neither of us was paying attention. The screen flickered with someone else’s story while ours played out in the silence between us.
I could still smell her. Not on my clothes this time. Deeper than that. Under my skin. In my lungs. Like she’d taken up residence in my bloodstream and my body had decided she belonged there.
Jonah shifted, curling into my side the way he did when he was tired or worried or both. I lifted my arm to make room for him and he settled against my chest, his head tucked under my chin. I could feel his heartbeat through his shirt, steady and sure. My omega. My anchor.
“She went home alone tonight,” Jonah said. “After everything she did today. She went home to an empty apartment and she was alone.”
My chest ached. A specific, localized pain that had nothing to do with biology and everything to do with the image Jonah had just put in my head.
Nora, in her quiet apartment, in her quiet life, having spent twelve hours being extraordinary and then going home to a silence that didn’t know her name.
“Soon,” I said. The same word I’d said before, but it felt different now. More urgent. More certain.
“She has to choose it,” Jonah said. Echoing my own words back to me.
“She does.”
“And if she doesn’t?”
I’d thought about this. In the dark, in the shower, in every quiet moment when my brain wasn’t occupied with work or pack management, I’d thought about the possibility that Nora Whitfield would decide that a pack of alphas and an omega were too complicated, too risky, too far outside the boundaries of the life she’d built for herself.
That she would look at what I was offering and decide it wasn’t worth the upheaval.
The thought made me feel like I was drowning.
“Then I’ll still be glad I found her,” I said. “And I’ll spend the rest of my life knowing she exists in the world, and that will have to be enough.”
Jonah was quiet for a long time. Then he pressed his face into my chest and said, muffled and fierce, “It won’t come to that.”
“You can’t know that.”
“I can. I sat with her in a kitchenette and watched her drink coffee and talk about books and I saw the way she looked when she was happy, Kieran. Really happy. Not the polite, managed, beta-appropriate version of happy that she shows everyone else. The real thing. And it was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
” He pulled back enough to look at me. “She wants this. She doesn’t believe she’s allowed to want it. But she does. I could see it.”
I looked at him. This man. This extraordinary, perceptive, enormous-hearted man who had been seeing the world more clearly than the rest of us since the day we’d bonded.
“I love you,” I said.
“I know.” He smiled. “I love you too. Now go to sleep. Tomorrow we have to figure out how to make the most stubborn alpha in the world and the most terrified alpha in the world both fall in love with a beta who doesn’t think she deserves them.”
“That’s an ambitious agenda.”
“I’m an ambitious omega.”
He kissed me, soft and warm and tasting like home, and I held him and let the bond settle between us. Steady. Sure. The foundation on which everything else would be built.
Through the wall, Rhys’s guitar played something slow and aching.
And somewhere across the city, my match slept alone, and I lay awake in the dark, counting the hours until I could see her again, and told myself that patience was a virtue and not a punishment, and almost believed it.