Chapter Seven
Nora
Maren Torres had a theory about pasta.
The theory was that no problem in the known universe could withstand a properly made carbonara, and that any crisis that survived past the first bite was either unfixable or imaginary, and in either case, you might as well have seconds.
We were at her apartment on Saturday evening, which was our standing arrangement whenever life got complicated enough to require carbohydrates and wine.
Maren’s kitchen was small and cheerful and perpetually cluttered with things she’d bought at farmers’ markets with the optimism of someone who genuinely believed she’d use twelve different varieties of artisanal honey.
She taught kindergarten, lived alone in a walk-up that smelled like cinnamon and fresh laundry, and had the kind of relentless warmth that made you feel like the world might actually be a reasonable place.
She was also the only person I’d ever met who could make me talk when I didn’t want to.
“Start from the beginning,” she said, setting a bowl of carbonara in front of me with the focused attention of a doctor administering treatment. “And don’t skip the part about the elevator. I need details.”
“How do you know about the elevator?”
“You texted me four question marks at eleven p.m. on Thursday. That’s elevator energy.”
I picked up my fork. Put it down. Picked it up again.
Then I told her everything.
I started with the acquisition and the anxiety and the broken coffee maker, because context mattered and because I was stalling.
But Maren was patient. She ate her pasta and drank her wine and listened with the same attentive stillness she probably used with her kindergartners, and when I got to the part about Kieran walking off the elevator and stopping dead, her fork froze halfway to her mouth.
I told her about the hum. The pull. The impossible, inexplicable feeling that something in my chest had recognized something in his, even though I was a beta and betas didn’t have that kind of biology.
I told her about the pen. About the way he said my name.
About the copy room, where he’d appeared in the doorway and Marcus Webb had practically dissolved.
I told her about Jonah. The coffee machine. The lunches. The way he looked at me like I was a person and not a designation, and how that simple act of seeing had cracked something open in me that I hadn’t known was sealed shut.
I told her about Declan’s coldness and the email that hadn’t included my name, and about the follow-up that had arrived the next morning, which had included it, and how I’d stared at those two sentences of acknowledgment for a full minute, unsure whether to feel grateful or pathetic.
I told her about Rhys. The quiet. The nod. The careful, impersonal “thank you” that somehow hurt more than hostility.
And I told her about the elevator. About Kieran asking if I could feel it, and about the word that had come out of my mouth before I could stop it.
Yes.
When I finished, Maren set down her wine glass and looked at me with an expression I couldn’t read.
“Nora,” she said.
“I know. It’s insane.”
“It’s not insane.”
“It’s a little insane. I’m a beta who might be scent-matched to an alpha who runs a crisis management empire and comes with a pack of four, two of whom don’t want me there. That’s objectively insane.”
“The scent match part is unusual. The rest of it is just love.”
“It’s not love. It’s been two weeks.”
“Fine. It’s the beginning of love. The part where the ground shifts and you don’t know if you’re falling or flying and everything is terrifying and electric and you can’t think straight.” She smiled. “Which, for the record, is the best part.”
“You are a dangerously optimistic person.”
“I teach five-year-olds. Optimism is a survival skill.” She pulled her legs up onto the chair and wrapped her arms around her knees, which was her thinking posture, the one she adopted when she was about to say something she’d been holding. “Can I ask you something?”
“You’re going to ask me regardless of what I say.”
“True.” She paused. “When was the last time you let yourself want something?”
The question landed like a stone dropped into still water. I felt the ripples move through me, outward and downward, touching things I didn’t usually let the surface reach.
“I want things,” I said.
“You want things that are safe. You want coffee and books and a clean apartment and stability. You want the things you know you can have.” Her voice was gentle, but her eyes were steady.
“When was the last time you wanted something big? Something that could go wrong? Something that could hurt you if it didn’t work out? ”
I opened my mouth to answer and nothing came out.
Maren waited. She was very good at waiting.
“I don’t...” I started. Stopped. Tried again. “Betas don’t get the big things, Maren. You know that. We don’t get packs. We don’t get scent matches. We don’t get fairy tales. We get reasonable. We get manageable. We get by.”
“Who told you that?”
The answer was so obvious and so painful that it sat in my throat like a stone.
Everyone. Everyone had told me that. Not in words, necessarily. Not in cruelty. In a thousand small, kind, well-intentioned moments that had calcified over twenty-seven years into a cage I’d stopped noticing because it had become indistinguishable from the shape of my life.
· · ·
My parents were betas. Both of them.
My mother taught high school English. My father worked in insurance.
They lived in a three-bedroom house in a suburb that was neither good nor bad, in a neighborhood that was neither wealthy nor poor, and they loved each other in the steady, uncomplicated way that betas were supposed to love.
No fireworks. No dramatic gestures. No scent bonds or heat cycles or the consuming, biological intensity that alphas and omegas described in books and movies and the cultural mythology that betas were always on the outside of.
They loved me. I never doubted that. They loved me with a consistency and a quietness that I’d built my entire personality on, and they had prepared me for the world by teaching me, gently and carefully and with the best of intentions, not to expect too much from it.
My mother had said it once, when I was sixteen and heartbroken over a boy who’d chosen an omega over me.
She’d sat on my bed and stroked my hair and said, “Honey, the world isn’t set up for people like us.
That doesn’t mean it’s against us. It just means we have to be realistic about what’s available. ”
She’d meant it as comfort. I’d taken it as gospel.
Be realistic. Manage your expectations. Don’t reach for things that weren’t built for you, because the fall will hurt more than the wanting.
My father had said something similar, in his own way, when I’d considered applying for a management position two years out of college.
“Nora, you’re smart and you’re capable, but those positions go to alphas.
That’s just how it is. Better to be the best at something attainable than to set yourself up for disappointment. ”
He’d been right. Statistically, empirically right. Eighty-seven percent of management positions were held by alphas. The remaining thirteen percent were split between omegas and the occasional beta who’d gotten lucky or fought twice as hard for half as much.
So I’d become an office administrator. I’d become reliable. I’d become the person who kept things running without expecting to be seen, because being seen meant being evaluated, and being evaluated meant being found wanting, and I was so tired, so bone-deep tired, of being found wanting.
And now a man with dark eyes and tattooed hands was standing in front of me saying, You’re more than this. Things work differently now. If you’ll let me.
And I didn’t know how to let him, because I’d never learned how to want something I might not get.
· · ·
“My parents love me,” I said to Maren, after a silence that had lasted long enough for her to refill both our wine glasses. “They love me and they wanted to protect me. They saw the world for what it was and they tried to keep me from getting hurt by it.”
“I know,” Maren said softly. “And it came from love. The best cages always do.”
I looked at her. She looked at me. And something about the word cage, something about hearing it said out loud by someone who wasn’t inside it with me, made the walls of it suddenly, startlingly visible.
“I’m scared,” I said. It came out small and raw and I hated it and I was also, distantly, proud of it, because I hadn’t said those words out loud in years.
“Of course you are.” Maren reached across the table and took my hand. Her fingers were warm and sure. “You’ve been told your whole life that the big things aren’t for you. And now a big thing is standing at your desk every morning asking if you need a pen. That’s terrifying.”
I laughed. It was wet and shaky and not entirely a laugh, but it was something.
“What if it doesn’t work?” I asked. “What if I let myself want this and it falls apart? What if the other two never accept me? What if the scent match is wrong, or temporary, or some biological glitch that fades in a month?”
“What if the universe got it right for once?”
I stared at her.
“What if,” Maren continued, squeezing my hand, “for the first time in your life, the world is handing you something extraordinary and all you have to do is stop talking yourself out of taking it?”
“That’s terrifying.”
“Yes.”
“You’re supposed to say something reassuring.”
“I’m supposed to say the truth, and the truth is that love is terrifying and you should do it anyway.” She let go of my hand and picked up her wine. “Also, eat your pasta. It’s getting cold and that’s a crime against Italy.”