Chapter Seventeen #2
The drive home was controlled. The elevator ride was controlled. The walk through the front door and the hanging of my jacket and the removal of my shoes were controlled, because I was Kieran Ashworth, and I controlled things, and I did not fall apart in public.
The moment the bedroom door closed, the control evaporated.
I put my fist into the closet door. Not through it. Into it. The impact shuddered up my arm and the wood cracked and the pain was clean and sharp and briefly, mercifully, louder than the fury.
It wasn’t enough.
I turned, looking for something else to hit, something that would absorb the rage without consequence, and Jonah was there.
Standing in the doorway. Still in the clothes he’d worn to the meeting.
His green eyes were steady and dark and he was not afraid.
He had never been afraid of me. Not in four years, not once, and the absence of fear in his face when I was vibrating with violence was the most stabilizing thing in my universe.
“Don’t,” he said. Not a request. A command. An omega commanding his alpha with the full authority of a man who knew exactly how much power he held. “The closet didn’t do anything to you.”
“Jonah, I can’t...”
“Yes, you can.” He walked into the room.
Toward me. Into the radius of my anger the way a person walked into a bonfire, deliberately and without hesitation, because Jonah understood something that most people didn’t.
He understood that I was not dangerous to the people I loved.
I was dangerous because of how much I loved them.
He stopped in front of me. Close. Close enough that I could smell him, warm and sweet, and the scent cut through the rage like a blade through smoke.
“You’re furious,” he said.
“They hurt her.” My voice was wrecked. Shaking. “Our pack hurt her, Jonah. She went home and she cried and she put her walls back up and she thinks she doesn’t deserve us, and they did that.”
“I know.”
“And Rhys just walked away. He didn’t say a word. He didn’t argue. He didn’t fight. He just left, and I don’t know how to reach someone who won’t stay in the room.”
“I know.” Jonah reached up and put his hands on my face. Firm. Grounding. His palms against my jaw, his thumbs on my cheekbones, the exact mirror of the way I held Nora. “Look at me.”
I looked at him.
“You said what needed to be said. You didn’t break anything. You didn’t hit anyone. You stood in that room and you chose words over violence and I am so proud of you.” His eyes were bright and fierce. “Now let me take care of you.”
“Jonah, I’m not...”
He kissed me.
Not softly. Not gently. Not the tender, steadying kiss of an omega calming his alpha. This was something harder and hotter and full of an intensity that matched mine. He kissed me like he was meeting me where I was, in the fire and the fury, and instead of trying to pull me out, he was climbing in.
My hands found his waist. His fingers twisted in my hair.
He pulled and I growled, a sound that came from deep in my chest, and he answered it with a sound of his own, not a whimper, not a moan, a challenge.
An omega who was not submitting. An omega who was standing in front of a raging alpha and saying, I am not afraid of you, now give me everything.
I gave him everything.
I picked him up and his legs locked around me and I pressed him against the wall, the one without the cracked closet door, and kissed him with all of the rage and the grief and the desperate, howling love that was tearing me apart.
He took it. He took all of it. His body arched against mine and his hands pulled me closer and he matched me beat for beat, fierce and unrelenting, refusing to let me spiral alone.
This was Jonah’s strength. Not softness.
Not compliance. Not the stereotype of omega submission that the world projected onto him.
This was a man who could hold the most dangerous version of his alpha and not break.
Who could walk into a fire and burn alongside me and use the heat to forge something stronger.
We fell onto the bed. Clothes came off in pieces, torn more than removed, and I should have been careful, I should have slowed down, but Jonah didn’t let me.
Every time I hesitated, he pulled me back.
Every time I tried to be gentle, he bit my lip or raked his nails down my back or whispered harder, and the permission of it, the fierce, unequivocal permission to be exactly what I was, broke something loose in me that I’d been clenching for days.
It was intense. Desperate. The kind of sex that happened when two people were using their bodies to say things that words couldn’t hold.
I love you. I’m scared. I’m angry. Don’t leave me.
He moved with me, against me, and the sounds he made were not gentle or sweet.
They were raw and loud and demanding, and each one anchored me deeper, pulling me out of the spiral and into the present, into the reality of his body and his voice and the unbreakable fact of us.
When it was over, we lay tangled in ruined sheets, breathing hard, covered in sweat and each other. My forehead was against his shoulder. His hand was in my hair, stroking slowly, the way you calmed an animal that had finally stopped thrashing.
The rage was gone. Not resolved. Not fixed. But spent. Burned through, metabolized, transformed by Jonah’s body and Jonah’s stubbornness into something quieter. Something I could carry.
“You’re incredible,” I said against his skin. “You know that, right? You’re the strongest person I’ve ever known.”
“I’m an omega,” he said. I could hear the smile in his voice. “We’re the most dangerous ones. Everyone just forgets.”
I pulled back and looked at him. His eyes were soft now, the fierceness banked, and the love in them was so total that it hurt.
“What do we do?” I asked. Not rhetorically. I was asking him. Because Jonah saw things I couldn’t, understood currents I couldn’t feel, and I trusted his judgment more than I trusted my own.
“We wait,” he said. “You planted the seeds. Declan is already cracking. I’ve seen it. He’s been watching her for weeks, and what he sees is breaking his own argument.”
“And Rhys?”
The softness in Jonah’s eyes flickered into something more complicated. Sadder. “Rhys is the one I’m worried about. He’s not resisting because he doesn’t want her. He’s resisting because he does. And for Rhys, wanting something he might lose is worse than never having it at all.”
I thought about Rhys standing in the doorway of the conference room. Three seconds of hesitation, his hand on the frame. Not speaking. Not fighting. Just standing at the edge of something he couldn’t bring himself to enter.
“And if they don’t come around?” I asked.
The question sat between us. Heavy. Real. The question I’d been avoiding for weeks, the one that lived underneath every argument and every strained pack night and every empty space on the couch where my brothers should have been.
Jonah was quiet for a long time. His hand moved through my hair, slow and rhythmic. When he spoke, his voice was steady but his eyes were not.
“Then we have to decide what we’re willing to lose.”
I closed my eyes. I pressed my face into his chest and breathed him in and thought about Nora in her quiet apartment and Rhys in his sealed room and Declan staring at a closed laptop, and I thought about the pack I’d built over four years, the thing I’d bled for and fought for and loved with every cell in my body.
If the pack broke over this, it broke.
That was the thought I’d been circling, the thought I’d refused to land on, the thought that lived in the dark space behind everything else.
If the choice came down to the pack as it was or the pack as it could be, with Nora in it, with all five of us whole, and two of my brothers refused to see what was in front of them. ..
I would choose Nora.
Not because I loved her more than I loved them. Not because she was more important than the family I’d built. But because choosing Nora was choosing truth, and building a life on a foundation that excluded her because of her designation was building a lie, and I was done with lies.
The pack might not survive this. That possibility was real and present and it sat in my chest like a stone.
But a pack that couldn’t make room for Nora Whitfield was not a pack worth saving in its current form. And if that made me a traitor to what we’d built, then I was a traitor. I’d carry that. I’d carry all of it.
I held my omega in the dark and I felt the pack bond humming between us, strained to the point of breaking, and I thought: this is what it sounds like when something is about to either shatter or transform.
I didn’t know which one yet.
But I was done waiting to find out.