Chapter Twenty #2
I told myself it was fine. Heats lasted three to five days for most omegas.
Jonah’s were on the longer side, he’d mentioned once, casual and unbothered in the way that omegas talked about their biology when they trusted you enough to be honest. The pack would be focused on him. Phone calls were not the priority.
I was fine. I was a beta. I didn’t belong in a heat.
Sunday. No word.
I cleaned my apartment. I reorganized my bookshelf by genre, then by author, then by color, which was irrational and comforting and took four hours. I texted Maren. She called. I sat on my kitchen floor, which was becoming my emotional processing location of choice, and told her everything.
“He’s in heat and they’re with him and I’m here,” I said. “And it’s fine because that’s how this works. The biology is what it is. An omega needs his alphas during heat. He doesn’t need a beta.”
“Nora,” Maren said carefully. “Is that what you believe? Or is that what you’ve been told?”
“It’s what’s true.”
“It’s what’s conventional. Conventional and true are not the same thing, and you know that.”
I pressed my forehead to my knees. The hum in my chest was wrong.
That was the only word for it. Wrong. Jonah’s thread, which had been growing brighter for weeks, was flickering like a light with a bad connection.
I could feel him, distantly, the way you felt a sound through a wall.
Present but muffled. Close but unreachable.
“What if he needs me?” I whispered.
“Then he’ll ask,” Maren said. “And if he asks, you go. Do you hear me, Nora? If he asks, you go, and you do not let biology or convention or anyone’s idea of what a beta is supposed to be stop you.”
I heard her. I held the words. I went to bed and slept with my hand on my chest and Jonah’s thread flickering beneath my palm.
· · ·
Monday. 6:14 a.m. My phone rang.
I was already awake. I’d been awake since four, lying in the dark, feeling the wrongness of the hum, the flickering absence where Jonah’s presence should have been steady and warm.
My body knew before my phone rang that something had shifted.
Something was happening that the conventional wisdom hadn’t accounted for.
Kieran’s name on the screen. I answered before the first ring finished.
“Kieran.”
The sound of his voice cracked something open in me.
He was wrecked. Not the controlled, sharp-edged exhaustion I’d heard from him before.
This was deeper. Hollowed out. The voice of a man who had been holding his omega through four days of heat and had watched it go wrong in a way he didn’t understand.
“He’s asking for you.”
The words landed in my chest like a detonation.
“Jonah is... he won’t settle. The heat isn’t breaking.
It should have peaked by now, it should be easing, but he’s.
..” Kieran’s voice fractured. I heard him take a breath, ragged and wet.
“He keeps calling your name. He’s reaching for someone and it’s not us.
It’s you, Nora. He keeps saying your name and we can’t. ..”
Another breath. Worse than the first.
“We can’t help him. All three of us are here and we can’t give him what he needs and he’s calling for you.”
My hand was shaking. The phone trembled against my ear. The hum in my chest was blazing, all three threads alive and screaming, Kieran’s dark and desperate, the faint cedar thread of Rhys vibrating with something that felt like fear, and Jonah’s, flickering, reaching, calling.
He was calling for me.
An omega in heat, surrounded by his three bonded alphas, was calling for a beta.
Every piece of conventional wisdom. Every biological framework.
Every voice that had ever told me what betas were and were not, what we could and could not do, what we belonged to and what we would never be a part of.
All of it said this was impossible. That an omega in heat could not need a beta.
That the biology didn’t work that way. That whatever Jonah was experiencing was a misfiring, an anomaly, a glitch in the system that would correct itself if they just waited.
But Jonah was calling my name. And the hum in my chest, the one that the world said shouldn’t exist, the impossible connection between a beta and an alpha pack, was telling me to go.
“I’m coming,” I said.
I hung up. I stood in my apartment at 6:14 on a Monday morning with my phone in my shaking hand and my heart slamming against my ribs and the entire architecture of everything I’d been told about what I was and what I wasn’t crumbling around me like a building that had been built on the wrong foundation.
He was calling for me.
I got dressed. I picked up my keys. Rhys’s keys, still on the hook by my door, because he’d had my car fixed and brought it back but I’d kept his keys and he hadn’t asked for them.
I walked out the door.
The morning was cold and still and the city was barely awake and I was driving across it toward a penthouse where an omega was reaching for me through the walls of a heat that his three alphas couldn’t break, and I didn’t know what I was doing and I didn’t know what would happen when I got there and I was more afraid than I had ever been in my life.
But Maren’s voice was in my head. If he asks, you go.
And Kieran’s voice was in my ear. He keeps calling your name.
And the hum in my chest, impossible and undeniable and blazing with a light that the world said shouldn’t exist, was pointing me toward the place where I was needed.
I drove.