Chapter 10
Vee
The house smells like Arden immediately.
That rich scent that I've come to associate with his presence, his careful questions and careful silences. It's everywhere here. Soaked into the walls and the furniture and the air the way a scent gets when someone has lived somewhere long enough to become part of it.
Underneath that, fainter but unmistakable, is the burnt wood smell from the shirts. Lighter here than what I've been breathing in for days. Diffused through a whole house instead of concentrated in fabric pressed against my face.
I'm still taking it in when something else catches.
Smoke and dark spice. Familiar in a way that makes me stop walking.
"Chase has been here," I say.
Arden turns. Cocks his head slightly at my expression. "He lives here. He's my pack lead."
I stare at him.
"You're in his pack."
"Yes." His expression shifts, almost imperceptibly. Surprise, maybe, at my surprise. "I thought he mentioned it."
"He didn't."
"Vee, I'm sorry. It wasn't something we were intentionally keeping from you. I guess it just—didn't come up like it should have."
I stand in the entryway of Chase's house and let that sink in.
Chase. Who showed up at my gym with his easy confidence and my home with his registry badge.
The alpha who has apparently been Arden's pack lead the entire time Arden was sitting across from me asking me careful questions about my mental health and documenting everything for the case Chase was building.
Anger is the obvious response.
But I find I don't have the energy.
"Is there anything else?" I ask. My voice comes out dry, almost amused. "Anyone else I know that's secretly in a pack with someone I also know?"
Arden pauses.
"Jasper," he says.
I look at him.
"Jasper is also our pack."
I open my mouth. Close it.
Jasper.
Also in Chase’s pack. Chase and Arden and Jasper. All three connected to me and each other at once. My head is spinning.
I can't smell him here, though. He’s probably been gone too long. I wouldn't have known he'd ever been here had Arden not said it.
"That's why I can't scent him," I say. “Because he’s been at Ragon’s for months.”
"Most likely."
I nod slowly.
I start turning over every interaction I ever had with Jasper in that house.
Every careful deflection. Every sympathetic look across a room that never became anything more.
Every time he almost did something and then didn't. The shape of his restraint, which I always interpreted as personal but which was apparently also strategic.
He couldn't bond into Ragon's pack even if he'd wanted to. He already had one.
"He didn't help me much," I say and it comes out dry and a little bitter around the edges. "For someone who was supposedly there to help me."
"I know." Arden doesn't argue it. "Something was going on with him.
I can't speak to all of it, but I can tell you that it's eating him alive.
" He holds my gaze. "He wanted to help you.
He genuinely did. And he did help, Vee, even if it didn't feel like it from where you were standing.
His evidence has been crucial to Chase's case.
Without his recordings, without his reports, we don't have what we need for the hearing. "
I think about that.
"Later," I say. "I'll think about it later."
Arden nods. He knows what that means. He's heard me say it enough times by now.
He leads me to the living room.
It's a good room. There’s a deep couch, warm light. Bookshelves on two walls, the kind that look used rather than decorative. It smells like a home, like Arden and Chase and underneath everything that strange, layered burnt wood scent that my chest keeps reaching toward.
"Sit," Arden says.
I sit.
He stands in front of me. His expression has shifted from professional to wary.
"I want to prepare you," he says.
"Okay."
"He's large." He says it plainly. "Larger than anyone you've met. And the scars—" He pauses. "They're significant. His face, his arms. You'll see them."
I think about the size of the shirts. How the hem falls to my thighs, the shoulders drooping past my elbows. Whoever fills those shirts is a very large person.
"He's not dangerous to you," Arden continues. "I need you to hold onto that when you see him. Whatever your instincts tell you in the first second, he is not dangerous to you."
"But he is to others," I say.
"In certain circumstances, yes. Alphas he doesn't know.
Situations he can't control." Arden is quiet.
"He's been alone Vee. He's always thought of omegas as something beyond what he could have.
He expects them to be frightened of him and he's made a kind of peace with it but it's—it's a wound.
How you react to him matters to him more than he'll show. "
The image of it settles in me somewhere unguarded.
I nod.
Arden disappears down the hallway.
I stay on the couch in the quiet house and listen.
At first, there’s nothing. Then there’s the low sound of Arden's voice, too far away to make out words. Then a response. Deeper. Rougher. The voice of someone very large keeping it quiet.
My heart rate picks up.
I press my hands flat against my thighs and breathe.
The voices get closer.
Arden appears first at the end of the hallway. He's looking back, saying something, his expression calm and encouraging.
Then the figure behind him.
My heartbeat spikes.
He has to angle slightly through the hallway, shoulders almost too wide for the space.
Brown hair, long and wavy, falling to his shoulders.
A short beard the same color. He moves. Like someone who learned a long time ago to be deliberate about how he takes up space because he takes up so much of it.
Then they're in the room and I can see him properly and my brain goes briefly, completely blank.
He's the most physically imposing person I've ever seen.
Not just tall but massive in every dimension.
Shoulders like architecture, arms that look carved from something denser than ordinary muscle.
His face could have been beautiful once—strong jaw, broad cheekbones, something classical in the structure of it—but the scars run through all of it.
Diagonal. Jagged. Raised and pale against his tan skin.
One crosses from his jaw up through his lips and over his nose.
Another cuts across his cheekbone and through his eyebrow almost to his hairline.
Several others, overlapping, layered, the story of something I can only begin to imagine written permanently on his face.
He's utterly terrifying.
He stops a distance away and doesn't move.
Just lets me look.
Then his scent reaches me.
It’s raw and fresh and overwhelming in the best way, nothing like the diluted version I've been getting from the shirts. This is the real thing. Burnt wood and that deep layered something underneath it and it hits me directly in the place where anxiety lives and silences it completely.
My shoulders drop and my hands loosen against my thighs. The breath I take is the deepest I've taken all day.
I watch his nostrils flare.
He breathes in.
His muscles loosen, the wariness draining from around his eyes, and he looks like a man who has been holding something rigid for a very long time and has just been given permission to put it down
The corner of his mouth moves just slightly. Like he's fighting a smile and not entirely winning.
He moves toward the armchair across from me.
It happens fast. He's large and he moves quickly. My body reacts before my brain can catch up with what Arden told me. I flinch back into the couch cushions. Just slightly, just for a second.
But he sees it and stops immediately.
His expression changes into one of pain before he shuts it down.
"Vee," Arden says. "Meet Rhys."
I swallow. "Hi." It comes out smaller than I intend.
Rhys looks at me for a long moment.
Then he does something I don't expect.
He kneels.
Right there on the hardwood floor in front of the armchair, this enormous, terrifying, scarred alpha folds himself down onto one knee and then sits back on his heels so that his eyeline drops below mine.
Making himself smaller.
For me.
I have never in my life had an alpha kneel for me. Not once. Not for any reason. I don't know what to do with my face or my hands or the thing happening in my chest right now.
We look at each other.
His eyes are a deep warm brown. Expressive in a way the rest of him isn't, or maybe in a way the rest of him can't be anymore. There's so much in them. Patience. Wariness. Something that wants to be hope but hasn't decided yet whether it's allowed.
The silence stretches.
Then he lifts one arm and extends his hand toward me, palm up.
"Come."
One word.
His voice holds no command, carries none of that alpha pressure that forces obedience. Instead, the single word hangs in the air between us—gentle yet unmistakable. Dominant and quiet and somehow the most honest thing anyone has said to me in weeks.
Hopeful.
My omega doesn't deliberate.
I stand up from the couch.
I cross the space between us and put my hand in his.
His hand swallows mine completely. It’s warm and steady.
He wraps his fingers around mine with a carefulness that doesn't match the size of him, like he's very aware of the difference and is being deliberate about it.
He draws me closer, guiding rather than pulling, and then I'm close enough that his scent surrounds me completely.
I stop thinking.
Everything I've been carrying—the fear, the anger, the grief, the love that won't stop hurting, the registry, the hearing and Drake and Ragon and the five years I spent getting smaller—all of it stops. Not gone, but quiet. Like it moved to another room and closed the door.
There is only this. His warmth seeping into me. His scent filling up every part of my lungs. The rightness of it shatters me.
I sob.