Chapter 27 #2
"If you want out," he says, "I will make sure Ragon cannot touch your life again.
Cannot reach you through any mechanism I can block.
" A gentle squeeze. "But if you don't want that.
If you want to go back—especially knowing what you know now, knowing Marie is gone—if that's what you choose, I will call this off. "
I stare at him.
"Everyone around you has been moving pieces," he says.
"Including me. Including Arden. And I know that's not something you asked for.
I know you were never given the choice to say yes or no to any of it.
" Even and careful. "That's the world we live in.
Omegas answer to the registry first and their pack second and somewhere after that, if they're very lucky, they get to answer to themselves. "
He lets that sit.
"I want you to be very lucky. So I'm asking. What do you want?"
I'm quiet for a long time. The fire pops in the grate.
I think about Ragon. Not the Ragon of the last year—the one before that.
The one who appeared in my doorway when I was screaming from nightmares and didn't ask what was wrong, just pulled me in and said no one is taking you from here.
The one who used to sit in my nest on slow Sunday mornings just to sit there, talking about nothing for hours.
I remember the nights he held me and told me I was good enough. Until I wasn't. Until Marie arrived and five years of promises dissolved like they'd been made in water.
I think about the registry and my first pack returning me when their match showed up, the hollow assessment hallways, the woman in the grey suit who made decisions about my future without asking.
I think about Drake at the window offering to testify, how it didn't change anything but still meant something.
I think about Marie back at the registry and Ragon with nothing.
After all of it.
I meet Chase's eyes. "If I go back to Ragon's, I'll also need a lobotomy and possibly a personality transplant, so unless the registry is offering a two-for-one special on those this week, that's going to be a hard pass from me."
Chase's mouth curves. Just slightly.
"I'd elaborate," I say, "but I think that covers it."
"It does."
Malcolm makes a sound that might be a laugh. Might be relief. Hard to tell.
Beside me, Rhys says nothing. But his hand finds mine where it rests on my knee and his thumb traces one slow circle across my knuckles. I don't look at him. Neither of us makes anything of it.
"So what happens to me?" I ask. "Where do I actually go?"
Chase releases my hands and moves back into business.
"For now you stay here. I'll tell the registry you're coming to my home—I've done it before for omegas in transition. They'll accept that for a short time. Right now they think you’re still with Ragon. I don’t expect him to contest that tomorrow. If he told them you’ve been missing and he hasn’t reported it, they’ll accuse him of trying to hide the heat abandonment, which is the truth.
We won't mention Alex’s pack at all and neither will he.
" He glances briefly at Alex. "It buys us time. "
"Time to do what?"
"Figure out the next move." He stands. "But first we get through tomorrow."
He looks at each of them in turn, something passing between the alphas that I'm only partly part of. He tells me to get some rest before he leaves, and the door clicks shut.
None of us say anything.
Then Finn exhales slowly. "Okay. That's tomorrow's problem."
I nod. The knot in my chest doesn't loosen.
***
The rest of the day is impossible.
I try to read and can't, the sentences sliding off the page and underneath them always the hearing, always tomorrow, always the chance that it isn't enough. I tell myself Chase is confident. It helps for about three minutes before the anxiety climbs back.
Finn worries over me in the quiet way he has—not saying he's worried, just appearing with snacks I didn't ask for, sitting nearby, making conversation that doesn't demand anything.
Malcolm, shirtless as always, keeps finding reasons to be in whatever room I'm in.
His chest is a particular problem. A distracting problem.
I notice Drake's jaw work every time Malcolm stretches or reaches for something, which would almost be funny if I weren't also experiencing a small guilty involuntary appreciation every single time. I am only human.
Rhys spends the afternoon moving between the porch and wherever I am, not hovering, just present.
At one point I find him outside sitting on the steps watching the tree line and I sit beside him for twenty minutes without either of us saying anything, and I feel the anxiety dial down by several notches just from proximity to him.
I don't understand exactly why his presence does what it does to me, but I've stopped questioning it.
By evening the anxiety has gone low-grade and miserable, the kind that just has to be waited through.
"We need a movie," Alex says. Like a conclusion he's already reached.
"Okay," I say.
Finn's face lights up and what follows is Finn—pure, enthusiastic, deeply committed Finn—disappearing into the kitchen and returning with popcorn, then chips, then a bowl of mixed nuts nobody asked for. Then drinks and a bag of gummy bears presented like a long-awaited gift.
"Finn," Malcolm says.
"What?"
"We're watching a movie. Not preparing for a siege."
"Snacks set the tone." He adjusts the gummy bears on the coffee table with the gravity of someone arranging something important. "The tone is crucial."
I cover my mouth with my hand.
I love movie nights. I used to love them.
We had them every week in Ragon's house, back when things were good.
Back when movie nights meant piling onto the big sectional with my alphas, arguing over what to watch and someone always ending up with their head in someone else's lap before everyone forgot the plot around the halfway point because the company was better than the film.
Until Marie arrived.
Then movie nights meant sitting in the chair they'd moved slightly to the side to accommodate everyone else on the sectional while I was exiled to the outside. The chair where I’d watch my alphas pull her in close. Ragon's arm around her. Drake's chin on her shoulder. Nobody's head in my lap.
I blink it away.
We find a comedy. Light and stupid and exactly right.
I end up in the middle of the couch. Finn drops down on my left without ceremony.
Rhys settles on my right, taking up considerably more of the couch than a standard-sized person would, which means I end up pressed close to him, and I find I don't mind at all.
Malcolm takes the armchair nearest the window.
Alex takes the other armchair, legs stretched out in front of him, sprawled and loose in a way I haven't seen before. I’ve seen Alex in crisis mode, Alex vigilant, Alex careful, and now this version, almost comfortable, and it does warmth and strange to my chest.
Drake is in the chair at the outer edge of the room. Separate. Watching.
The film is genuinely funny. Finn laughs loudly. Somewhere in the first half hour Finn's shoulder presses into mine and Rhys's arm shifts along the back of the couch behind me with a casual certainty that makes me want to lean into it, which I do.
I shiver though I'm not really cold. My body is just releasing something it's been holding.
Alex unfolds himself from his armchair, disappears down the hall and comes back with an enormous blanket. He shakes it out and drapes it over the three of us without a word. I look up at him and he meets my eyes for just a second.
"Thank you," I say.
He goes back to his armchair. I tuck the blanket up to my chin and settle in. Malcolm's purr starts up across the room, low and absentminded, and Rhys's starts too—broken and stuttering and deep, the two of them layering together in a way that reaches everywhere.
I close my eyes.
Just for a second.
The movie is completely different when I open them.
Different characters. Different everything.
"What happened?" My voice comes out slightly wrecked.
Finn is grinning at me. "You fell asleep."
"I didn't—" I look at the screen. Definitely a different film. "For how long?"
"The rest of the movie. We started another one."
"I'm so sorry." I push myself upright off Rhys's chest, mortified.
Rhys looks down at me, his expression doing the soft thing it does. He reaches up and tucks a piece of hair behind my ear with one careful finger.
"Stay," he says, a question without being a question.
I look up at him. The scars and the warm brown eyes and that almost-smile that takes work to find but means everything.
I sink back into his side.
Malcolm is watching from his armchair, and he leans forward. "Come here," he says to me.
I blink. "What?"
He holds his arms out.
I detach from Rhys's side, cross to Malcolm's armchair, and barely register what's happening before he's kissing me.
It starts soft—tentative, for Malcolm, which surprises me—and then I catch up and kiss him back and the softness burns away.
My fingers curl into his shirt. My omega screams, a sound that floods outward, the bond pulling toward him with a want so complete it blots out coherent thought.
His hand cups my jaw and I press into him.
Then Finn is there. Ink and rain and paper scent relaxing me even as my heart rate picks up.
His fingers slide around my cheeks from the other side, gentle and deliberate, and turns me toward him, and then he's kissing me with the same hunger and I make a sound into his mouth that I absolutely should not be making in a room with other people in it.
He kisses like he does everything—thoughtful, thorough, like he's figured out exactly what he wants from this.
When we finally break apart I'm breathing hard.
My eyes open and land on Alex first.
He's still in his armchair, same position, but he's watching us and his expression is not what I expected—no discomfort, no careful blankness.
He looks satisfied. Like he's watching something work out how he hoped.
warmth and quiet in his face that makes my chest do something I don't have a name for yet.
Then I remember Drake.
He's in his chair, staring at us with the look I had just a few weeks ago. I want to feel bad for him, but then I remember watching him fix Marie’s plate first without noticing he'd walked right past mine. The mornings he’d beeline past me just to kiss her on the forehead.
That emptiness I felt. The sensation of being on the outside of something you used to be inside.
I look at his face and recognize it completely.
The horror I expected doesn't come. Because I spent so long wearing that same expression and nobody in that house cared to stop it.
Nobody told Marie to stop. Nobody pulled back to make space for me.
Nobody saw the look on my face and reconsidered.
I made myself small so they could be big and they took all the room I gave them.
I don't owe Drake my guilt.
I go back to the couch and pull the blanket higher, snuggling back into Rhys’s side. Finn's arm settles around me from his side where he returned. Malcolm's purr drifts across the room. Alex sits in his armchair with that satisfied look.
On screen something slapstick happens. Finn makes a noise that's half laugh and half involuntary. Malcolm says something under his breath and I catch a word and laugh.
And then—before I know it's coming—something rises in my chest, warm and rounded. A vibration I don't have a blueprint for. It bubbles up and out in one small stuttering sound.
An omega purr. Something I don't think I've ever done before. Something I’ve never felt safe enough to do before.
I go still.
Finn's arm tightens. Malcolm makes a sound low in his chest, his purr deepening in response. Rhys goes very still, and then his purr starts too—the broken stuttering of it smoother somehow, like it's responding to something it recognizes.
I sit there and let it happen.
Let my body say what I'm not ready to say out loud.
That I'm here. That I'm warm. That for right now, in this room, I am safe.