Epilogue
Vee
The apple tree is giving fruit.
I noticed it this morning—three small green apples in the lower branches, still hard, weeks from ready, but there.
The tree is alive and producing. Mine. I stood under it for a full minute just looking at them before Rhys appeared at my elbow with a cup of coffee and the look on his face that means he saw me standing still and came to investigate.
"They're not ready yet," he said.
"I know," I said. "I just wanted to see them."
He handed me the coffee and we stood under the tree together for a while. That was enough.
The garden is nothing like the overgrown tangle it was when we bought the house.
Eight months of work. Finn researching soil amendments and companion planting with the focused intensity he brings to any project worth doing.
Malcolm building the raised beds over a long weekend, covered in sawdust, refusing help until Rhys silently picked up the other end of a board he was struggling with and they finished it in half the time.
Alex sourcing the seeds I'd marked in the catalog with tiny penciled stars.
It's mine now. Really mine. Deep beds, stone borders, lavender running along the south edge that smells like something good when you walk past it.
The herbs I wanted. The tomatoes that outproduced anything I'd grown before.
And at the far end, the apple tree, which needed two full seasons before it decided to trust us.
Today the garden is full of people.
Jess arrived yesterday, declared the garden "criminally unfair," and I took it as the compliment it was. She's on a blanket near the lavender with a glass of wine, looking content in like she gets when she's somewhere that asks nothing of her.
Noah is here too. He arrived this morning with his pack—Jonah and the others, all of them piling out of two cars with enough food to feed twice our number.
Noah greeted me with a hug so enthusiastic it lifted me off the ground and then immediately went looking for Finn, who he has been in consistent contact with the last time he came over and they discovered they both like the same viking shows.
Malcolm is at the grill.
He's been at the grill for forty-five minutes with the focus of a man who has decided this is his domain and anyone who questions his methods will be asked to leave. Finn hovers nearby offering unsolicited advice. Malcolm ignores all of it. The food smells incredible.
Alex is in one of the porch chairs with his feet up and a beer in his hand and the ease of a man who is exactly where he's supposed to be. He catches my eye from across the yard and the corner of his mouth moves.
I touch the claim mark on my neck. His. The first.
Four marks total, placed where I can show them off if I choose.
Alex's on the left side of my neck. Malcolm's on the right.
Rhys's lower, at the curve where my neck meets my shoulder, the one that makes people's eyes go wide when they see the sheer size of it and then who it belongs to.
And on the other side, just below my ear, the small beta sized one in dark ink that I sat still for in a tattoo chair last spring—the mark I chose for Finn because he couldn't give me one and I wanted him to have one anyway.
He cried when he saw it. He'll deny this. He was having an allergic reaction to something, apparently.
I carry all four of them and I'm not subtle about it.
Rhys is across the yard talking to Noah's alphas.
I stop what I'm doing and watch.
It's not the careful, managed interaction of someone working through exposure therapy.
It's just—a conversation. Jonah said something and Rhys responded and Jonah laughed.
Then Rhys's almost-smile appeared and didn't go away.
He's standing with his shoulders loose. Not braced. Not monitoring every exit.
He’s just present.
My breath hitches with tenderness. Not quite pride. Something mine. Like watching someone you love become more themselves than they were before.
He still sees Arden every two weeks. He probably always will.
But the man standing across the yard having a normal conversation in a backyard full of unfamiliar alphas is not the same man who couldn't be in a room with strangers at one point.
He's not healed exactly. He'd be the first to say that.
But he's further along the road than he was and he's walking it on his own terms.
I watch him notice me watching and do the barely perceptible nod that means I see you, I'm fine, stop hovering.
I look away.
Noah appears at my elbow. He hands me a fresh drink and follows my gaze to where Rhys is still talking to Jonah.
"Your pack is disgustingly devoted to you," he says.
"Yours is too."
"Mine is." He says it with complete satisfaction. "Jonah reorganized our entire kitchen last week because I mentioned that I couldn't reach the mugs. I didn't ask him to. He just did it." He sips his drink. "It's a good problem to have."
I look at Noah's pack moving around the yard—the easy way they orbit him, the small attentions, how one of them appears with sunscreen before he thinks to ask. The same language mine speaks. The same silent language of those who've chosen their person.
"Yeah," I say. "It is."
I go inside to get more ice and pass the bedroom on my way back.
The door is open.
The bed is enormous. We had it custom made because no standard size was going to accommodate five people sleeping in it and we stopped pretending that wasn't what was happening.
There are separate bedrooms—five of them, outfitted and useable—and nobody uses them.
We end up here every night, in the nest I've built, a shirt or two or three from each of them woven into the layering of it.
There are no schedules or rotations. We just end up wherever we end up, which is always here, in this bed, in this nest, together.
I stand in the doorway and just look at it.
Mine.
All of it.
I'm back outside when Finn appears beside me.
He doesn't say anything specific. He just looks at me, the corners of his eyes softening in a way I haven't seen in months.
"Okay?" I ask.
"Yeah," he says. And means it.
We're clearing the table when my phone rings.
Chase.
I step away from the noise to answer.
"Vee." His voice has that quality it gets when he's about to say something he'd rather not. "I wanted to let you know before it hit any official channels. Marie has disappeared from the registry."
I go still.
"What do you mean disappeared?"
"No trace. No record of her leaving. She was there two days ago and this morning she wasn't. The room was clean. Nothing left behind." A pause. "I'm looking into it."
"Is she—" I stop. "Is she okay?"
"I don't know yet." He pauses again. "I'll keep you informed. If you want me to."
I think for a second. “I do.”
"One more thing," Chase says. Then a pause that goes on too long. "Jasper left."
"Left where?"
"The pack. He packed his things about a week ago and walked out. Didn't break the bond. Just... left."
My eyes widen. "Where did he go?"
"We don't know. He's not answering calls. He’s been… struggling with some things. We haven’t been able to help him through it." Another pause. Chase's voice drops. "Arden's not doing well with it."
Of course he isn't.
"I'm sorry," I say. And I mean it in a way that covers more than I can articulate. For Chase losing a pack member. For Arden losing him too. For Jasper, who spent so long playing the long game that he might not know how to stop.
"Yeah," Chase says. "Me too. We'll figure it out. Or we won't. But I wanted you to know."
We say goodbye. I stand there with the phone in my hand.
Jasper’s gone.
And Marie.
I think about her like I've been trying not to—the damage underneath the things she did, the note she gave Chase that I've read so many times the fold lines are wearing through. I never wanted to hurt another omega. But I'd do it again.
And then, without planning to, I'm back in Ragon's house.
It was the middle of the night. I woke up to a sound and followed it down the hall to the bathroom. The light was on underneath the door. I could hear it clearly once I stopped… crying. The kind that tries to be quiet and isn't.
I knocked.
There was a long pause before the door opened.
Marie stood there in the bathroom light, red-eyed and tear-streaked, her hair loose, wearing a sleep shirt that was too big for her.
Drake’s. She looked—different than the person I'd been building in my head.
Here she was just a girl who had been crying alone in a bathroom in the middle of the night.
She looked at me.
I asked if she was okay.
Her face shifted… a crack in whatever she was maintaining, a moment where she almost said a real thing. Her mouth opened. She looked at me with an expression that I didn't understand then and only half understand now.
Then she closed it.
“I'm fine,” she said. And shut the door.
I stood in the hallway confused and vaguely unsettled, and then went back to my room.
I didn't think about it again until much later.
I think about it now.
She wanted to say something that night. I'm sure of it. Something real and complicated and probably too big for a bathroom doorway at two in the morning. And she chose not to. Or couldn't. Or was afraid of what happened if she did.
I don't know her story. I know pieces of it—the father, possible trafficking connections, the brother who's missing, that she did things she maybe didn’t want to do.
But I don't know what it felt like from the inside.
What it cost her. Whether she had any choices at all or just the illusion of them.
She's one of the lucky ones. She got away.
I hope Marie got away too.
Wherever she is.
I put my phone in my pocket and stand in the warm afternoon letting the thought drift into something I can carry without it weighing too much. Marie's problems are her own. Her story is her own. I hope it ends somewhere better than it started.
But that's for her to find out.
I walk back to my pack.
Rhys sees me coming and extends his arm. I tuck into his side and feel his warmth wrap around me immediately, his lips kissing my hair. Jonah is still talking and Rhys has one ear on the conversation and one on me, how he always divides his attention when I'm nearby.
I press my hand flat against his chest.
Feel his heartbeat. Steady and real.
He looks down at me.
I look up at him.
He nods once, lips turning up slightly.
Across the yard Malcolm is laughing at something Jess said, loud and unguarded, his whole face open.
Finn and Noah huddle over Finn's phone, their heads nearly touching, eyes bright with the excitement of people who share the same obscure passion.
Alex is still in his porch chair and when he sees me looking he raises his beer slightly—a small, private acknowledgment—and I feel the claim mark warm on my neck.
My pack.
My home.
My life—this one, the one I built from nothing and almost lost and chose again anyway.
I think about the girl who sat in a registry waiting room watching other omegas get chosen and wondering what was wrong with her.
The girl who said yes to five years of conditional love because she needed somewhere to go.
The girl who folded herself into corners, who swallowed her words before speaking them, whose smile became a ghost of what it once was.
She's still in me. She'll probably always be in me, in the same way that things that shaped you don't fully leave.
But she's not who I am anymore.
I'm the woman in the garden with four claiming marks and an apple tree that's finally giving fruit. The woman whose pack reorganized itself around her without being asked. The woman who learned, the hard way and then the good way, that she was always worth choosing.
It just took finding the right people to choose her.
Loved.
Kept.
Chosen.
Claimed.