Chapter Eight
Miles
Rowan came in looking like someone ran over his cat. We didn’t have a cat.
“What’s going on?” I asked. Lev and I were making dinner. Rowan’s hours at the clinic varied. Sometimes omegas had to make appointments at odd times of the night or early in the morning. He never turned down one of those requests. He worked himself to the bone helping the omegas in our community.
He was once offered a prestigious position in a fancy hospital, but he declined it in favor of his dream of helping omegas who had fallen through the cracks.
“Let’s talk over dinner. About the omega. I need a shower first.”
Lev and I looked at each other. We were making a chopped salad to go along with the roasted vegetables and sausage meal.
We hadn’t talked about Harper since the day Lev brought her up.
I’d seen her in orientation and again in passing at the bakery, but I hadn’t had any life-changing experiences with her, so I didn’t bring it up again.
Clearly, Rowan had. He didn’t often fret about things that weren’t important.
We sat at the table after Rowan came out of his room and made our plates in silence.
“What about the omega?” I asked when I couldn’t take the quiet any longer.
Rowan nodded and served himself some salad. “I saw her the other day. A couple of days after Lev brought her up. I wanted to see for myself.”
He hadn’t told us any of this. Rowan kept his feelings to himself most of the time. All of us were heartbroken over not finding our omega yet, but sometimes I thought it hit Rowan hardest.
“And?” I prompted. My heart picked up the pace a little bit and my dinner? Almost forgotten.
“I went to the bakery early one morning after Lev told us about her. She was practically flying around the place busy and almost knocked into me. When she did, a bottle of pills fell out of her apron. They were street suppressants. Black-market shit no one has prescribed in years. I gave her the card to the clinic and, today, she was brought in after fainting at work.”
“Is she okay?” Lev asked, leaning forward.
He nodded. “She is now. The suppressants she was taking were depleting her system. That, and she’s going to school and working and not feeding herself well.”
I sat back in my chair. “She’s in trouble. Or running from someone.”
“An ex-pack, from what I could gather. She keeps the information tucked in tight. But I got her a prescription, and she’s going to come back in to get them.”
“Her smell?” I asked, needing to know. It was one thing to be attracted to a female but quite another to have her be a scent match.
“She smells incredible. The suppressants and all the scent blockers she wears mask most of it, but from what my wolf could get a whiff of…she might be a match for us.”
Lev’s brow furrowed. That worry line in his forehead deepened. “What can we do for her? She’s defensive and shielded.”
Rowan shook his head. “I don’t know. What we did today at the clinic was a good step. She used the name Harper, but I’m not sure if that’s her real name or not. She breathed easier once she knew we weren’t going to register the visit in the system.”
“Harper,” I breathed out. In an instant, everything clicked. “Wait a minute. Pink hair?”
All eyes were on me. They both nodded.
“Shit. I’ve seen her too. She was in the administration office and then in my orientation. Harper. Pink hair. Beautiful. Curves for days. Stunning blue eyes.”
“That’s the one.” No one was eating. There were more important things on the table.
“She might just be the one.” Lev stated the obvious, but I was glad someone said it aloud.
“Except she muttered something about alphas and not in a good way. She was adamant about not putting her in the system at the clinic. She was taking black-market suppressants, so there is a reason she’s hiding her name and her location.
I don’t think she’s going to swoon and fall into our arms.” Rowan had a point.
“So what do we do?” Lev asked. They all looked to me as the alpha of the pack to come up with something, but our hands were mostly tied.
“We do what we have been,” I said. “We accidentally run into her more when we can. Try to make contact.”
Rowan shook his head. “She’s an omega, not an alien. This feels…weird.”
“That’s all we can do for now. She’s not going to trust us until we earn it. All we know about her is where she works, where she goes to school, and her name. We look out for her. Be around.”
We began eating our dinner and had almost finished when Rowan looked up. “There’s something else I forgot about. When I told her that maybe she needed some time to rest in her nest, she said ‘There’s no nest for omegas like me.’ I’ve never heard an omega think she has to earn her nest somehow.”
Omegas didn’t earn their nests. Nests to an omega were like food, water, air. A necessity for their well-being and for their beast if they had one. A nest was where an omega felt safe and secure in a world that didn’t always make them feel that way.
“She has no nest, then,” I said, my thoughts wandering to the room we had reserved for our omega. It would be her room, her nest. She would decorate it any way she liked. She would take our scent-saturated items and put them there, her alphas’ scents bringing her comfort.
I imagined Harper in her nest, in our home. Safe. Secure. Loved. Adored.
If Fate meant for us all to be together, then I had confidence it would happen. The goddess wouldn’t do that to us, put her in our path just to take her away. I wouldn’t believe it. Couldn’t.