Chapter 10
Ten
Wren
I hold out for four days.
Four days of baking and pretending and keeping my eyes off the firehouse.
Four days of my body humming a little louder every morning, like a kettle nobody’s bothering to take off the heat.
Four days of telling myself I don’t need to understand a single thing, I just need my head down, my hands busy, and my ridiculous new instincts on a short leash.
On the fifth day, I give up and go find Della.
I pick the dead hour, the gap after lunch when the diner empties out. Just her, the coffee machine, and a radio playing something old. She takes one look at me coming through the door with my apron still on and puts two mugs down without being asked.
“Finally,” she says. “Sit.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You’ve had a question stuck in your throat for a week. It’s been very loud.” She slides into the booth across from me. “Ask it. I’ve got nowhere to be and a fresh pot.”
She’s an omega herself, I remember, though I’ve never seen her with anybody. Whatever her own story is, she keeps it behind the counter. She’s the one who feeds the whole town and goes home to a quiet apartment above the diner, and I’ve never once thought to ask her why.
So I ask it. Or I try. “Is it normal,” I start, and then I lose my nerve halfway and stare into my coffee. “For someone like me. Now. Is it normal to.”
“To want more than one,” Della says it gently, like it’s the easiest sentence in the world. “Yeah, love. Around here it’s about as normal as rain.”
I look up.
“This town runs on packs,” she says. “Always has. You noticed the Pelhams are two men and Susan, right? Dot’s got two alphas of her own, thirty years married, and she’ll tell you about all three of them if you stand still long enough.
It’s not a scandal here. It’s just a normal day.
An omega with a pack, an alpha pack looking for their omega, that’s the shape of half the families in Ember Hollow. ”
“That’s” I don’t have a word. “Nobody told me that.”
“Nobody tells the new girl the whole rulebook on day one. It’d scare her off.
” She blows across her tea. “It’s the scent that does it, mostly.
You get near the right ones, and your body just knows.
Settles. Says yes, these, before your head’s caught up.
It’s not magic, it doesn’t drag you anywhere you don’t want to go.
It’s more like a nudge. A very loud, very stubborn nudge.
” She turns her mug a slow half-circle on the table. “Trust me, I know how loud.”
That lands somewhere under my ribs, because I know that nudge. I’ve been calling it heartburn for a week.
“And it runs both ways,” she says. “You settle around the right pack. But a pack settles around the right omega too, that’s the whole point of one.
Three alphas on their own is a lot of want with nowhere to put it.
They run hot. They get restless, snappish, they pick fights over nothing.
An omega’s the still point. The thing that makes the whole shape make sense.
” She says it fond, and a little sad, and I file the sad part away to wonder about some other time.
“Okay,” I say carefully. “But is it normal to want. More than two.”
Della’s mouth curves. She’s too kind to laugh at me, but it’s close.
“Three’s a very popular number, sweetheart. Especially if the three already come as a set.”
I go still. “What do you mean, a set?”
And she looks at me, and my face must give the whole thing away, because her eyebrows climb slowly toward her hairline, and she sets her mug down very carefully, like it might go off in her hand.
“Oh,” she says. “Oh, honey. Cal, Eli, and Rhett.”
I don’t say anything. Which is, apparently, saying everything.
“You didn’t know.” It’s not a question. She’s studying me like she’s doing quick math and not liking the total. “You genuinely didn’t know they’re a pack.”
Everything in me goes cold and quiet at once.
“A pack,” I repeat.
“Bonded. Six years, near enough. The three of them, one unit.” She says it slow now, feeding me each word like a step onto ice.
“Everybody knows. It’s the great sad story of this town, honestly.
Three good alphas, a real pack, and no omega, and they’d all but given up on ever finding one.
Dot’s spent years shoving every unbonded omega in the county at that firehouse and none of it ever took.
And then.” She stops. Her eyes go soft and terrible.
“And then you moved in across the road.”
I put my coffee down before I drop it.
A pack. Not three men. One thing. Three men who belong to each other, who I watched move around a griddle like a machine that’s run for years, who cook, rescue cats, fix shelves, finish each other’s jobs without a word, because they are not three separate problems I’ve been failing to ignore.
They’re one problem. And I slept with a third of it on my own damn counter.
I think about the pancake breakfast. The three of them behind the griddle moving like one animal.
Eli plating the best one for me. Cal lighting up.
Rhett with my name already in his mouth before I’d said it.
I thought I was meeting three men. I was meeting a family that’s been waiting six years, and I wandered into the middle of it with flour on my apron and no idea it was anything at all.
“I didn’t know,” I say, and my voice comes out small. “Della, I swear I didn’t know. I would never have. If I’d known they were—” I can’t finish. “One of them. I was with one of them. And he walked out like it was nothing, and now I find out he’s got two—”
“Which one?” Della’s gone very still.
I shake my head. I’m not saying it. Some things a person keeps.
“It doesn’t matter.” She reaches across and puts her hand over mine, warm, steady.
“Wren. Listen to me. It’s not the mess you think it is.
That’s not how it works here. A pack that’s looking for an omega, one of them being with you, that’s not a betrayal of the other two.
That’s the opposite. That’s how it often starts.
He’d have gone home, and they’d have smelled you on him, and not one of them would’ve thrown a punch over it. That’s not what a pack is.”
There’s the thing she’s trying to hand me, gentle as anything, and I can’t take it, because it requires believing a sentence my whole life has trained me to know is a lie.
That they might want me. All of them. On purpose. That I could be the end of a six-year sad story and not just a nice afternoon on the way to something better.
“No,” I say.
“Wren—”
“No. Della, look at me.” I actually laugh, and it comes out wrong.
“I’m the woman who came here to disappear.
Men like that don’t wait six years for a whole town of options and then pick the flustered new baker who dropped scones on their boots.
That’s not a real thing that happens. One of them had a good time.
It was nothing. He told me it was nothing without saying a word, and I believed him, because it’s the only part of this that actually makes sense. ”
Della looks at me for a long moment. Whatever she sees, it makes her go quiet, and it isn’t agreement.
“You know what I notice,” she says finally, mild, wiping a ring off the table that isn’t there.
“I notice all three of those men go stupid when you walk past my window. Every time. Six years I’ve watched them be fine, and three weeks you’ve been here, and now they’re not fine at all.
” She shrugs. “But you’re the baker. You’d know better than me. ”
I don’t answer that. I can’t. It’s too big, too warm, too dangerous to hold, so I set it down where I set everything down, on the outside, where it can’t get in and hurt me.
Because I know how it goes if I let myself believe her.
I believe I’m the end of their sad story.
I let it in. I let myself want the whole impossible thing out loud, and then one ordinary morning they remember there’s a reason they waited six years, and it turns out it wasn’t me.
Better to keep it out on the step where it can’t reach me.
Cheaper. I’ve paid the other way, and I didn’t care for the price.
“Thanks for the coffee,” I say, and stand, and my legs are not entirely steady.
“Anytime.” She lets me go, because she’s a good friend, and good friends know when you’ve heard as much truth as you can hold in one afternoon. But as I reach the door, she adds, soft, “For what it’s worth. That kettle sound you’re pretending you can’t hear? Go talk to Dot about that. Soon.”
I don’t ask what she means. Some part of me, the part humming louder every single morning, already knows, even if I won’t say the word yet. Whatever’s barreling toward my body is nearly here, and it does not care one bit that I’ve decided to want nothing from anyone ever again.
I walk back to my shop that smells like all three of them. I let myself into the quiet. I stand in the middle of it with a truth I can’t use and a body I can’t argue with.
A pack. They’re a pack.
And the worst part, the part I’d never say out loud to Della or anyone, is the flicker of a feeling underneath the shame. Quick. Unwelcome. Stamped out the second I noticed it.
For half a second, before I knew better, it felt like hope.