Chapter six #2
The lobby is empty at 2:23 AM. The night doorman, a middle-aged Beta named Frank who's been nothing but polite, looks up from his desk with a surprised expression.
"Ms. Vasquez? Everything okay?"
"Fine, Frank. Just going for a walk."
He frowns. "At two in the morning? Alone?" His nostrils flare, scenting me, reading the distress in my scent. A Beta's sense of smell isn't as sharp as an Alpha's, but distress is distress. "Can I call someone for you? Mr. Blaine's car is…"
"I'm fine," I say, and I force a smile. "Fresh air. I'll be back."
The lie tastes bitter, and Frank doesn't look convinced, but he nods and returns to his desk. I push through the revolving door and step out into the night.
The city is different at 2 AM. The traffic has thinned to occasional taxis and delivery trucks. The streetlights cast pools of amber on the sidewalk, and the air is cool, almost cold against my bare arms. I pull my sleeves down over my hands and walk.
I don't have a plan. I don't have a destination. I have $312 in my checking account, a duffel bag of thrift-store clothes, and a phone with a dead battery.
I walk.
The streets narrow as I leave the gleaming downtown core and enter a neighborhood of bodegas and laundromats and apartments with fire escapes.
This is closer to my world, not the penthouse world, not the billionaire world, but the real one.
The one where people work for a living, count their change, and don't hire omegas through exclusive matching services.
I pass a 24-hour diner. The windows are fogged, and the neon sign buzzes and flickers. Inside, a few night-shift workers hunch over coffee, a cook moves behind the counter, and a waitress refills cups. It looks like my mother's diner.
I keep walking.
Three blocks later, I find a bus stop. The schedule on the metal sign says the next bus comes at 3:15 AM. Cross-town to the regional station. From there, I can catch a bus to Millbrook. Six hours. I'd be home by morning.
Home.
The word feels wrong. Millbrook isn't home, it's the place I left. The place with no opportunities, no future, no possibility of being anything more than what I've always been. The waitress's daughter. The omega who couldn't afford to finish school.
But at least in Millbrook, I know what I am. I'm not a placeholder there. I'm not a match. I'm not a function. I'm just Willow, small, unremarkable, and safe.
I sit on the bus bench and set my duffel bag beside me. The metal is cold through my jeans, and I shiver. The streetlight above me flickers. A taxi passes, splashing water from a puddle.
And then I smell it.
Pine.
Faint, so faint I almost miss it. But it's there. On me. On the shirt I'm wearing, not Deklan's shirt - I left that behind - but the long-sleeved shirt I changed into before I walked out. It was in my duffel bag, in the penthouse for two days, and the scent of the house has seeped into the fabric.
Pine. Smoke. Cedar.
All three of them. On me. In me. Woven into my clothes and my skin and my hair and my lungs. I've been breathing them for two days, and their scent has become part of me.
I press my face into my sleeve and inhale.
And the nesting urge hits me like a freight train.
It's not a thought. It's not a desire. It's a biological imperative, a primal, cellular demand that overrides every logical process in my brain.
My omega instincts scream at me. Nest. Build.
Gather. Make a home. My hands shake and my vision blurs.
I can feel my body producing slick, the scent-match responding to the pine-smoke-cedar on my clothes, triggering arousal even now, even here, alone on a bus bench at 2:30 in the morning.
I want to nest. I want to gather their clothes, the shirts they wore, the sheets they slept on, the pillows that hold their scent, and build something. A place. A home. A promise.
But I left. I walked out. I chose safety over hope. And now I'm sitting on a cold bench, smelling them on my clothes, and my body is screaming at me for being the biggest fool who ever lived.
Go back, the instinct says.
I can't.
Go back. Build your nest. Let them hold you.
They'll let me go. They'll get bored. The match will fade.
You don't know that.
I know what happened to Serena.
You're not Serena.
How do I know that?
I don't. That's the thing. I don't know. I can't know. The future is unwritten, and the match is untested, and the only way to find out if it's real is to stay and risk everything. And I'm not brave enough.
I'm just not.
I sit on the bench, and I wait for the bus, and I breathe in pine-smoke-cedar and try not to cry. And I fail.
At 3:02 AM, a black SUV pulls up to the curb.
I don't look up because I don't need to. The scent that pours out when the driver's door opens is pine and smoke and Alpha and JD.
"Willow." His voice is a blade. Low and controlled, barely.
I look up.
He's standing in front of the SUV, and he looks like hell.
His dark hair is disheveled, like he's been running his hands through it for hours.
His eyes are black, fully black, no color left, the Alpha in him surging past every barrier he's built.
He's wearing the same clothes from earlier, the suit pants, the unbuttoned shirt, the rolled sleeves, but the shirt is half untucked now, and his chest is heaving like he's been running.
Behind him, two more figures emerge from the SUV. Knox, golden hair wild, green eyes blazing, jaw tight. And Deklan, glasses absent, laptop nowhere in sight, his controlled facade cracked wide open.
They found me.
Of course they found me. I left my scent trail through the entire building, through the lobby, and across twenty blocks of city sidewalk. I might as well have left breadcrumbs.
JD walks toward me. Not running, walking. Each step deliberate and measured, the walk of a man who is holding himself back from something violent. His eyes never leave mine.
"Don't," I whisper.
He stops. Three feet away. Close enough to touch. Close enough to scent, pine and smoke rolling off him in waves, thick and possessive and angry.
"Don't what?" His voice is gravel.
"Don't, don't make this harder than it already is." My voice breaks. "Please, JD. Just let me go."
Something crosses his face. Something raw and wounded and terrible. "You want me to let you go."
"Yes."
"You're sitting at a bus stop at 3 AM with a duffel bag and no plan.
" His voice cracks on the last word. "You're wearing a shirt that smells like us.
You're producing enough slick for me to smell it from ten feet away.
Your nesting instincts are screaming so loud I can feel them in my chest, and you want me to let you go. "
"Yes," I say again, but the word is barely a whisper.
"Why?"
The question is simple. Three letters. And it shatters me.
"Because I can't stay." The tears come again, hot, fast, and unstoppable. "I can't stay and hope and believe and then wake up one day and find out it was all just, just chemistry. Just a match. Just biology pretending to be love."
JD stares at me. Behind him, Knox makes a sound, a sharp, wounded inhale. Deklan is motionless, his dark eyes fixed on me with an intensity that makes my skin prickle.
"Who told you that?" JD says. His voice is quiet now. Dangerously quiet.
"Serena." I swallow. "She said the match fades. She said you'd get bored. She said I was just a… a placeholder. A function. A warm body."
Silence.
Then JD moves.
He doesn't lunge. He doesn't grab me. He closes the three feet between us in one step, drops to his knees on the wet pavement, and wraps his arms around my waist.
And I freeze.
His face presses against my stomach. His shoulders, heaving, massive and trembling, shake. And from somewhere deep in his chest, a sound rises. Not a growl. Not a roar. A whine. Low and broken, the sound of an Alpha in distress.
"Don't," he says against my stomach. "Don't leave."
"JD…"
"You're not a placeholder." His voice is muffled, rough, and I feel his arms tighten around me.
"You're not a function. You're not a warm body.
You're Willow. You walked into our house and made it warm.
You held Lily, and she called you omega.
You made Deklan feel. Deklan. The man who hasn't felt anything in six months. "
"JD, please."
"I'm begging you." He looks up. His black eyes are wet.
JD Blaine, billionaire, CEO, the man who controls everything, is kneeling on a wet sidewalk at 3 AM, looking up at me with tears in his eyes.
"I have never begged anyone for anything in my life.
I built an empire from nothing. I survived foster care.
I survived the streets. I survived everything the world threw at me by being too stubborn to break.
But this, you, if you walk away, I will break.
We will break. And I am begging you. Stay. "
I can't breathe.
Behind him, Knox drops to his knees. Not in front of me, beside JD, his hand on the Alpha's shoulder, his green eyes fixed on my face.
He doesn't speak. He doesn't grin. He doesn't whisper filth.
He just looks at me with an expression so open, so raw, so desperate that it steals the last of my resolve.
And Deklan. Deklan steps forward and stands behind the two Alphas, looking down at me with those dark, unguarded eyes. He doesn't kneel. He doesn't beg. He just says one word.
"Home."
One word. That's all.
And it's enough.
My hands find JD's hair, dark, thick, damp with sweat, and I bury my fingers in it. He makes a sound against my stomach, muffled and desperate, and his arms crush me against him.
"I'm scared," I whisper.
"We know," Knox says. His hand finds mine, wrapping around my wrist, pulling it to his mouth, pressing his lips to my pulse point. "We're scared too."
"Then why…" My voice cracks. "Why do this? Why risk it?"
Deklan answers. "Because you're worth the risk."