Chapter eighteen
Lily
Iopen my eyes and, for a second, I actually believe today will be different.
I tell myself that every morning, but today it feels true.
Spoiler: it’s not. The first thing I notice is the absence of pain.
No migraine, no rolling nausea, no lying in the dark counting imaginary cracks in a ceiling I know is smooth.
My body hums with the memory of yesterday.
The bite, the command, the quiet relief that followed.
Whatever Miles did to me in the kitchen, it worked.
It really worked. Better than Garrett’s purr for Miles that accidentally reached me.
Faster than anything Dr. Turner can scribble on a prescription pad.
Turns out my body doesn’t care about alpha pheromones.
It wants Miles standing over me, telling me to give in.
It wants the feeling of being safe and protected, even if Miles wasn’t actually trying to make me feel either of those things.
He was probably trying to do the opposite.
But my omega didn’t understand that. All she felt was someone stronger calming her down. I’ll take it.
So that’s my plan. Find Miles. Stay near him. Let whatever happened between us happen again. Because I need it. My whole body is screaming for it. And for about two and a half seconds yesterday, Miles looked at me like I was more than an unsolvable problem.
I shower, get dressed, check the mirror.
The dark circles aren’t so bad today. There’s some color in my cheeks, and my scent is actually noticeable.
It smells like ozone and peach, not the sad, faded-paper scent I’ve been dragging around.
For the first time in days, I look alive. Or at least, not totally dead.
I find Miles at nine, right where he tends to be: in the kitchen with coffee, sketchbook open, pencil moving. It’s his ritual, his space. Except now, when I look at the counter, all I can see is myself bent over it, his teeth in my neck. The ghost of it is everywhere.
“Morning,” I say.
He doesn’t even look up. Just keeps sketching. “What do you want?”
“Just coffee.”
“Then get it and go.”
Flat. Cold. Not the cutting cruelty he usually throws at me. I can see the wall he built overnight while he stood outside my door and walked away holding everything in.
I pour my coffee and stand at the sink, lingering.
“I said go,” he says, like he’s repeating a script.
“I heard you.”
Now he lifts his head. His eyes are bloodshot, the dark circles even worse than mine. He didn’t sleep. So whatever peace I found last night, he found the opposite.
“If you’re waiting for a repeat of yesterday, don’t.” It’s so controlled it sounds rehearsed. “That was a mistake. It shouldn’t have happened and it won’t happen again.”
“It helped me, Miles.”
“I don’t care.”
“My headache was gone. Completely gone, even after—“
“I said I don’t care.” He snaps the sketchbook closed. “What happened was a biological accident. Proximity, hormones, nothing else. It didn’t mean anything.”
“Your scent said otherwise.”
That gets him. His face just… locks. The mask he rebuilt overnight gets a crack in it, and he knows I see it, and that makes him even more dangerous.
“Get out of my kitchen,” he says. “Now.”
I take my coffee and leave, but not to my room. I go to the living room, sit on the couch, and wait.
Twenty minutes later, he comes out with his sketchbook and stops when he sees me. His nostrils flare. He catches my scent—which, yes, is stronger today, reaching for him whether I want it to or not.
“You’re in my spot,” he says.
I move to the other end. He sits where I was, opens his sketchbook, and starts drawing. We’re just existing together in the same room. I count that as progress.
The whole morning goes like this: me orbiting him at a safe distance, him pretending I’m invisible while tracking my every move. I try talking to him, twice. Both times he cuts me off with comments that sting.
“I heard you used to paint. Did you always, or is that a recent hobby for someone with too much free time and no future?”
“The Carrs called yesterday, by the way. Gabriel’s setting up another date. You should practice your ‘I’m not completely broken’ face.”
Each one hurts. Each one is meant to send me back to my room, back to the isolation, back to the cage. But I stay. Yesterday, his body told me what his mouth refuses to say, and I’m stubborn (or desperate) enough to wait for the body to win.
By noon, I’m losing. The headache is coming back. The relief from the morning is wearing off as the hours tick by with no real contact. My body knows what it wants and it’s not getting it.
Miles notices, of course. He notices everything.
“You look pale,” he says, not looking up from his sketch.
“I’m fine.”
“Liar. You look like you’re about to pass out.”
“Then maybe you could—“
“No. Whatever you’re about to ask, the answer’s no.”
I swallow the rest. The headache pulses.
Miles sets his pencil down. He looks at me, and for a second, I see it. The fight behind his eyes. What he wants to do versus what he thinks he should do. Then it’s gone. The mask is back.
“The guest bathroom needs cleaning,” he says.
It takes me a second. “What?”
“The guest bathroom. It’s dirty. Go clean it.”
He’s staring. Waiting.
So I clean the guest bathroom.
When I come back, he has another order. “The laundry room floor needs mopping.”
I mop it.
“The windows in the living room have fingerprints.”
I clean them.
“The pantry is disorganized.”
I reorganize it.
He’s doing it again. Like yesterday, giving orders, watching me follow them, testing the dynamic.
Only yesterday, the orders came after the bite, after the kiss, after we both cracked open.
Yesterday, there was heat under the control.
It was raw and mutual. Today, it’s just orders.
Me, on my hands and knees scrubbing tile, while he sits on the couch drawing, handing out tasks like he’s managing a cleaning crew.
I do everything he says. Every single thing.
I tell myself it’s because I’m working for the reward: if I’m good enough, compliant enough, maybe he’ll give me what he gave me yesterday.
The bite, the stillness, the relief. I’m working for it the way a dog works for a treat, and the humiliation doesn’t stop me.
But the reward never comes. One o’clock. Two o’clock. Three o’clock. He keeps ordering, I keep obeying. My knees are bruised, my hands are raw from the cleaners, and the headache is no longer lurking. It’s here, pounding at the base of my skull.
“The bathroom mirrors have spots.”
“I already cleaned those.”
“Clean them again.”
So I do. My vision blurs halfway through and I have to grip the sink to stay upright. The nausea’s back. The black mood is circling, waiting to take over.
By four I’m basically a zombie. The throbbing is splitting my skull.
Light is a weapon. Sound is an attack. I’ve been on my feet for hours, cleaning a house that was already immaculate, following orders from an omega who won’t give me what I need because admitting it would mean admitting he wants to.
He’s in the kitchen when I finish the last task, re-wiping the counters, again. He’s eating an apple, leaning against the fridge, eyes on me like I’m a checklist item.
“Anything else?” I ask. My voice sounds awful, even to me.
“No. You’re done.”
I stand there. Waiting for… something. For him to cross the room, put his teeth on my neck. For him to say something, anything, that means yesterday happened. For the reward I’ve been scrubbing for all day.
“What are you waiting for?” he asks.
“Nothing,” I say. “I’m not waiting for anything.”
I leave. The hallway rocks under my feet. I catch myself on the wall, breathe through the nausea, but the world won’t hold still. The headache is alive, chewing through my skull.
I lie on my bed and reflect on what an idiot I made of myself today.
***
Hours later the ache is worse than it’s been in days. I think all the moving around and cleaning amplified everything.
I need help. Real help that makes it stop, even for a few minutes.
Dr. Turner’s pills aren’t even touching it.
Miles won’t help me. That’s clear. Arden’s clinical exposure is a joke I refuse to entertain. Gabriel won’t touch me. Cyrus follows Gabriel.
That leaves Garrett. They all came home a while ago but I couldn’t bring myself to leave the bed.
I know what this will cost.
I go anyway.
I find him in his room, which is weird. Garrett’s almost never alone in his room. But today the door’s closed, and when I knock, his voice is muffled.
“Yeah?”
I go in. He’s on his bed, laptop open, but he closes it as soon as he sees me. His whole face goes from relaxed to worried in a heartbeat.
“Lily? What’s wrong?”
I step in. My hands are shaking. My eyes burn. The agony is so bad, even talking is hard.
“Miles was…hard today,” I say. “All day. And I’m really not feeling well.”
Garrett’s expression softens into that look—the one that says he wants to fix me but isn’t sure how. “He’s probably confused about what happened yesterday. He doesn’t know how to deal with things he can’t control, so he lashes out.”
He doesn’t mention details. I don’t offer them. The scent in the kitchen told everyone what they needed to know, and the fact that nobody’s brought it up tells me they don’t want to. Maybe they’re disgusted. Or scared. Maybe Gabriel told them not to mention it.
“What do you need?” Garrett asks.
“My head.” My voice breaks. “It’s bad, Garrett. Really bad. It hasn’t been this bad since…” I stop because I don’t want to cry. Not yet. “I need it to stop. Even for a few minutes. I need—“
I can’t finish. The tears are right there, and the pain is so loud I can hear it.
Garrett’s face is a battlefield. I can see the alpha who wants to hold me, the packmate who’s promised to follow Gabriel’s rules, the man who drove slow so I could have five more minutes of respite in the truck. He glances at the door. He’s weighing the risk.
“Close the door,” he says.