Chapter forty-two
Miles
The nest doesn’t smell right anymore.
It’s been a week. Still, if I press my face hard enough into the right blanket—the one she always curled up with and I had to pry off her in the morning because she was a blanket thief—I can catch her scent.
Ozone and peach, faded, fading a little more every day.
I keep burying my nose in it, desperate, like chasing a high I already know is gone.
My alphas are in the living room. I hear them through the cracked door.
Their voices are low, careful. The hush of alphas who’ve taken the week off to watch their omega in case he shatters.
They rotate. Someone checks on me every hour, opens the door, looks in.
I fake sleep. They fake believing me. It’s the only game left.
The nest is too big. That’s the problem.
Built for five because I can’t bring myself to change it back to four, but now it’s only me anyway.
I can twist the blankets, build up the walls, burrow deep, but there’s a gap.
A Lily-shaped gap that nothing else fills.
Believe me I’ve tried. Pillows, hoodies, even the towel she used before she left and no I didn’t wash it because it still smells like the strawberry body wash Gabriel bought her.
But it isn’t fabric that’s missing. It’s the warm weight of a girl who used to wedge her back against my chest and breathe slow while I held her.
I’d lie there thinking, this is mine. And for the first time in my whole miserable life, I believed it.
And then I sent her away.
It plays on repeat. Over and over, every time I close my eyes. Her face, right before I ruined everything.
Her voice raw from crying all night—for me, because she was afraid for me and the only thing she wanted was to be available to help me if I needed it. I walked into the living room and saw her between my alphas and my brain went nuclear.
I called her a snake. A stray. A homeless dog. Told Gabriel to throw her out.
I see her on the floor, looking up at me with those blue eyes while I jammed every knife I had straight into her. Unwanted. Worthless. Reject. The words my old pack used on me that lived in my bones for years… I gave them to her, a girl that never deserved them.
She said she loves me.
She stood there trembling, defenses gone, stripped to nothing, and she gave me the most fragile thing anyone can offer.
And I said: I was just using you to get off. Why would I love a rejected stray?
I watched her die. Not her body but the thing behind her eyes. Hope. That tiny, stubborn hope that survived the registry, survived my cruelty and Gabriel’s mistakes and every reason she had to give up—and I snuffed it out. Just like that.
I did that.
The worst thing is that for a second—a split second—I felt her love hit me and I almost grabbed it. Almost held on. Almost said it back. Because it was true. It’s been true for weeks. Maybe since the night she sat in my nest and let me order her around and smiled when it was over.
But I didn’t. Because I’m Miles. I’m broken in all the places that matter. The last time I let someone besides my current alphas in, they called me faulty wiring and tried to trade me to the men who killed them. My body remembers even when I try not to.
I roll over and bury my face in her blanket. Her scent is almost gone. Another day or two and it’ll just be me and my alphas and a hole where she used to be.
I can’t stop thinking about her laugh. She tried not to smile when I said something awful and failed every time, the corners of her mouth twitching even when she tried to hide it. She’d peek at my sketches over my shoulder, thinking I didn’t notice. I always noticed. I pretended to be annoyed.
I wasn’t.
I think about her pressed against me. Warm skin. Soft breaths. Her body melting under my hands when I touched her neck. She listened because she wanted to. She trusted me to take control without hurting her.
And I destroyed that trust. Smashed the thing she built for me—the thing nobody else ever earned.
Because I was afraid.
Because I felt out of control, and the fastest way to get it back was to break something close by.
Her.
I can’t lie here anymore. If I do, I think I’ll die.
I get up. My body protests—a week of barely eating, barely moving. My muscles are stiff. My bones are heavy. I walk down the hall. I can feel Gabriel watching from where he stands. He doesn’t speak. I go to the studio.
The painting is still on the easel.
She finished it. The imaginary city from my sketch.
The buildings rise from the bottom of the canvas in dark, heavy strokes—shadows, angles, something huge built on shaky ground.
But the higher up I look, the dark thins.
Colors shift. Deep blue becomes lavender, becomes gold.
At the top, a sunset shatters the skyline.
Light bleeding through like the city is being born instead of dying.
It’s beautiful. The most beautiful thing anyone’s ever made from something I drew.
I see her in it. The darkness at the base—that’s where she started. The registry. Rejection. Years of feeling like she wasn’t enough. The light at the top—that’s what she was turning into. Here, in this house, with us.
With me.
It’s hope clawing its way out of fear. That’s what she painted. She looked at my sketch—all hard lines and ragged corners, the only way I see the world—and she found the soft parts. She found the light I never put there, and painted it in herself.
She’s my fucking light.
I press my hand to the canvas. The paint is dry.
I love her.
The thought is quiet. Like sunrise. You don’t choose it or earn it. It just happens. Fighting it is pointless.
I love Lily.
It’s different from how I love my alphas. Gabriel is my anchor, the thing that keeps me from flying apart. Garrett is my warmth, proof that gentleness doesn’t mean weakness. Cyrus is my silence, the calm I can’t make for myself. They’re the walls of my house. The beams that hold me up.
Lily is the window. She let in the light. And I boarded her up and nailed her shut because the brightness scared me.
I remember her face when I said I could never love her. How everything drained from her. I could almost see it leaking through the cracks in the floorboards under her feet. She went still—she was someone who just learned their worst fear is real.
I picture her with Jeremy. His pack. Surrounded by alphas tripping over each other to make her smile. I picture them touching her. Holding her. Jeremy’s knot inside her while she closes her eyes and wishes it was someone else.
No.
She’s my omega. Mine. She belongs here, in my nest—our nest, in my arms, arguing with me over the name of a stuffed cat, kicking me under the blankets, painting light into my darkness.
And I threw her away like it didn’t matter. Like she didn’t matter.
I have to get her back.
I have to get her back now.
I leave the room. My feet move fast, faster than my thoughts, carrying me into the living room where my alphas are arranged like they’ve been waiting for something, but didn’t know what it was until now.
Gabriel on the couch, phone in hand. Garrett in the armchair, leg bouncing. Cyrus by the window, arms crossed, watching the street like he always does, waiting for the world to give him a reason.
“I fucked up.”
They look at me. No one says anything. My words come out fast, tumbling, my voice cracking because I haven’t talked this much in a week, and my throat feels like it forgot how.
“I fucked up really bad and I have to fix it. I know what I did. I know she didn’t try to steal you.
She was out here because she was worried about me.
She was scared for me and she didn’t want to be alone and she asked you to stay with her and I walked in and I—I broke everything because I was out of control and she was the closest thing I could grab. ”
Garrett sits forward. “Miles—“
“Let me finish.” I’m shaking. My hands won’t stop.
“I know she loves me. I saw it in her face and I threw it back at her because I was terrified. Because the last time someone was that close to me besides you guys, they spent years telling me I was worthless and then they tried to sell me to the people who murdered them. My brain saw Lily giving me everything and it told me to run, because that’s how it always goes: someone hurts you.
But she wasn’t hurting me. She was loving me. And I punished her for it.”
Dead quiet. Gabriel hasn’t moved.
“I love her. I love Lily. We’re both omegas and it doesn’t make much sense but it’s real and it’s mine and I destroyed it because I’m fucked up and scared and I’ve been trying to survive for so long that I forgot what it looks like when someone from the outside just wants… me. For me.”
I stumble over everything like I’ve been stumbling for years. The words are vomiting out of my mouth and I know it but I can’t stop because I don’t know how else to make them understand.
“I want her back. I want her in our nest every night. I want to share her with you and nobody else. I want her to be ours. I want to hear her laugh in this house again, watch her paint those terrible beautiful things, fight over the remote, wake up every morning to her breathing in my ear.” I swallow.
My eyes burn. “We have to get her back before Jeremy claims her. Before it’s permanent. ”
Garrett jumps up so fast his chair almost tips. “Thank God,” he says. “Thank fucking God.”
Gabriel doesn’t move. He’s calm, but I see the cracks. The tension in his hands. His jaw set. I can’t read what his eyes are doing. “Tell me exactly what you need, Miles. Because if we do this, it’s forever. No more sending her away when things get hard.”
“I know.”
“No more ultimatums. No more threatening to leave if you don’t get your way. If she comes back, she stays. We commit. All of us. You understand what that means?”
“I understand.”