The lie was transparent even to me.
Her cabin sat on stilts above the water, cypress wood weathered to silver, plants spilling from every surface. A pirogue tied to the dock. Lights glowing warm through windows as dusk settled over the bayou.
Then I spotted the alligator.
Nine feet of prehistoric predator floating in the shallows, watching me watch the cabin. Our eyes met across the water, two apex creatures recognizing each other. He didn't move toward me. Didn't retreat. Just... acknowledged.
I understood him. The patience of a hunter. The stillness that came before violence. We were the same kind of thing, he and I. Built for waiting. Built for the kill. I didn't approach the cabin. Didn't announce myself. Just watched from the tree line, cataloging entry points and sight lines and the particular way she moved across the porch in the evenings, a glass of something amber in her hand.
Old habits. The kind that had kept me alive when everyone else in my unit had died.
Then I found the stakes.
Orange flags with corporate logos, driven into the soft earth along the property line. Crescent Holdings. I pulled one out and examined it, memorizing every detail—the legal language, the survey coordinates, the implicit threat.
Someone was coming for her land.
A growl built in my chest, low and feral. The sound surprised me. I hadn't made sounds like that in years—had trained myself out of every involuntary reaction, every tell that might give away my position. Standing there with that stake in my hand, all I could think about was her.
Threat. Threat to her territory. Eliminate.
She wasn't mine. I had no claim on her. The instinct didn't care about logic, didn't care about the walls I'd built or the distance I'd tried to maintain. The instinct said protect, and I'd spent too many years following instincts to argue now.
I started patrolling the property lines regularly after that. Pulling up new stakes when they appeared, noting the frequency, tracking the pattern. The developers were getting bolder. Testing boundaries. Probing for weaknesses.
I wasn't the only one who'd noticed.
I caught scent trails on the stakes—other Alphas who'd been checking the same spots. Moonshine and cedar, sharp and masculine. Fontenot, the distiller. I'd bought supplies from his shop once, years ago. Big man, quiet, watched everything with those dark eyes.
The other scent was harder to place at first. River water and honey, something sweet underneath. It took me a few days to identify it—Thibodaux, the musician who played at The Rusty Hook. I'd seen him around town, all charm and easy smiles. The kind of man who made people want him without trying.
Both of them circling her. Both of them watching over her property.
Three Alphas. One Omega. None of us talking to each other, or to her.
The situation was untenable. Inefficient. We were duplicating efforts, leaving gaps in coverage, operating without coordination. If this had been a military operation, I would have called for a briefing, established clear protocols and areas of responsibility.
This wasn't a military operation, though. It was three broken men orbiting a woman who hadn't asked for any of us. I should have told her about the stakes. Should have walked up to her cabin, knocked on her door, and briefed her on the threat. That's what a rational person would have done.
Instead, I watched. I waited. I told myself I was gathering more intelligence, assessing the full scope of the threat before acting. The truth was simpler: I didn't know how to talk to her. Didn't know how to be around someone who looked at me and saw something other than the weapon I'd been shaped into.
She came to the rehabilitation center a week after bringing the hawk, just like I'd told her to.
I heard her truck before I saw it—that distinctive rattle, the engine that sounded like it was held together by willpower alone. I was in the aviary, checking on a recovering owl, and I went still when the sound reached me. Everything went still. The world narrowed down to the crunch of gravel, the slam of a door, the particular rhythm of her footsteps on the path.
I didn't go to meet her. Made her come find me. Watched from the shadows as she walked up to the main building, knocked, waited. She was wearing a sundress the color of whiskey, her auburn hair loose around her shoulders, and she smelled like apple cider and warm spice and something wild that made my pulse quicken.
"I know you're watching. You going to come out, or do I have to hunt you down?" Her voice carried across the property, calmand certain, as she turned in a slow circle scanning the tree line and the shadows where I stood.
I stepped out. Let her see me approach. Her eyes tracked my movement, sharp and assessing, and something flickered in those green-gold depths when I got close enough to smell.
"The hawk's recovering. Want to see?" The words came out of me clipped and rough from disuse as I stopped three feet away, keeping distance between us.
"I'd like that." She smiled, warm and genuine, and something in my chest did something complicated that I didn't have a name for. I showed her the hawk. Explained the healing process, the timeline for release, the signs of recovery. She listened with genuine interest, asked intelligent questions, reached out to touch the cage bars with gentle fingers.
"She's a fighter. I could tell, even when she was dying. That look in her eye." Her voice was soft and fond as she studied the bird, then she glanced at me sideways, her green-gold eyes sharp. "You've got the same look, you know. The look of someone who survived something they shouldn't have. Someone who came out the other side different than they went in." She tilted her head, watching me with patient curiosity. "What was yours?" She waited, giving me space to answer or not.
I didn't answer. Couldn't. The words were locked behind walls I'd built years ago, walls that had kept me functional when everything else had fallen apart. She didn't push. Just watched me with those knowing eyes, patient as the bayou itself.
