“You.” It breaks out of me. “I need — I need you in it. Your — “ My face is on fire. “Your scent. I need your scents in my nest, I can't — it won't be safe without —”
For a second nobody moves.
Then Finn reaches back over his shoulder and pulls his shirt off in one motion, and hands it to me. Just like that. Woodsmoke and clove, warm from his body, and I press it to my face and make a sound of pure relief that should embarrass me and doesn't.
“Here.” Hudson, tugging his over his head, giving it over. Juniper. “Been trying to figure out how to get this on you for a month. Wasn't picturing these circumstances, but I'll take it.”
And Logan, last, careful, unbuttoning his flannel with hands that aren't quite steady, folding it once before he sets it in my palms like it matters, like I matter. Maple and cedar, the one my body's been reaching for across fences for five years.
I take all three and I weave them into the center where I'll sleep, and the second their scents layer together over mine the whole nest goes right, clicks into place,safe, and I sink into the middle of it and breathe like I haven't breathed in days.
Three shirtless alphas kneel around my bed, not touching me, watching me settle into a nest built of their own clothes, and none of them look away.
Hudson makes the calls.
I hear him in the hall, low, because I asked and he understood without me finishing the sentence.
“Yeah, Dottie, big order. Whatever travels. Three hungry men and an omega who's not going to eat much, so — everything. All of it.” A pause. “No. She's fine. She's got people.”Another pause, and his voice changes, goes soft and a little dangerous. “And Dottie. If one word of this turns up on your specials board, I'll know exactly who to blame. Thanks. You're a queen. Bye.”
Finn calls the firehouse and says four words about a family thing and hangs up. Logan texts his brother to cover the build.
Our omega's in heat.Nobody says it out loud. But it's in the room, in the way they've rearranged their whole lives around my bedroom in the space of an hour, in the water refilled before I've finished it, the fresh cool cloth Logan lays on the back of my neck between waves without being asked, the way none of them so much as shifts a pillow of my nest without me reaching for it first.
They take care of me. But they don't let me suffer through it, either, and that's the part that undoes me.
Because when the next wave crests and I'm shaking apart in the middle of the nest, Finn kneels down at the edge of it, close as he's let himself get.
“Tell us what you need,” he says, rough as gravel. “Anything. Hands on you, distance, whatever helps. There's no wrong answer, and we're not going anywhere either way.” Four sentences, which for Finn is a speech, and every word lands. “We're yours. However you want us.”
And I look at the three of them, kneeling around a nest built out of their own shirts, offering me everything and asking for nothing back, and the thing I've been outrunning for four weeks finally catches me.
I have to say it. Before they touch me. Even though it changes nothing, even though I already know how it ends.
“Can I say something first.” My voice comes out steadier than it's been all day. “And I need you to hear that I'm clear. Not heat-clear. Actually clear.”
Logan goes still. Finn doesn't move. Hudson waits.
“You know how this started.” I make myself hold Logan's eyes, because he's the one I'll lose my nerve looking at. “I needed a fake pack to survive my mother and one bad reunion. Three pretend boyfriends, one weekend, and everyone goes home. That was the whole plan.”
My heart is going like a hammer.
“Except somewhere in the middle of pretending, it stopped being pretend. For me.” The words scrape on the way out. “I fell in love with you. All three of you. And I know that's not what you signed up for. I know you were doing me a favor, and I went and turned it into something it was never supposed to be.”
Finn's jaw works. Nobody says anything, and I make myself keep going before the silence swallows me.
“I kept waiting for one of you to let something slip. Some sign it was real on your end too. It never came, so I did the math and got the only answer that made sense — that it was the arrangement for you, and only ever real for me.” I breathe, and it shakes. “I made my peace with that. I'd have taken it to my grave before I made it your problem. But I couldn't let you put your hands on me tonight and have you think I was only doing this because my body left me no choice. It's not the heat. It's you. It's been you for weeks. That's all. That's the whole thing I needed to say.”
For a second none of them breathe.
Then Logan makes a low sound in his chest and closes the distance, takes my face in one careful hand like it might come apart if he's not gentle.
“It was never fake.” His voice is wrecked. “Not for one day, Josie. You want the truth? That fence at your school's been done for five weeks. I kept un-finishing it. Sanding rails that were already smooth, resetting posts that were already straight, because it bought me two o'clock at your fence line with you.” His thumb moves over my cheek. “Five years I've been findingreasons to be wherever you are. I made you that coaster so there'd be one thing of mine sitting in your house.”
I can't breathe.
“I fell over a wall of rope,” Hudson says, and all the performance is gone out of him. “First week you were in town, five years back. You brought my whole display down and then looked up out of the middle of it and asked, so polite, to buy one yard.” He shakes his head. “I told myself for the longest time it was just that you were fun. That I liked having you around. Took me way too long to cop to what it actually was, and then I got very good at hiding it behind a grin.”
He scrubs a hand down his face.
