Page 3 of Knot Your Pucking Secret

It’s raw. Guttural.

A broken sound tears from somewhere deep inside me, quickly followed by another, each one ripping through my chest until hot tears blur my vision and drip down my face.

“Oh, Lenn. Let it out, babe. We’ve got you,” Bronte murmurs, her quiet reassurance splintering whatever fragile composure I have left.

I can’t stop it. Every emotion I’ve buried crashes over me in relentless waves, each one stronger than the last until I can’t breathe. Every ugly thought. Every sleepless night. Every impossible decision. Every unanswered question. They’ve all been waiting for this moment, clawing at the walls I’d built around them until they finally tear their way free. I’ve carried grief everywhere. I convinced myself that if I ignored it long enough, it would somehow lose its power over me. That if I buried myself in my job, focused on everyone else’s problems instead of my own, eventually the ache would dull. It never did. Grief doesn’t disappear simply because you refuse to acknowledge it, and I knew that, and still. I couldn’t face it. I wasn’t ready to.

I fought. Oh, did I fight.

For the Cardinals. I fought to prove I deserved my position, which everyone believed had simply been handed to me because of my surname. Or what I thought was my surname. I fought every whispered accusation of nepotism, every sideways glance, every person who dismissed my hard work with a single word.

In the end, it still wasn’t enough.

I wasn’t enough.

I cry for the father I thought I knew. The man who tucked hockey sticks beneath the Christmas tree instead of dolls because he knew exactly where my heart belonged. The one who spent my childhood reminding me that my designation would only define me if I allowed it to. He never looked at me and saw an Omega. He saw his daughter. A girl capable of becoming anything she wanted if she was willing to work for it, and God did I work for it. He taught me that I was more than biology. More than instinct. More than a warm hole for an Alpha to fuck.

He taught me a lie.

And somehow, despite everything, the collateral damage didn’t end with me. Good people walked away from their careers they’d spent years building because of what happened. Players, coaching staff, canteen workers, cleaners. Fuck, even Veronica packed her things after being with the team since she was a teenager. Not because any of them had to. They left because of me. The cruelest part of all is that it was never truly mine to keep. Not the Cardinals. Not the legacy. Not even the name I’d spent my entire life trying to honor. Because the only name I’d ever known…isn’t mine. It never was.

Then I cry for the pack that should have been mine. For everything that was stolen from us because of the hurt that they carried. For the little boy who was never given the chance to become anything other than the product of his father’s cruelty. For the Alpha shaped by fists instead of love, by fear instead of safety. Until revenge became the only language he knew how to speak. For their sabotage. Their violation of what should’ve been sacred. And though every logical part of me knows they don’t deserve my tears, my heart has never been particularly interested in listening to reason. I promised myself long ago that I would never cry over a man, yet here I am, mourning three of them. Mourning the future I’d started to imagine before it was ripped away by their own ridiculous greed. Because that is what it was. They couldn’t see past their own foolish vendetta.

They couldn’t see me.

And that makes them just like everyone else, if not worse. Definitely worse.

Veronica and Bronte keep me anchored between them as they slowly guide me toward my nest. The third one I’ve built for myself in less than a year. The third place I’ve painstakingly pieced together in an attempt to convince my instincts that I was safe, even when every part of me knew I wasn’t.

“Sleep, babe. We will be here for you when you wake up.” Bronte’s fingers continue to comb gently through my hair while Veronica strokes slow circles across my back, their whispered conversation fading into little more than comforting background noise. And with them beside me, I finally surrender to the darkness, vowing to give myself this one day. Just this one. One day to grieve everything I’ve lost before it stays where it belongs. Behind me. Because when I wake, I won’t be the woman who walked through that front door. I won’t rise as the woman they broke.

I’ll rise as the woman who survived them. And God help anyone who mistakes my kindness for weakness ever again.

Chapter Two

Holden

No one ever tells you that grief feels this way. That eventually it settles beneath your skin until it becomes part of you. A constant ache. A permanent reminder that somewhere along the way, you lost the one person who made the world feel like it was spinning in the right direction. I never imagined I could miss someone the way I miss Lennon. That every ordinary moment could feel so painfully empty simply because she no longer exists inside it.

If I could turn back time, I would. I’d go right back to the beginning. To the exact moment she walked into that locker room with her shoulders squared and her chin held high, determined to prove herself to a room full of Alphas already waiting for her to fail. To the moment her scent wrapped around me and quietly rewired every part of who I thought I was. Who I thought I was comfortable being.

I would have dropped to my knees before her then, consequences be damned. I would have ignored every single taunt and demand Sasha threw my way because none of them should have mattered more than she did. I would have given herloyalty from the very beginning. The one thing she had always deserved from me. From us.

Honesty.

I should have told her the truth the moment I found out about her parents. I should have helped her navigate a world that had been built on lies instead of placing obstacle after obstacle in her path until every direction she turned ended in betrayal.

But I didn’t.

I chose Sasha. I chose revenge. I chose silence.

Every decision I made after that became another stone in the road she was forced to walk alone.

I am a Beta for fuck’s sake. I don’t hold any of the characteristics Sash or Dom do. I’m supposed to be the steady one. The rational one. The Beta who sees the bigger picture when everyone else is too consumed by emotion to think straight. I should have been the voice of reason. The one to remind them that our future, our Omega, was never supposed to come at the cost of someone else’s destruction. That love was always going to be a stronger foundation than revenge or hatred could ever hope to be. Instead, I stood by and watched the two people I love the most in this world destroy the woman we were supposed to protect. The woman fate chose for us. Hell, I was just as much a part of it. I’m just as much to blame because I did it too. And now, we’re forced to live with the consequences of defying fate and betraying our girl. Something that was never meant to fucking happen, yet we did it anyway.

Once fate decides who you’re destined to be with, or who will join you on this wild, chaotic ride we call life, those feelings, those instinctual cravings don’t disappear just because they did. They’re there for life. And now? We’re burdened by the everlasting ache of grief because she left us. Things were just about to get good. We were going to tell her. We were going to show her what it would have been like to be with us. We weregoing to throw all previous fucking notions to the wayside and stand up and be the pack she needed us to be. The pack she deserved from the very start.

We built her a nest.