Page 10 of The Last Great Omegaverse

Four Alphas, one farmhouse, and an Omega that showed up on a bus two days ago that’s already got all of us dreaming. I don’t know what to call that yet. I know better than to say it out loud before anybody’s ready to hear it.

I load the truck with tools before anyone’s finished their coffee, because if I wait for a formal plan we’ll still be discussing logistics come Christmas, and I’d rather just show up and start fixing things than sit around debating whether we’re allowed to.

The drive over takes three minutes. I could walk it faster some days.

Wren answers the door in an old flannel that’s clearly not hers, sleeves rolled past her wrists, hair pulled back in a messy ponytail. Something in me sits up at the sight of her before my brain’s caught up to why. She looks tired in a way that’s got nothing to do with sleep and everything to do with the weight of what landed on her yesterday. My whole chest wants to do something about that, fix it, carry some of it.

“You’re back,” she says, arms crossed, though there’s less bite in it than yesterday.

“Told you it was basically inevitable.” I lift the toolbox like evidence. “Barn roof’s going to come down on somebody’s head if we don’t shore it up, and I figure better it’s me up there than you, given I’ve done this before and you, no offense, look like you’d fall through the first rotten board you stepped on.”

“That’s oddly specific for a guess.”

“I looked at your barn yesterday while you were busy scowling. Occupational hazard, noticing structural problems. Comes with the territory.”

That gets something close to a smile out of her, even though reluctant, gone almost as fast as it appears, but I clock it and file it away like treasure. “Fine,” she says. “Don’t fall through anything either. I probably don’t have insurance for that, and I definitely don’t have the emotional bandwidth to deal with a body on my property this week. I’m not even sure where the shovel is kept.”

“Duly noted. I’ll try to die somewhere more convenient.”

She huffs something that’s almost a laugh, and steps back to let me in. I feel that same composed pull I felt this morning at the fence line, except closer now, sharper, the kind of awareness that comes with being in a room with someone your whole body’s decided matters before your head’s had any say in it. I don’t act on it. I wouldn’t, not with her still raw from yesterday, not with trust still something we’re building one barn roof at a time instead of something we’re guaranteed. But I feel it, warm and unmistakable, and I think that this is going to be a great deal more complicated than fixing a roof.

We work through the morning, the sound of hammers banging and her handing up nails when I ask. Somewhere around midday she climbs half the ladder herself to pass me a board, sleeves pushed higher, cheeks flushed from the work. I have to look away fast and think hard about joist spacing before my body does something embarrassing about how good she looks doing manual labor in a flannel.

“You’re staring,” she says, not looking up, like she felt it anyway.

“I’m admiring my own handiwork,” I reply. “The board. Excellent board. Very structurally sound.”

“Sure you are.”

“I absolutely am.”

She laughs at that, real this time, head tipping back, and the sound of it does something to make my pants feel suddenly tighter. I decide, somewhere between the third and fourth rafter, that whatever this is building between us and this stubborn, sharp-tongued, grief-worn Omega who just inherited more than she bargained for, I’m not interested in fighting it off.

I’m just going to keep showing up. Toolbox in hand. However long it takes her to let me stay.

Chapter 5

Wren

56 Days To Go

By day four, I’ve made a list. Lists are how I cope. Lists don’t ask me how I’m feeling about my dead grandmother or whether I’ve slept, they just sit there being useful, and right now useful is the only currency I’ve got.

I spread it across the kitchen table at six in the morning with a mug of coffee that’s finally drinkable now that I’ve located Eleanor’s secret stash of the good beans, and I go through the farm the way I’d go through a failing account at my old job. Assets, liabilities, timeline, triage. Barn roof, fixed, thanks to Coop and a truly alarming number of nails. Tractor, still dead. Irrigation, half-functional at best. Pumpkin count across the fields, low, but not zero, and that one strange healthy patch near the south fence still going strong.

I add one more line at the bottom, underlined the same as the rest: Figure out the south patch. It’s not a farm problem, not the kind that costs money or needs triage, but it itches at me anyway, the plain wrongness of one corner of a dying field doing exactly the opposite of everything around it. I’ve never been able to leave a discrepancy alone. It’s an old habit, a decade of jobs that paid me, essentially, to notice when the numbers didn’t match the story they were supposed to tell.

Sixty days, minus four already gone, leaves fifty-six. I write that number at the top of the page and underline it twice, hard enough that the pen nearly tears through. I stick the list to the fridge with a magnet and get back to work.

Later, I’m elbow-deep in seed catalogs, trying to work out whether it’s too late in the season to replant anything worth harvesting, when a truck rattles up the drive and Silas climbs out looking like a man who’s already had an argument with someone this morning and lost.

“Tractor,” he says, by way of hello, jerking his chin toward the barn. “You mind?”

“Would it matter if I did?”

“Not particularly.”

That, unexpectedly, gets a laugh out of me, and he looks almost startled by it himself, like he wasn’t fully aware he’d said something funny.