Page 14 of The Last Great Omegaverse

“Feels less like talking and more like informing.”

She’s not wrong, and the honesty of that lands somewhere uncomfortable, close enough to my own habits that I don’t have a rebuttal ready. I’ve spent so many years making decisions for a pack that trusts me to make them that I’ve stopped noticing when it starts sounding like I’m not asking anymore, just announcing. I don’t love that she’s the one who caught it inside five minutes of conversation.

“You’re right,” I say, which visibly surprises her, her arms loosening slightly from their crossed position. She’s even cute when she’s angry. “That’s not how I meant it. I’d like first use if the timing allows, but if your fields need it worse, we’ll work something out. I’m not looking to squeeze you on equipment while the reversion clause is sitting over both our heads like it is. Wouldn’t feel right.”

“It wouldn’t feel right,” she repeats, testing the words like she’s checking them for a hidden edge. “That’s an interesting thing to say, given how much you personally stand to gain if I don’t make the deadline.”

There it is. I knew it was coming, have known since the ledger this morning, and I still feel it land like a hand closing around my balls. “I know how it looks,” I say. “I’ve done the math myself, more times than I’d like to admit. Doesn’t mean I’m rooting for the outcome that makes the math easier.”

“Doesn’t it, though? Not even a little?”

I don’t answer right away, because the honest answer is complicated in a way that won’t do either of us any favors said out loud. I’ve learned the hard way that half-honest is worse than not answering at all.

“I’ll let you know about the baler once I’ve checked the forecast,” I say instead, and get back in the truck before the silence stretches long enough to make either of us say something we’ll regret.

She watches me go the whole way down the drive. I check the mirror twice to confirm it, which is its own kind of answer, one I’m not proud of and can’t quite make myself stop giving.

I come back after midnight, because the pump on the south fence line has been rattling for two days now, loud enough that I noticed it from my own porch, and because if it seizes up entirely she’ll lose water to half her remaining crop right when she can least afford to lose anything at all. I can’t sleep knowing that.

I don’t tell her I’m coming. I tell myself that’s practical, that she’s asleep and there’s no sense waking her over a pump. But the truth sits closer to something simpler and harder to admit: I don’t want the conversation that comes with showing up in daylight, the questions about motive, the accounting she’s clearly already doing of every kindness against every dollar I stand to gain from her failure. Easier to fix what needs fixing and let the fixing speak for itself.

The night’s cold enough that my breath fogs while I work, flashlight wedged under one arm, hands going stiff around the wrench faster than they should this early in the season. It takes the better part of an hour to find the worn gasket and replace it, longer than it should because I keep stopping to listen for the house waking up, some part of me half hoping she will and half terrified of exactly that.

She doesn’t. The house stays dark the whole time, windows black, the stillness of someone sleeping soundly enough not to notice a stranger working forty feet from her back door. I tell myself that’s a good thing. I mostly believe it.

Working this close to the house, I catch her scent again, fainter now, drifting down from an upstairs window cracked an inch against the cold. It’s not right, a man standing in the dark outside a woman’s house committing her scent to memory like he’s got any claim to it. I know it’s not right even as I keep working slower than the job requires, breathing it in a while longer before I make myself finish.

My Alpha brain has ideas about that scent. Like storming into her house and claiming her for itself. To make that Omega mine. Ours. Our packs. I have so many ideas about what I would like to do with her. How she’d taste. How she’d feel with my cock inside her. How she’d look submitting to me.

As much as I enjoy those thoughts, I push them down into a little ball and try to focus on the task at hand.

I finish just before four, pump running smooth and even, no more rattle. I stand there a moment longer than the job requires, looking at the dark shape of the house against the fading stars, thinking about ledgers and easements and forty acres that would fix half my problems if I just let one deadline pass without doing anything at all.

I think about her chin lifting when she sees my truck. I think about the softness in my chest every time she catches me trying too hard not to want something I’ve got no business wanting from a woman who has every reason not to trust a single thing I do.

I pack up my tools and walk home in the dark. I don’t leave a note, and I don’t tell Coop or Asher or Cal where I’ve been. Some part of me knows that’s its own kind of tell, the kind of secret you only keep when you’re not entirely sure your own motives would survive being said out loud.

The math’s still sitting there in the morning, same as it was. Forty acres. A balloon payment. A woman who deserves better than a man doing the right thing while running the wrong numbers in the back of his head the whole time he does it.

I fixed the pump anyway. I’ll keep fixing whatever needs fixing for as long as she’ll let me, and I’ll keep doing the math too, because apparently that’s the only way I know how to want something without trusting myself to actually deserve it.

Chapter 7

Wren

51 Days To Go

By day nine, I’ve stopped flinching every time a truck turns up the drive. That feels like it should be a bigger realization than it is.

It happens gradually, not some single dramatic morning where I wake up and decide to trust four strange Alphas with my grandmother’s failing farm, but a slow accumulation of small things. Coop leaving eggs on the porch before I’m even awake, Asher texting me a picture of a pumpkin he swears looks like Linda Pruitt and making me laugh hard enough that I nearly choke on my coffee, Silas showing up with parts for the tractor he definitely didn’t need to buy out of his own pocket and definitely won’t let me pay him back for.

Cal I still see mostly at a distance. A shape at the fence line. A nod across the yard. I’ve started, without quite meaning to, watching for him, some muted part of me tracking whether he’s there before I’ve finished deciding I care.

The town’s gotten easier too. The hardware store owner, a wiry man named Pete who I’m fairly sure has opinions about everyone in a fifty-mile radius, spends ten minutes explaining fence post spacing to me unprompted and seems genuinely delighted when I ask a follow-up question that proves I was listening.

I make a supply run on day ten and Dot waves me over before I’ve even reached the counter. She refuses to let me pay for a coffee and then tells me half the county’s been asking after the farm like it’s the only interesting thing to happen here since the last flood.

“You’re settling in,” Dot observes, refilling my cup without asking. “Didn’t figure you would, this fast. City girls usually take longer to stop looking like they’re braced for the whole town to bite them.”