Page 22 of The Last Great Omegaverse

“Ah.” She doesn’t sound remotely surprised. “The Ashworth pack. Figured that was coming, the way this town gossips.”

“I don’t understand any of them.” I turn the glass in slow circles on the bar top. “One of them practically confessed something and then refused to kiss me. On principle. In a freezing truck. Who does that?”

“A man trying to do right by you, sounds like.”

“It’s infuriating.”

“Good men usually are, for exactly that reason.” Dot’s mouth twitches, amused, wiping down a glass that’s already clean. “Eleanor used to say the ones worth keeping are the ones who make you wait for the right reasons instead of the easy ones. Took her long enough to learn it herself, and she passed the lesson down every chance she got.”

“You keep bringing her up like she’s got some grand plan for all this.”

“Maybe she did.” Dot shrugs, unbothered, refilling my glass before I’ve finished it. “Or maybe she just knew good land and good people when she saw them, and figured the rest would sort itself out given enough time.” She studies me a moment, something assessing in her look that I don’t entirely trust. “You’ve got, what, six weeks left on that deadline now?”

“Forty-three days.”

“Plenty of time for things to sort themselves out, then.” She says it lightly but there’s a weight underneath it I can’t quite place, gone before I can ask her to explain it. “Drink your cider, honey. Whatever those boys are working through, you’ve got time to let them work through it properly. Rushing good things usually just makes them come apart faster.”

I don’t know if I believe her. But I drink the cider anyway, and let the warmth of the bar and the fire and Dot’s unbothered presence calms some of the noise in my head.

By the time I walk home under a sky shining with stars, I’ve almost convinced myself forty-three days is enough time to figure out what I’m supposed to do with four Alphas I never asked for and can’t quite seem to stop wanting anyway.

I don’t go inside right away. The porch light’s on, making everything glow orange. I sit down on the top step, my coat still buttoned against the cold, and let myself actually ask the questions I’ve been dodging for weeks. Ever since I received that phone call from Warren.

Do I even want the farm?

It’s not a question I’ve let myself truly think about before now, not once, not even in the panicked first days when quitting would have been the easy, defensible choice. I came here because the alternative was walking away from the only family connection I had left without at least trying. Somewhere in the trying, wanting crept in sideways, disguised as stubbornness, as competence, as the satisfaction of watching a tractor start on the third try instead of the fortieth. But sitting here now, cold seeping up through the porch boards, I make myself hold the question honestly instead of letting the momentum of the last few weeks answer it for me.

Yes. I want it. Not the way I wanted my old apartment, or my old job, wanting shaped like convenience and habit. I want it the uncomfortable way, the way that costs something, the way Eleanor apparently wanted it her whole life, stubborn and entirely inconvenient to a version of me who left the city to stop wanting things that could be taken away.

The pack’s a harder question, and I sit with it longer.

Do I care about them, or do I just care about not being the reason four men lose land that’s been theirs for generations? It would be easier, in some ways, to let the second explanation be the whole truth. Guilt’s a simpler thing to carry than whatever this is, four separate kinds of wanting that don’t fit neatly into any category I’ve built for myself before.

But I think about Silas in that truck, choosing not to kiss me rather than risk me doubting him later, and I know, sitting here honestly with myself, that isn’t guilt. Guilt doesn’t ache like that. Guilt doesn’t keep you up at night replaying the exact weight of somebody’s arm around your shoulders.

I could let them have the farm. The thought arrives clean and practical, the same efficient part of me that used to close out failing accounts without sentiment. Forfeit the remaining forty-three days. Let the reversion clause do what it was always designed to do. They know this land better than I ever will, know how to read weather and soil and a hundred other things I’m only just starting to learn about. Nobody would blame me. A woman from the city, in over her head from day one, walking away from a farm she never asked to inherit isn’t a failure. It’s just honest.

Except it doesn’t feel honest. It feels like exactly the kind of quiet, reasonable surrender I promised myself, standing in an empty apartment with my whole life in two suitcases, I would never make again. Letting somebody else decide what I’m capable of because it’s easier than finding out for myself.

I think about going back to the city, and the thought that arrives isn’t relief. It’s blah. I remember from the year before I left, the sense of a life of surviving instead of living, every day organized around not needing anything too badly from anyone. I don’t miss that life. I miss, if I’m honest, having already decided who I was going to be, instead of finding out fresh, inconveniently, every single day out here.

Why Eleanor left it to me is the question I can’t actually answer, not with anything solid, just with the accumulating evidence of her handwriting in old ledgers, learning the particular slant of her opinions about crop rotation and stubborn Alphas and land that answers honestly to whoever’s tending it. I never knew her well. Six visits in twenty-five years, most of them short, most of them polite in the careful way visits are with extended family that are pretty much strangers.

Maybe she saw something in me those six visits that I never saw in myself. Maybe she just ran out of other options and decided a stranger with her blood in her veins was better odds than letting the land go to auction. I don’t know, and some nights that not-knowing sits heavier than the deadline itself.

But sitting here now, with the cold porch boards under me, four men’s worth of complicated wanting sitting tender in my chest despite every argument I’ve built against it, I think maybe it doesn’t matter why she chose me.

Maybe what matters is what I choose to do with having been chosen. Whether I spend the next few weeks protecting myself from a bigger loss, or spend them finding out, without my mother’s warnings or my own old fear doing the deciding for me, what I actually want.

I go inside eventually, colder than I meant to get, clearer than I’ve felt in weeks. Forty-three days. I have some choosing of my own left to do before they run out.

Chapter 10

Asher

The town hall smells like old carpet and stronger coffee than the pot can actually produce. I’ve been through this type of meeting enough times to know exactly which chair to take if I want Linda Pruitt to see me without craning her neck every time she needs to make a point.

“The committee’s position hasn’t changed,” she’s saying, for what I count as the third time this evening, clipboard held like a shield. “We can’t be seen favoring one farm over another, especially not one currently sitting under an estate reversion clause. It complicates the optics considerably.”