Page 27 of The Last Great Omegaverse

“You’re quiet,” Coop says at one point, leaning close enough that I catch the familiar scent of him. It’s slightly less awkward now that it’s been more than a week since the storm incident. “Good quiet, or thinking-too-hard quiet?”

“Good quiet, I think.” I mean it more than I expect to. “This is nice. All of it.”

“We do this every few months, when Cal’s feeling ambitious with the stove.” He bumps his shoulder against mine affectionately, the last of the awkwardness slipping away. “You’re welcome anytime, for the record. Not just when Cal’s cooking. Just, in general. Welcome.”

I don’t have a response ready for that, something too sincere for the noise of the table, so I just nod, and let the ease of it resolve somewhere I’ve stopped trying too hard to guard.

Cal catches my eye once across the table briefly, unreadable in his usual way, but there’s something gentler in it tonight than the distance he keeps at the fence line. When he asks whether I want more stew, it feels like more of an offering than the question requires.

“I’d love some,” I say, and mean that too.

Somewhere between the second glass of wine and the third round of laughter, I stop following the conversation properly and start just sitting in it instead, letting the noise wash over me while some other, less disciplined part of my brain gets busy doing something I have absolutely no intention of admitting to out loud.

I can smell all four of them. Not in an overwhelming way, not the way I’d have braced for if you’d warned me a month ago that I’d end up at a table with four unmated Alphas and my guard down enough to actually notice. But layered, distinct, the kind of thing I only clock because I’ve stopped trying not to.

Coop smells like sun-warmed hay and something sweet underneath it, cinnamon maybe, or the ghost of whatever he had for breakfast, cozy and uncomplicated in a way that matches him exactly. Asher’s all cedar and something darker, whiskey and woodsmoke, expensive in a way nothing else about him bothers being. Silas carries engine grease and lightning, even when he’s nowhere near either, a low, calm note under everything else. Cal, closest to me at the end of the table, smells like orchard air and honey, which makes me want to lean closer instead of further away.

Combined, all of it together, filling a kitchen this homely, this loud, this full of affection, it should be a lot. It should be the kind of thing that sends me straight back to my own porch, alone, door locked, every old warning my mother ever gave me running on a loop.

It’s not.

It’s the opposite of that, if I’m being honest with myself, which I try not to be too often at a dinner table with wine in my system. It’s intoxicating in the literal sense of the word, rich and thick enough that I catch myself taking slower breaths than necessary just to keep pulling it in.

Underneath the smell there’s the rest of it too, the visual, unfair reality of four grown Alphas relaxed around a table, sleeves shoved up, laugh lines deep from use. Coop’s forearms flexing every time he gestures too big with the bread, Asher’s throat working around a laugh, Silas’s hands, competent and rough and doing absolutely nothing scandalous right now beyond holding a spoon, and somehow that’s still enough to make my whole face go scorching.

Cal glances over at exactly the wrong moment, catches me mid-stare, and one corner of his mouth lifts, just barely, like he’s seen exactly what I’m doing and has decided, generously, not to call me on it in front of the others.

I look back down at my stew. My face stays heated the rest of the meal.

If this is what an unbonded Omega is supposed to guard against, some careful, clinical danger to be managed and minimized, nobody warned me it would feel this good to stop guarding against it. Even for one dinner, even just for the length of a bowl of stew and four sets of shoulders I’ve apparently decided are worth staring at more than table manners technically allow.

I walk home late, full and a little lightheaded from the wine, the whole property silvered under a clear fall sky. I stand a long while on my own porch before going inside, looking back across the field at the Ashworth farmhouse, lights still glowing gold in the windows, laughter faintly carrying across the distance between us.

The wind chime clatters softly behind me, same as it has every night since I got here, and for the initial moment since I alighted from that bus I don’t find the sound irritating. I find it, unexpectedly, almost comforting, the noise of a house that’s still standing, still holding on, same as I apparently am.

I think about my mother, about every warning she ever gave me about packs and how easily they swallow a person whole, about the version of myself that left the last one certain I’d never let anyone get that close again. I think about a kitchen full of noise and stew and four men who somehow, without my permission, without much of a formal decision on my part at all, have become the thing I look forward to at the end of a long day.

It scares me, how much this is starting to feel like home. Not the farm, though the farm’s growing on me too, stubborn pumpkins and unexplained good luck included. But the people. The noise. The rare comfort of being wanted somewhere without having to earn it fresh every single day.

I go inside before the cold gets too serious, and I lie awake a long while listening to the wind chime. I don’t manage to talk myself out of the feeling, no matter how many times I try.

Thirty-seven days left. I’m starting to worry the countdown I should be dreading is the one thing standing between me and admitting how much I don’t want any of this to end.

Chapter 12

Silas

Coop lets something slip three days before the baler’s due, and I know it the second I walk into the kitchen and catch the guilty set of his shoulders, the way he won’t quite meet my eyes over his coffee.

“What did you say to her?” I ask, already dreading the answer.

“Nothing bad. I swear. We were just talking, and she asked how the farm’s doing, being friendly, and I mentioned the loan without thinking too hard about it, and then she asked some follow-up questions I probably shouldn’t have answered as honestly as I did, and—” He winces, the whole confession collapsing under its own weight. “I might’ve mentioned the balloon payment’s due around the same time as her deadline. I didn’t think it through. I’m sorry, Silas, I know that’s yours to tell, not mine.”

It is mine to tell. Was always going to have to be told, eventually, some version of the truth she’d find her own way to sooner or later in a town this small. But I’d wanted to be the one to hand it to her properly, on my own terms, not have it land sideways through Coop’s honesty with no context to soften it.

I drive over that afternoon already braced for the fight I know is coming.

She’s waiting on the porch when I pull up, arms crossed, jaw set in the way that means she’s spent the last few hours building an argument and isn’t interested in letting me talk my way around it.