Page 32 of The Last Great Omegaverse

“I’m aware.”

Silas doesn’t say anything at all, just watches me with an intensity that makes the fever under my skin flare hotter. Cal, when I glance his way, holds my gaze for a beat longer than comfortable before deliberately, visibly, making himself look away first.

Whatever this is, they’re feeling it too. I don’t have a name for it, at least not one I’m ready to say out loud. But something about the charged quality of the air today, four Alphas all quietly failing to keep their distance from me, tells me this isn’t only happening in my own overheated, irritable body.

I make an excuse to leave early, claiming a headache that’s not entirely a lie, and walk the long way back to the house instead of taking the direct path, needing the extra time to think without four sets of eyes tracking my every move across the field.

The house is quiet when I get there, blessedly, and I stand in the kitchen a long while with a glass of water I don’t drink, running through the evidence like I’m building a case against myself. The warmth that won’t fully resolve. The way touch, any touch, from any of them, lands sharper than it should. The restlessness that’s kept me up two nights running, some low hum under my skin that feels less like anxiety and more like anticipation, though anticipation of what, exactly, I haven’t let myself finish thinking through.

I know what this could be. I’ve known my whole adult life what my own body does in the lead-up to a heat. The warning signs I’ve spent years managing carefully, medicating around, planning my whole calendar to avoid ever being caught unprepared by. It’s early, if that’s what this is. Weeks early, by my usual rhythm. But stress does strange things to cycles, and I haven’t exactly been living a low-stress existence since I stepped off that bus. The timing lines up close enough that I can’t fully talk myself out of the possibility no matter how many times I try.

The thought of it terrifies me more than it should.

I’ve weathered plenty of heats alone with a locked door and enough supplies to get through it without needing anyone. What terrifies me is the undeniable fact that if it does come early, if it comes here, in this house, surrounded by Alphas who’ve spent four weeks slowly, mindfully working their way past every wall I’ve ever built, I don’t know if I’d want to weather it alone the way I always have before.

I catch myself doing it anyway. Some old, well-drilled part of me gets up from the kitchen table without asking permission from the rest of me and starts the ritual I’ve run every cycle since I was eighteen. Check the pantry for enough food to last four or five days without leaving the house, count the ice packs in the freezer, find the number for the pharmacy that delivers, make sure the bedroom door locks securely. My hands are three steps into it, pulling the curtains half-closed against a sun that’s still hours from setting, before I notice what I’m doing and freeze in the middle of my own kitchen.

I’m building a bunker. Alone, out of habit, before anybody’s even confirmed there’s anything to hide from.

I stand there with one curtain half-drawn and feel something close to embarrassment at how automatic it was, how little thought went into it. Seven years of practiced solitude running on a track deep enough that my body reached for it before my mind caught up to what it was doing. I think about the version of myself that would’ve spent the next five days behind a locked door on principle, supplies stacked like she’s weathering a siege instead of just being an Omega in a body that occasionally runs hot. I think, for the first time, that maybe I’ve spent almost a decade preparing for heats the way you’d prepare for something to survive, instead of something you’re allowed to just, simply, feel.

I let the curtain fall back open.

It’s a tiny thing. Four inches of sunlight let back into a kitchen. But my hands are shaking a little when I do it, and I stand there a long moment after, just breathing, watching the light spill back across the table like it’s the first genuinely reckless decision I’ve made in years.

I think about my mother’s warnings, about how easily a pack swallows you whole if you let it, about the last pack that took everything I was and handed back a smaller, subtler version instead. I think about Coop’s hand at my back today, Asher’s voice dropping low, Silas’s fingers lingering, Cal’s deliberate look-away. I don’t know how to reconcile the fear with the wanting. The old warning with the new, undeniable fact that some deep, stubborn part of me has stopped bracing against this and started, instead, leaning into it.

By the time the sun goes down, I still don’t have an answer. I sit on my porch instead, alone, the wind chime clattering behind me, and let myself feel, for a little while, how strange and unfamiliar it is to want something this much and not immediately start planning my escape from it.

My body, apparently, has opinions about how I spend the final few weeks before the festival that has nothing to do with pumpkins at all.

Chapter 14

Coop

I’ve had the clipboard for two days straight and I’m not giving it up to anybody, not even Silas, who’s offered three separate times now to “handle the logistics properly,” which is his polite way of saying he doesn’t trust me with anything more complicated than a hammer.

He’s wrong.

I’ve been planning Community Harvest Day since the second Asher came home grinning about Linda Pruitt’s sign-up sheet. I’ve spent every spare hour since coordinating volunteers, working out which fields need which hands, figuring out where to stage the equipment so nobody’s tripping over each other come sunup.

Nobody asked me to run point on this. I just started doing it and somewhere around day two, nobody had the heart to take it away from me, which I’ve decided to interpret as a vote of confidence rather than nobody wanting to deal with my face if they tried.

I know what people think. Youngest of the four of us, biggest, loudest, first to hug, first to cry at something sentimental, easiest to underestimate because I wear all my feelings right there on the surface where anybody can see them. I’ve made peace with most of that about myself. But there’s a difference between being soft and being useless, and I’ve spent weeks watching Wren’s farm claw its way back from the edge of nothing. I want, badly, for this day to be the thing that proves I had a real hand in that, not just muffins and enthusiasm.

Eleanor used to run a Community Harvest Day of her own, way back, before her hands got too tired to manage a crowd that size. I remember helping her organize one, sixteen years old and desperate to be useful. She told me that day that the trick to a good Harvest Day isn’t the work itself, it’s making sure everybody who shows up feels like their contribution mattered, no matter how small. I’ve held onto that longer than I probably should have. Feels right, using it now, on her granddaughter’s farm, on the last patch of ground she ever loved this hard.

The morning of, half the town shows up before the sun’s fully over the trees.

Pete from the hardware store arrives with two trucks full of donated fencing supplies and immediately starts bossing around a crew of teenagers like he’s been waiting his whole life for the authority. Dot sets up a table by the barn with enough coffee, water, and baked goods to feed three farms, refusing payment from anybody who tries. Linda Pruitt herself even turns up in work boots instead of her usual cardigan, clipboard in hand, looking almost giddy at the prospect of coordinating something bigger than a committee meeting.

By eight, I’ve got forty people spread across the fields, sorted into teams, and a schedule that’s somehow, miraculously, holding.

“You all did this,” Wren says, finding me by the equipment staging area around midmorning, looking out at the organized chaos with something like wonder. “All of it. The whole thing.”

I catch the sweet scent of her impending heat and it momentarily stuns me. I have to suppress an Alpha growl before she notices. Trying to ignore how goddamned good she smells is way more difficult than it sounds.

“Had help. Asher got the committee on board, Silas is handling anybody who wants to talk numbers, Cal’s running the crew clearing the back acreage.” I gesture vaguely at the controlled madness spread across her fields. “But yeah. Logistics were mine.”