Page 37 of The Last Great Omegaverse

I sit with the ledgers spread across the kitchen table long after the light’s gone, doing the math three separate times because I don’t trust the first two results, and getting the same unsettling answer each time. More hands should mean better yields, sure, simple labor math, nothing mysterious about extra people getting more work done. But the numbers don’t track with labor alone. They track with something else, something I don’t have a tidy word for, and the not-knowing itches at me worse than any of the actual problems currently sitting on my plate.

Underneath the last ledger, tucked flat against the bottom of the box, there’s a single page, torn in half at some point long before I got here, in handwriting that isn’t Eleanor’s and isn’t old enough to belong to any of the earlier hands I’ve been reading all afternoon. It’s my mother’s hand. Younger, sharper, none of the control she’d spent twenty-five years wrapping her warnings in.

The half that survived starts mid-sentence: …and I’m done being the version of myself that fits neatly into somebody else’s pack when they’ve already decided I’m optional. You can tell people whatever story makes it easiest for you. I know what actually happened, even if you’re not ready to say it. Four men, one at a time, deciding I wasn’t worth the trouble of choosing all the way—

It ends there. Torn clean across, the second half missing entirely, whether by accident or on purpose I have no way of knowing.

I sit with it a long time, the ledgers forgotten beside me. My mother had a pack. Here, in Hollow Creek, before the city, before me, before every warning she’s given me since I was old enough to understand what an Alpha’s attention meant. Four men whose names I’ll probably never know, who apparently decided, one at a time, she wasn’t the one worth keeping.

It’s not the whole story. Half a page, torn mid-thought, tells me there’s a wound underneath every warning she’s ever given me, but it’s not the whole shape of it. Just enough to know the warning was never abstract. Never some inherited rule handed down without a reason attached.

I fold what’s left of the letter along its old crease and tuck it back into the drawer.

I go into town the next morning, half convinced I’m chasing nothing, unable to stop myself from chasing it anyway.

Warren’s office is neat, but he’s unhelpful in the way of a man who knows more than he’s saying and has decided professional discretion outranks satisfying my curiosity. “Your grandmother kept detailed records,” he says, when I press him about the pattern. “I couldn’t speak to why certain years performed better than others. That’s farming knowledge, not legal knowledge. Might be worth asking somebody who actually worked this land alongside her.”

“You added a clause requiring a pack to inherit, though. That’s not just farming knowledge. That’s specific.”

“I drafted what your grandmother instructed me to draft,” he says cautiously. “She had her reasons. I never asked what they were. It wasn’t my place.”

Dot’s more forthcoming, though not by much, refilling my coffee slowly while she decides how much to say. “Old story around here,” she says, when I lay out what I’ve found. “Land does better with a full pack working it. Been said for generations, long as I can remember, long as my mother could remember before me. Most folks treat it like folklore, same as any small town’s got its share of stories nobody quite believes and nobody quite dismisses either.”

“But you don’t think it’s just folklore?”

“I think this town’s watched it proven often enough that calling it ‘just’ anything feels a little disrespectful to the pattern.” She shrugs, wiping down the bar top, not meeting my eyes quite as directly as she usually does. “Your grandmother believed it, near as I could tell. Wouldn’t be the first woman to write that belief right into her own will.”

“Why wouldn’t anybody just tell me that?”

“Would you have believed it, six weeks ago, fresh off that bus, furious at the whole arrangement?” Dot raises an eyebrow, and I don’t have a good answer for that either. “Some things a person’s got to find their own way toward. Telling you outright, before you’d lived any of it, might’ve just felt like one more thing being decided for you instead of by you.”

I leave the bar with more questions than I arrived with, and a persistent unease building under my ribs that has nothing to do with the pre-heat warmth that’s started creeping back in over the last two days, unwelcome and unmistakable now that I already know exactly what it is.

I find Cal at the hives again, same as the first time, veil down, smoker going, the same calmness he brings to everything that matters to him.

He looks up before I’ve said anything, like he’s been half expecting me. Something in his expression, mindful, resigned, unsurprised, tells me before I’ve asked a single question that Dot was right about at least one thing: this isn’t news to him.

“You’ve been in the ledgers,” he says. Not a question.

“How did you know?”

“Because I’ve heard of three generations of Calloway women work through the same discovery, in one form or another, and you’ve got the exact look on your face all three of them probably had.” He sets the smoker down, pulling his veil back, meeting my eyes properly for the first time since I crossed the fence. “Whitfield send you my way, or did you figure it out yourself?”

“Figured it out myself. Dot filled in some gaps. Nobody’s actually told me anything real yet, just enough to know there’s something real to be told.”

He’s quiet a long moment, weighing something. Standing this close to him I catch the searing smell of him under the smoker’s char, honey and lavender. It does nothing to calm the persistent unease already sitting under my ribs. If anything, it sharpens it, my body picking an inconvenient moment to remind me of the restless heat that is creeping back now like it never really left.

When he finally speaks his voice has gone lower, rougher, the register I’ve only heard from him a handful of times, always right before something that costs him.

“There’s a reason I’ve kept my distance since the day you got here,” he says. “Reason that’s got less to do with caution than I’ve let you believe, and more to do with the fact that I’ve known what you just found in those ledgers longer than anybody else on this land. I wasn’t sure it was mine to hand you before you were ready to hear it.”

My throat goes tight, something between dread and relief, the strange, suspended feeling of standing right in front of a door that’s about to open whether I’m ready for it or not.

“You’re ready to tell me now?” I ask, hopeful.

He looks at me for a long moment, the orchard gently swaying in the breeze around us, bees moving in patient lines behind him. His expression relaxes, like a decision finally made after weeks of carrying it alone.

“Come inside,” he says. “This isn’t a conversation for standing in the cold.”