Page 40 of The Last Great Omegaverse

Chapter 17

Wren

9 Days To Go

I wake before Cal does, body still thrumming with a heat that should have subsided hours ago and hasn’t. I’d let myself hope, somewhere in the desperate tangle of last night, that this would work the same way it did with Coop. That whatever eased off after the Community Harvest Day would ease off again now, quiet and grateful, leaving me clear-headed enough to actually think straight.

It didn’t happen.

If anything, waking up tangled in Cal’s arms, skin still too hot, every nerve still humming with something unfinished, the heat feels worse than it did yesterday. Closer to the surface. Less patient. Whatever last night was, it wasn’t the kind of relief my body was quietly begging for, and I don’t let myself examine too closely why that fact unsettles me nearly as much as everything else already does this morning.

I leave before Cal wakes, quietly, the same way I’ve left plenty of places before when staying felt more dangerous than the cold walk home.

Sleeping with Cal was a mistake. Even though it felt so right at the time, I can’t help but feel guilt now. It had been an emotional day and he was saying all the right things. It’s not an excuse, of course, but I wasn’t thinking clearly nonetheless.

The farmhouse feels different when I get there, wrong in some way. It takes until I’m standing in the kitchen with the kettle going that I understand what it is. It feels like a stranger’s house again. Not because anything’s changed about the rooms themselves, but because I’ve spent seven weeks letting it become cozier, a place that feels like mine. Now I can’t look at any of it without hearing my own voice from last night asking whether any of it was ever really a choice at all.

I don’t answer my phone when it buzzes around nine. Coop, probably, or Asher, checking in the way they always do. I can’t face either of those things right now, I can’t face the guilt of hearing honey in someone’s voice and not knowing anymore whether the warmth I feel back is mine or something the land decided I should feel.

I know Cal said it didn’t work like that, but I can’t be sure. He can’t be sure either.

By eleven, I’ve turned my phone off entirely and I’m sitting on the porch with a coffee, running the same loop I’ve been running for the last twenty-four hours. It’s my mother’s voice, warning me my whole life about exactly this.

How easily a person disappears into wanting something bigger than themselves, how quickly your own choices stop feeling like your own once you’ve let something else start making them alongside you.

She lost herself to a pack once, before I was born, some version of the story I never got the full version of, only the warning that came out of it, repeated so often growing up that it became less a memory and more a kind of scripture.

I left my own pack three years ago because I recognized that warning finally happening to me, watched myself disappearing a little more every month I stayed. I vowed that I would never again let anything, anyone, get close enough to make that choice for me.

And now here I am. Four Alphas deep into exactly that, except this time it isn’t even a person doing the choosing. It’s dirt. It’s some old, unprovable pull running underneath a piece of land I never asked to inherit. I can’t tell anymore where the line sits between wanting these men because they’re worth wanting and wanting them because some inherited farming superstition decided, generations before I was born, that I would.

I go back to Eleanor’s ledgers around noon, not looking for numbers this time, looking for something else, something I’m not entirely sure exists but need badly enough to keep searching for it anyway.

I find it in a box I hadn’t opened yet, tucked behind the practical ledgers, a personal journal in Eleanor’s hand, more personal than the farm records, less about yield and more about her own life. Decades of entries in a voice I never got to know properly while she was alive.

I read for an hour before I find the passage that actually stops me, dated the year my grandfather died, the year, according to the ledgers, the farm’s yield cratered harder than almost any other year on record.

People say the land only answers to a full pack, and I’ve come to believe there’s truth in it, though not the truth most folks assume. I don’t believe the ground has opinions about a person’s heart. What I think, having lived both sides of it now, is that the land simply answers honestly to whether we’ve let ourselves be loved at all, fully, without holding half of ourselves back in reserve against the day it might not last.

I held nothing back from my husband, my Alpha, and this farm knew it, season after season, better than either of us probably deserved. I’ve held plenty back since he passed, out of grief, out of fear, and the land’s known that too, same as it always has. It isn’t magic making that choice for me. It’s just honesty, written into soil instead of words, same as everything else I’ve never been brave enough to say out loud to the people I loved while I still had the chance.

I read it three times, slower each time, something in my chest loosening with every pass.

She’s not saying the legend chooses. She’s saying it reflects. The pack, the choosing, the letting yourself be loved without holding half of yourself in reserve, that’s still the person’s decision, still mine, still real, no matter what the soil does in response to it afterward.

The land didn’t put Cal’s hand on my jaw in that orchard, didn’t put Coop’s laugh in my chest during a storm, didn’t put Silas’s honesty in that truck or Asher’s question on that porch. Those were choices, mine and theirs both, made one at a time, long before any of us knew a single thing about ledgers or patterns.

The fear doesn’t disappear entirely, reading that. But it shifts, just slightly, into something I can actually hold instead of something holding me.

I don’t notice what I’m doing until I’m halfway through doing it.

It starts small. I pull the throw blanket off the back of the couch, the one that still smells faintly of woodsmoke and Coop, and drag it upstairs without any clear plan for it beyond wanting it closer. Then I’m digging through the hall closet for the flannel Asher left behind weeks ago and never came back for, the one I’ve been meaning to return and somehow never do, and I add that to the pile too, along with the sweatshirt Silas keeps forgetting in my truck, and one of Cal’s old work shirts, soft from years of washing, that I swiped from his cabin so I wouldn’t have to put on my sex-stained clothes.

By the time I catch myself, I’m sitting in the middle of my bed with all of it arranged around me in a rough, deliberate circle, blankets and borrowed shirts and one of Eleanor’s old quilts dragged down from the closet, everything positioned just so, like my hands had a plan my head wasn’t consulted on. I’ve even dragged a pillow from the guest room to prop against the headboard, angled exactly right, though I couldn’t tell you what “exactly right” was solving for until I look at the whole shape of it and understand, all at once, precisely what I’ve built.

A nest.

I sigh, sitting in the middle of it, feeling something between embarrassment and a kind of helpless, involuntary tenderness toward my own body for doing something this old, this instinctive, without bothering to ask permission first.