Page 48 of The Last Great Omegaverse

I sit between them, marks scorching against my throat, sixty days behind me and the whole rest of my life apparently stretching out ahead. I look at the four of them, Coop still riding the high of his ribbon, Asher finally letting the last of his old performance drop entirely, Silas quiet with his arm around my shoulders, Cal watching the fire with a softness I don’t think this land has seen on his face in thirty years.

I almost don’t say it. The moment’s good enough already, tender enough, easy enough, that voicing a fear I’ve had this whole time feels like risking spoiling something that doesn’t need fixing. But it’s been sitting there most of the day, and I’ve learned enough about myself this two months to know it won’t actually go away just because I decide not to say it out loud.

“Can I ask you all something? And I want an honest answer, not the version you think I want to hear.”

“Always,” Cal says, simply, and the other three go quiet in a way that tells me they’re listening, not just waiting for their turn to talk.

“Do I deserve this?” It comes out smaller than I mean it to, and I make myself keep going before I can talk myself out of finishing the thought. “The farm. Everything. Linda’s crediting me for a quota I only hit because Asher charmed an entire town hall into giving me free labor, and Coop rebuilt half this property with his own hands before I even knew how to hold a hammer properly, Silas fixed everything that needed fixing, and Cal—” I glance at him, throat tight. “Cal’s the reason any of it made sense at all, legend or no legend. I keep looking at everything that got saved today and wondering how much of it was actually me, and how much was just four people carrying a woman who happened to have the right last name.”

Nobody answers right away, and for a second I brace for the careful, kind non-answer, the reassurance that doesn’t actually address the question.

Silas is the one who breaks the quiet first, unsurprisingly practical even now. “You want the honest math? Fine. You didn’t know a single thing about farming two months ago. Now you know when a field needs replanting before anybody has to tell you, and you found a pattern in the ledgers that generations of actual farmers missed completely. We didn’t carry you, Wren. We handed you tools. You’re the one who picked them up and figured out what to do with them, every single time, including the times none of us had a clue either.”

“He’s right, and I hate agreeing with his math on principle,” Asher says, “but he is right. You want to know the difference between deserving something and not? It’s not whether you needed help getting it. Everybody needs help. Doesn’t make the farm less yours. Makes it exactly as yours as anything anybody’s ever built with people who love them helping along the way.”

“Nobody does this alone,” Coop adds, smaller than his usual volume, more serious than I’m used to hearing from him. “That’s not a flaw, Wren. Eleanor didn’t run this place solo either, not really. She had Iris, had the Hendricks men, had a whole town propping her up quietly for fifty years, same as we’ve been propping you up. Doesn’t mean the farm wasn’t hers. Means she was smart enough to let people help her keep it.”

Cal’s the last to speak, and when he does his voice carries the tone that calms a room before anybody’s agreed to a word of it. “You want to know if you deserve it? I’ll tell you what I know for certain instead, since deserved is a slippery thing to prove either way. You showed up here with nothing but a suitcase and sixty days, and instead of walking away the first week, the way anybody sane might have, you stayed. Learned. Fought for every single inch of this place like it already belonged to you, long before any court paperwork said it did. That’s not luck, and it’s not us carrying you. That’s just who you turned out to be, once somebody finally gave you the chance to find out.”

I don’t say anything for a long moment, my throat too tight to trust my voice with it, watching the fire instead of any of them.

“Okay,” I manage eventually. “Okay. I believe you. Or I’m getting there, anyway.”

“Getting there’s enough for tonight,” Silas says, arm tightening around my shoulders. “Some things you don’t finish believing all at once. You just keep showing up for them until the belief catches up.”

I lean back into him, into all of them really, the whole warm weight of the four of them around me like something I’m allowed to lean on instead of something I have to earn permission for first.

“Zero days left,” I say, testing the words out loud, strange after a month of counting down toward them.

“Zero days,” Cal agrees. “Whole rest of the season left to figure out, though. Whole rest of everything, really.”

“Think we can manage it?”

“Managed the last sixty,” Coop says, grinning around a mouthful of cider. “Pretty sure we can figure out the rest as we go.”

The wind chime clatters softly from my porch, distant enough now to sound almost like a different house entirely, and I lean back against Silas’s chest, watching the fire, watching the four men who chose me and stayed chosen even after they knew exactly why the land might have nudged us all together in the first place, and think that whatever Eleanor understood about this place, about pack and land and letting yourself be loved without holding anything back, I think I finally understand it too.

Finally, entirely, found.

Chapter 21

Wren

Three weeks after the festival, Silas silences in a way that has nothing to do with his usual quiet.

I notice it before he says anything, the way I’ve started noticing all four of them now, some low-grade hum of pack-awareness that never fully switches off. He’s short with the ledgers two mornings running, short with Coop over something that wouldn’t normally earn more than an eye-roll, and by the second evening he’s radiating heat I can feel from three feet away, a restless, coiled energy that has him pacing the kitchen instead of sitting still with his coffee the way he does every single morning of his life.

“Rut,” Cal says quietly, when I ask what’s going on. “Comes on faster than heat does, usually. Less warning. He’ll deny it for another day if we let him.”

“Should I be worried?”

“Should be prepared, maybe. Not worried.” Something almost fond crosses his face. “He’ll hate needing anybody right up until the second he stops being able to pretend he doesn’t. Man’s spent his whole life being the one who takes care of things. Doesn’t much care for being on the other side of that.”

Cal’s right, more or less. By the third night Silas has stopped pretending entirely, holed up in his room with the curtains drawn, a low fever burning under his skin that makes him restless and short-tempered and, underneath both, painfully, visibly ashamed of needing any of us at all.

I go to him anyway. Some old instinct, the same one that used to send the others orbiting closer to me during my own pre-heat days, pulls me toward his door instead of away from it. When I let myself in he’s sitting on the edge of the bed with his head in his hands, shirt off, skin damp, more undone than I’ve ever seen him.

“You shouldn’t be in here,” he says, voice rough. “Wren, I mean it. I’m not exactly myself right now.”