Page 8 of The Last Great Omegaverse

Cal isn’t the loudest voice in this kitchen, but he’s the one the others listen for. “We didn’t come here to collect on a clause nobody wanted written. Eleanor added that condition herself, against anyone’s wishes, for what it’s worth. I thought it was needless. I don’t know why she did it, and I’m not going to pretend I do. But I can tell you none of us are hoping you fail. We’d rather have decent neighbors than forty more acres and a grudge to go with it.”

It’s the most honest thing anyone’s said to me since I got off the bus, and it takes the wind out of my anger just enough that I don’t know what to do with what’s left.

“Fine,” I say, finally. “Fine. Nobody’s plotting. Everybody’s here out of the goodness of your hearts.”

“I’m here to deliver muffins,” Coop offers, hopeful, clearly relieved the tension’s cracked even slightly. “That part’s real.”

Despite myself, something in my gut loosens slightly. I pull out a chair and sit, letting Coop pour me coffee I didn’t ask for. I let the four of them fill my kitchen with noise and mud and the smell of blueberries. I think, distantly, that I have sixty days and a farm gone to ruin and four alphas next door who apparently aren’t going anywhere.

Nobody asks permission to stay. They just do. Coop noticing every broken thing in the kitchen out loud like he’s already planning repairs, Silas standing near the window with his arms crossed, quiet and watchful. Cal saying little else, but staying anyway, leaning against the counter like he’s got nowhere better to be. Asher smiling at me like he’s already under my skin.

By the time the coffee’s gone and the muffins are down to crumbs, none of them have left, and I haven’t asked them to. Some part of me notes that this is the first time since I got off that bus that the house hasn’t felt entirely empty.

This is how an Omega is supposed to feel around a pack of Alphas, I remind myself. I have just avoided this very thing since I was eighteen years old and determined not to let my biology dictate the direction of my life.

The pain under my ribs has gone quiet too, I realize, somewhere between the second cup of coffee and Coop’s running commentary on the state of my cabinet hinges. Not gone. Just muted. I don’t trust it. My mother spent twenty-five years warning me about exactly this feeling—how easy it is, how fast a house starts to feel like it belongs to more than just you—and I sit in my dead grandmother’s kitchen with four strange alphas making themselves at home in it, and let myself have five more minutes of quiet before I start building the wall back up.

Chapter 4

Coop

A few days before meeting our new neighbor, Cal had sat us down and told us everything about who Wren was, what the will said, and the reversion clause with all four of our names attached whether we wanted them there or not. Nobody said much for a long time. We just sat around the kitchen table with the lamp burning low, looking at each other like the conversation was going to start itself if we waited long enough.

Silas broke first, because Silas always does the math before anybody else has finished feeling the feelings.

“Forty acres,” he said. “Full water rights. If she doesn’t make it, that’s what’s sitting on the other side of sixty days.”

“You’re not seriously suggesting—” I started.

“I’m not suggesting anything. I’m stating the facts of the will. Somebody in this room needs to, since apparently the rest of you would rather just feel bad about it.”

“Feeling bad about it seems like the correct response,” Asher said, “to a dead woman’s granddaughter losing everything because we didn’t lift a finger.”

“I didn’t say lift no fingers. I said somebody should say the quiet part before we all pretend it’s not sitting in the room with us.” Silas leaned back, arms crossed, and for a second I hated how reasonable he sounded even disagreeing with every word of it. “We do nothing. Not sabotage, nothing that crosses a real line. Just nothing. Let the farm keep doing what it’s been doing for years without her. Let sixty days run out the way they were always going to before she showed up. Nobody could call that our fault. Nobody could call it anything but bad luck and a farm too far gone to save.”

“That’s still choosing to let her lose,” I said. “Doing nothing isn’t neutral when you know exactly what nothing costs somebody.”

“I know what forty acres and full water rights would cost the bank, come spring.” Silas didn’t raise his voice, never does, which somehow always makes it worse. “I’m not saying I want it. I’m saying pretending the option doesn’t exist doesn’t make either one of us more honest.”

Cal hadn’t said anything yet, which usually means he’s already decided and is waiting to see if the rest of us catch up on our own.

“My father would’ve taken the acres,” he said finally. The room went silent. “Would’ve called it practical. Would’ve told himself it wasn’t really his fault, same as you’re halfway to telling yourself right now, Silas. And then he’d have spent the rest of his life proving a man can lose everything twice. Once when it’s taken from him. Again, slower, when he decides to be the kind of person who lets something get taken from somebody else, because it was convenient not to stop it.”

Nobody said anything for a long moment.

“I’m not doing that,” Cal said. “I don’t care what the will says, what my father would’ve done, what forty acres would fix. We help her. Not because some old legend says a pack’s supposed to work this land. Because it’s the right thing, and it’s a rare enough thing in this life that a person gets to choose right without it costing them something. I’m not wasting the chance simply because the math’s inconvenient.”

“And if helping means getting to know her,” Asher said, “and she still loses anyway? What then?”

“Then we lose something too,” Cal said. “Same as any decent risk worth taking. But we go in with clean hands, or we don’t go in at all.”

Silas didn’t argue further. Just nodded, once, the nod he gives when he’s already run the numbers past the point most people would’ve stopped, and landed somewhere he can live with even if it’s not the answer that protects him best.

“Muffins, then,” I said, mostly to break the weight of it, and it worked, a little, Asher huffing something that might’ve been a laugh, Silas rolling his eyes in a way that wasn’t really disagreement anymore.

“Muffins,” Cal agreed. “And whatever comes after muffins.”

I think about that conversation more than I let on, days later, watching Wren’s farm disintegrate. About how close we came, that first night, to being the kind of men who let greed decide who we were. About how it was Cal, same as always, who wouldn’t let the rest of us take the easy road, even when the easy road came with forty acres attached and nobody in the county would’ve blamed us for taking it.