I came to this academy on a mission.
Find the Eastman heir.
Eliminate the threat.
Return to the pack and pretend this nightmare never happened.
Instead, I found her.
My pen pal.
My cotton candy girl.
My now bonded Omega.
And somewhere in the chaos of letters and rain and the best sex of my life, the mission stopped mattering.
She's the only thing that matters now.
My phone starts ringing.
The sound cuts through the silence—harsh, insistent, demanding attention. I can't see where it is, but I recognize the ringtone.
Jett — the pack member most likely to notice when something's wrong, to track me down, to demand explanations I'm not ready to give.
"Auto-command," I say, activating the voice control I installed for exactly this kind of situation. "Speaker."
The call connects.
"You have five seconds to explain why you're in some random badluck townhouse," Jett's voice fills the room, flat and controlled in the way that means he's barely containing his irritation, "and why it feels like we're all attached to something with this emotional bullshit."
Fuck.
He can feel it.
Of course he can feel it—the pack bond means they're all connected to me, and now that I'm connected to Seraphine, they're connected to her too.
They've been feeling her emotions all morning.
Her anxiety.
Her hope.
Her resigned determination.
Without any context for what any of it means.
I let out a long breath.
"Well," I say, keeping my voice deliberately casual, "I bonded with an Omega. So that explains the emotional rollercoaster bullshit."
Silence.
For five full seconds, Jett doesn't respond.
I count them.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five.
