"Whatever you need," Oakley adds.
"We're pack," Corvus says simply. "That means all of it. Not just the triumphs."
RiversidePsychiatricFacilityistwo hours north of Manhattan, tucked into woods that probably look peaceful if you're not visiting your institutionalized mother.
The visiting room is aggressively cheerful—pastel walls, soft furniture, windows with bars disguised as decorative elements. My mother sits in a chair by the window, gray hair pulled back, face lined with years I wasn't there to witness.
She looks up when I enter, and for a moment I see recognition. Then confusion. Then something like joy.
"Vespera," she says, and her voice is exactly as I remember. "You're so grown up."
"Hi, Mom." I sit across from her, the pack hanging back to give us space. "It's been a while."
"Twelve years," she says, lucid today. "I've missed twelve years of your life. Your father sends pictures. You're beautiful. And you're omega like me."
"I am."
"I'm sorry," she says immediately. "For leaving. For making you think I didn't want you. I wanted you so much it hurt. But I was losing myself. Seeing things that weren't there. Hearing voices. The bond rejection never healed properly and I couldn't—" Her voice breaks. "I couldn't risk hurting you."
"Dad told me," I say. "About the Alpha you rejected. The bond sickness."
"David," she says. "His name was David. He was controlling. Possessive. Not fated, just an Alpha who thought claiming an Omega meant ownership. I chose your father instead. Chose love over biology."
She looks at me, and I see the intelligence that must have been there before the illness took hold.
"But you," she continues. "You rejected three fated bonds. Dad told me. Said you survived the impossible. How?"
"I claimed them instead," I say. "Publicly. On my terms. Made them mine instead of being theirs."
Her smile is beautiful and broken. "You did what I couldn't. You found the way to have both—freedom and love. Choice and connection."
"I had help," I say, gesturing to the pack. "They chose to be better. To be different."
Mom looks at them—three Alphas who marked me once and whom I marked back. "You're lucky," she says to them. "She could have destroyed you. Could have rejected the bonds and let you suffer. But she's kinder than me."
"She's stronger than any of us," Dorian says.
"She gets that from me," Mom says, and there's pride in her voice. "The Castellano women don't break. We bend. We survive. We become something new."
We talk for two hours. She drifts sometimes, loses the thread of conversation, comes back confused. But in the lucid moments, I see the woman she was. The one who chose love over safety. Who paid for it with her sanity but never regretted it.
When it's time to leave, she holds my hands.
"You were on Broadway," she says. "Your father told me. Opening night was last night."
"It was."
"Did you kill them?" she asks. "Did you make the audience feel your rage?"
I understand she's asking about Emma, the character. "I did."
"Good." She squeezes my hands. "Show them what Omega fury looks like. Show them we're not meant to be caged. Even when the cage is biology itself."
"I will," I promise.
"And those three," she says, looking at the pack. "Don't let them forget who gave them their marks. Who claimed them. Make them earn you every single day."
"I do," I say.
