They knew me. They knew exactly what I needed, what I craved, what would make my Omega purr with contentment even as my human mind recoiled in horror. They'd built me the perfect cage, and decorated it with my own desires.
Home, whispered that traitorous voice in the back of my head. The one I couldn't silence no matter how hard I tried.Safe. Pack. NEST.
"No," I said out loud, my voice rough and cracked from disuse. How long had I been unconscious? Hours? Days? "No. This isn't—I don't want?—"
My body was already betraying me. Already sinking deeper into the blankets, burrowing into the softness like a wounded animal seeking shelter. Alreadynesting, rearranging the pillows around me with hands that moved without my permission.
The door opened.
I jerked upright so fast my vision went white, scrambling backward until my spine hit the headboard. My heart slammed into overdrive, my breath coming in short, panicked gasps.
Mason stood in the doorway.
He looked exactly as I remembered, and somehow, impossibly, even more devastating. Golden hair that fell across his forehead in artful disarray. Warm honey eyes that crinkled at the corners when he smiled. A face that belonged on magazine covers, all strong jaw and perfect cheekbones and lips that curved with easy warmth. He was dressed simply, dark jeans, a cream-colored sweater that probably cost more than my monthly rent, bare feet that somehow made him look more human. Less threatening. Like he was just a man checking on a houseguest, not a predator surveying his captured prey.
The sweater matched my cashmere throw, I realized. The same shade of cream. The same soft texture. He'd planned that. Of course he had. Everything was planned with Mason. Everything was calculated, considered, designed to achieve maximum effect. Even standing in a doorway, he was performing, presenting an image carefully crafted to disarm me.
It was working.
"You're awake," he said, and his voice—God, hisvoice—rolled over me like warm honey, sinking into places I didn't want him to reach. Deep and soft and impossibly gentle. "How are you feeling?"
I stared at him for a long moment, trying to find words. Trying to find the rage that had sustained me through the chase, the terror that had fueled my desperate escape attempt. But they'd slipped away somewhere in the fog of sedation, leaving me hollow and exhausted and terrifyingly vulnerable.
"How am Ifeeling?" The question came out flat. Dull. Nothing like the fierce defiance I wanted to project. "You drugged me. You kidnapped me. You locked me in a room full of—" I gestured weakly at the elaborate nest surrounding me, at the blankets and pillows and soft things that my Omega was already claiming asmine. "How do youthinkI feel?"
Mason nodded slowly, like my answer didn't surprise him. Like he'd expected exactly this response and had already prepared his counter.
"I think you're scared," he said, taking a single step into the room. Just one step, then stopping. Waiting. "I think you're confused and angry and overwhelmed. I think your body is going through something you don't fully understand, and your first instinct is to fight it because that's what you've always done."
Another step. Then another. Each one slow and deliberate, giving me time to object. To tell him to stop. To do anything other than sit there trembling in my nest like a frightened rabbit.
"But I also think," he continued, his voice dropping lower, softer, "that somewhere underneath all that fear... you're relieved."
"Relieved?" I spat the word like it burned my tongue. "I'm not?—"
"You built that nest in your sleep." The words hit me like a physical blow. I looked down at the elaborate structure surrounding me. At the carefully arranged blankets, the precisely positioned pillows, the obsessive attention to texture and weight and warmth. I'd assumed they'd built it. Had assumed this was just another part of their manipulation, another way to make me comfortable in my captivity.
Mason was shaking his head slowly, a ghost of a smile playing at his lips.
"We provided the materials," he said. "We saturated them with our scents, arranged them in the room, made sure you had everything you could possibly need. But the nest itself?" He gestured at the cocoon of softness around me. "That was all you, Red. Your hands. Your instincts. While you were sleeping off the sedative, your Omega took over and built exactly what she needed to feel safe."
I looked down at my hands. At the fingers that had arranged these blankets without my knowledge or consent. At the body that had betrayed me yet again, surrendering to instincts I'd spent six years trying to suppress.
"No," I whispered. "I wouldn't have—I didn't?—"
"You did." Mason had reached the edge of the bed now. The edge of the nest. He stood there, close enough to touch, close enough that his scent wrapped around me like a physical embrace. But he didn't reach for me. Didn't try to enter. Just... waited. "Your body knows you're safe now, Ava. Your instincts know you're finally where you belong. It's only your mind that's still fighting."
"Because my mind is the only part of me that's stillsane."
"Or maybe your mind is the only part of you that's been lying." His head tilted slightly, studying me with those warm honey eyes. "For six years, you've been telling yourself you don't need pack. Don't need Alphas. Don't needus. But your body knows the truth. Your Omega knows the truth. Why else would you build nests in your sleep? Why else would you buy blankets that smell like me, pillows that remind you of Leo's laugh, throws the exact texture Caleb likes?"
I opened my mouth to deny it. To tell him he was wrong, that I hadn't done any of those things, that my purchases had been random and meaningless and had nothing to do with them.The cashmere throw was still under my head. Still filling my lungs with his scent every time I breathed. I couldn't remember why I'd bought it. Couldn't remember anything except standing in that store, my hands shaking, my eyes burning, some desperate need driving me to hand over my credit card for something I couldn't afford.
Something that smelled like home.
"Can I come in?" The question startled me out of my spiral. I looked up to find Mason still standing at the edge of the bed, hisbody carefully positioned outside the boundaries of the nest I'd built.
He was asking permission. To enter my nest. The nest that some primal part of my brain had claimed asmine, as territory, as sacred space. He was standing at its border, waiting for me to let him in. It was such a small thing. Such a stupid, meaningless gesture in the face of everything they'd done—the kidnapping, the drugging, the three years of surveillance and manipulation. What did it matter if he asked permission to enter my nest when he'd already taken away every other choice I had?
