I stood up so fast my chair scraped against the floor, the sound jarring in the quiet library.
"You don't know anything about what I feel," I said, my voice shaking, my hands trembling at my sides.
"Don't I?" He stood too, blocking my path to the door, his tall frame suddenly seeming to take up all the space in the room. "I've watched you for three years. Watched you fight it. Watched you pretend you don't feel the pull. But I see you. I've always seen you."
"So what?" I was crying now, tears streaming down my face, and I couldn't stop them. "So what if I do feel something? That doesn't mean I have to give in. That doesn't mean I have to become your... your..."
"Our Omega?" he finished quietly, the word hanging in the air between us like a sentence. A life sentence.
"I'm not going to be someone's possession," I choked out, backing away from him, my back hitting the bookshelf. "I'm not going to spend my life as some... thing that belongs to you. I won't give up everything I am just to keep four possessive Alphas happy."
Leo's face went pale, his cocky mask crumbling into something that looked almost like pain.
"That's not what we want—" he started, reaching for me.
"Isn't it?" I slapped his hand away, my voice rising. "Four Alphas, one Omega. I know how that story ends, Leo. I become the center of your world, and in exchange, I disappear. I give up my dreams, my independence, my whole fucking identity?—"
"Ava, please?—"
"I can't," I sobbed, pushing past him toward the door. "I won't."
And then I ran. Not to the front door, they'd be watching that. Not to the back, too many people. I ran to the service entrance, just like my mother had told me, and burst out into the cold night air.
The car was exactly where she'd said it would be. Three blocks east. Keys under the mat. A bag of supplies in the trunk.
I drove until dawn, my mother's words echoing in my head:Run and don't stop until you've built a life that's yours.I stopped at a clinic in a town I'd never heard of, used one of the fake names my mother had prepared, got the suppressants that would bury my Omega nature so deep I could almost pretend it didn't exist.
I called her from a payphone two days later.
"Are you safe?" she asked, her voice carefully controlled, giving nothing away in case anyone was listening.
"I'm safe," I confirmed, clutching the phone like a lifeline. "Mom, I don't know how to thank you?—"
"You thank me by living," she cut in, her voice cracking just slightly. "You thank me by being happy. By being free."
"I love you."
"I love you too, baby." A pause. A shaky breath. "Now hang up and don't call again for at least six months. They're watching me. Let them think I'm as heartbroken and clueless as everyone else."
"Mom—"
"Go, Avalon. Go live your life. And if you ever decide to come back, I'll be here. But only if it's what you truly want."
I hung up before I could change my mind. For three years, I ran. Changed cities every few months. Used the names my mother had created, spent the money she'd saved, built a life that was mine and mine alone.
The suppressants made me sick sometimes, headaches, nausea, a bone-deep exhaustion that never quite went away. Itook them religiously, because the alternative was becoming the girl I'd been at that party. The girl who couldn't stop crying because she felt too much for four men she didn't want to love.
I told myself I was free.
I told myself I'd escaped.
I told myself the ache in my chest was just withdrawal from the suppressants, not longing for the people I'd left behind.
I told myself a lot of lies. Then they found me.
Here I am. Back where I started. Exactly where I swore I'd never be.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
