"And she ran," Hwan finished grimly. "Again."
"Same woman both times," I confirmed. "Same scent. Lilies and rain. Same reaction, pure terror, immediate flight." The silence that followed was heavy with implications none of us wanted to voice.
"Two bonds in less than twenty-four hours," Min-jun said slowly, and I could hear the worry threading through his usually gentle tone. "If she triggered with both of you..."
"Then she's pack omega," Jae-won finished, his voice flat with the weight of certainty. "She's meant for all of us."
More silence.
"But…she keeps running," Tae-min said, confusion evident in every word. "Why would she run from her own pack? From her soulmates? That doesn't make any sense."
None of us had an answer.
"She looked sick," I admitted, the memory making my alpha growl with protective fury. "Even before the bond triggered. Pale, dark circles under her eyes, trembling slightly. And after, when she realized what had happened…she looked like she was going to collapse."
"Two incomplete pack bonds in less than a day," Min-jun said, and the concern in his voice had sharpened into something closer to alarm. "For an omega, that's incredibly dangerous. Soul sickness sets in fast with incomplete bonds, and with pack bonds the effect is compounded. Her body is probably already struggling to handle the strain."
"And she'll have three more to trigger," Hwan added. "If she keeps running from us..."
"She could die." Jae-won's voice was flat. Final. The voice of a pack alpha stating facts he couldn't change no matter how much he wanted to. "We all could. Incomplete pack bonds don't just affect the omega, they affect the entire pack."
"Then we have to find her!" Tae-min's words tumbled out in a desperate rush. "We have to help her understand. We have to explain that we're not going to hurt her, that the bond isn't?—"
"We can't force her." Jae-won's pack alpha authority rang through the words, silencing Tae-min mid-sentence. "If she'srunning this hard, there's a reason. We need to know what it is before we do anything else."
"I can research," I offered. "It's what I do." My eyes fell on the conference table, on the spot where she'd been sitting when I walked in. She'd had a notebook with her, had been writing in it when I arrived. She'd left it behind when she left in such a hurry..but it was mostly with today’s notes and nothing else.
I had something else.
"She left her notebook behind when she collided with Hwan yesterday," I said slowly, the memory surfacing. "He picked it up, didn't he?"
"It's in my room," Hwan confirmed, his voice brightening slightly with hope. "I didn't know what to do with it. Didn't know if I'd ever see her again to give it back."
"Bring it to me." I was already moving toward the door, my alpha finally having something to focus on besides the ache of an incomplete bond. "I'll find out everything I can about her."
I set up in my studio, laptop open, Hwan's retrieved notebook sitting on the desk beside me like a talisman.
The pack stayed connected through the call, their presence a comforting weight in the background as I worked. I could hear Tae-min pacing in his room, hear Min-jun's soft breathing as he waited, hear Jae-won's occasional murmured instructions to Hwan about something unrelated, normal pack sounds, grounding sounds, reminders that I wasn't alone in this even though my omega was out there somewhere, running scared and getting sicker by the hour.
Her scent was fading from my clothes, from my skin, but I could still catch traces of it when I turned my head the right way. Sweet and soft, but with that undertone of wrongness that made my alpha want to howl.
She was hurting. Our omega was hurting. And we didn't know how to help her.
Her name: Keira Park.
The company files gave me that much, standard background information for any freelancer they brought in for high-profile projects. She was a lyricist, had been working in the industry for years, had contributed to dozens of tracks without ever meeting the artists who sang her words. No public photos. No social media presence. She preferred anonymity, the files noted. Preferred to stay invisible.
An omega who wanted to disappear.
My alpha didn't like that at all.
I dug deeper.
Family records were harder to access, requiring some creative navigation of databases that weren't exactly meant for my eyes. I'd learned a lot of useful skills over the years, research was my particular strength, the thing that made me good at writing lyrics that resonated with people. I knew how to find information. Knew how to follow threads until they led somewhere meaningful.
Her father: Dae-jung Park. An entertainment industry executive — which explained how she'd gotten into the business so young, how she'd built a career working behind the scenes at Narvi when most lyricists had to fight for years just to get noticed.
Her mother: Soo-min Park, née Kim.
