But here I am, surrendering everything.
She hadn't surrendered yet. But part of her wanted to. I could see it in every line she'd written.
Who hurt you, little omega?my alpha wondered, aching with the need to fix what was broken.Who taught you that bonds meant destruction instead of completion?
Her mother. That was the obvious answer. Twelve years of watching someone fade away because of a severed bond would teach anyone that soulmates were dangerous.
That wasn't the whole truth. The world had hurt her too. Society's expectations of omegas — soft, submissive, dependent, less than, had hurt her. The fear of losing herself to biology she'd never asked for had hurt her. Years of suppressants and denial had hurt her, even as they'd protected her from the very thing she feared.
Now she had five alphas to contend with. I closed the notebook carefully. Pressed my palm against the cover like I could somehow reach her through the pages, through the words she'd written, through the bond that connected us whether she wanted it to or not.
She writes like someone who's been hurt. But also like someone who wants to heal.
The longing was there, buried beneath the fear. The desire to surrender, to trust, to let someone in. She fought it — god, she fought it so hard — but it was there.
"We'll find a way," I said to the empty studio. To the ghost of her scent that I could almost imagine still lingered in my memory. To the violet bond burning quietly in my chest, reaching for an omega who kept running away. "We have to."
Because she was ours.
Because she was hurting.
Because somewhere in this city, our omega was running scared and getting sicker by the hour, and every instinct I had was screaming at me to find her and fix her and show her that bonds didn't have to be chains.
They could be lifelines. If only she'd let us prove it.
I gathered her notebook and stood, tucking it carefully into the drawer of my desk where it would be safe until I could return it to her. Evidence of who she was. A roadmap to understanding her fears.
Maybe — just maybe — a guide to earning her trust. The pack bond hummed with shared determination as I finally left the studio, the afternoon sun already dipping toward evening. Five alphas united in a single purpose, connected by threads that had bound us together since we were teenagers and would hold us together until we died.
We would wait. We would watch. We would show her what we really were.
When she was ready — if she was ever ready — we would catch her when she finally stopped running.
Chapter Seven
KEIRA
I woke up feeling like I was dying.
Not the slow, creeping death I'd watched claim my mother over twelve years — the kind that steals pieces of you so gradually you don't notice you're disappearing until there's almost nothing left. This was different. Faster. More immediate. A fever burning beneath my skin like someone had lit a match inside my chest and let it spread, consuming everything in its path until there was nothing left but ash and heat and the desperate need for something I refused to name.
The morning light filtered through my curtains in soft grey streams, painting my bedroom in shades of exhaustion and dread. Dust motes floated lazily in the pale beams, indifferent to my suffering, dancing their slow waltz while I lay paralyzed in the nest I'd built with my own hands the night before. The blankets surrounded me like a cocoon — soft and warm and exactly what my omega had demanded — but even their comfort couldn't mask how wrong everything felt inside my own body.
Every muscle ached like I'd run a marathon in my sleep, the kind of deep soreness that went beyond simple fatigue and settled into the very fibers of my being. My joints protested at the mere thought of motion, stiff and swollen and wrong in ways I couldn't quite articulate, like my bones had been replaced with rusted metal overnight. My head pounded with each beat of my heart, a relentless rhythm of pain that made me want to burrow deeper into the blankets and never emerge, never face the world waiting outside this small sanctuary of softness.
Two bonds burned in my chest.
Golden amber and violet, pulsing in tandem like twin heartbeats that didn't belong to me, that had taken up residence behind my ribs without permission and now demanded attention I couldn't give. I pressed my hand against my sternum, feeling the heat radiating outward through my thin sleep shirt, feeling the incomplete connections reaching, reaching, reaching for something I refused to give them. The sensation was almost physical — two threads anchored somewhere deep in my core, stretching out into the city beyond my windows, straining toward alphas I was desperate to avoid.
Alpha, my omega whispered, stirring awake alongside me like a cat uncurling from a long sleep. Her presence was stronger than yesterday, more solid, more real, pressing against my consciousness with an urgency that bordered on desperation. The suppressants were truly failing now — I could feel it in the way she moved inside me, no longer caged but merely... restrained. Temporarily.Need alpha. Need pack. Need?—
"Shut up," I mumbled into the pillow, my voice rough with sleep and sickness, the words scraping against my throat like sandpaper. "Just... give me a minute."
She subsided, but I could feel her there — watchful, worried, waiting. A presence in my own mind that I'd spent seven yearspretending didn't exist, now impossible to ignore no matter how hard I tried.
I don't know how long I lay there before I finally forced myself to move. Long enough for the grey morning light to shift and brighten through my curtains, the sun climbing higher in a sky I couldn't see, painting new patterns on my ceiling as the minutes ticked by. Long enough for the sounds of the city to filter through my windows — the distant hum of traffic building on the streets below, the occasional honk of a horn sharp and irritating, the muffled voices of people living their normal lives while mine fell apart around me.
When I finally pushed myself upright, the room spun.
