I turn my head, looking at Rosemarie. Her brow is furrowed now, her face scrunched with concentration even in sleep. She's talking—or trying to, the words coming out slurred and fragmented.
"...the beans... strictly from Mexico..." She shifts, her hand flexing against the pillow. "...not Guatemala... the notes are different..."
Is she dreaming about coffee? She's actually dreaming about coffee beans and their country of origin.
Something that might be a smile tugs at my lips. I don't let it fully form—I'm notthatfar gone—but it's there, threatening at the edges.
She turns over, facing me now, and I can't help but study her face in the moonlight. She doesn't look peaceful. That's the first thing I notice. She looked peaceful earlier, when she first fellasleep, but now there's tension in her features. A crease between her brows. A tightness around her mouth.
What is she really dreaming about?
"...I'll redo it..." The words come out sad, defeated. A tone I've never heard from her in waking life. "...I can fix it... just let me try again..."
She turns again, restless, the sheets tangling around her legs. Her scent shifts—still cinnamon and coffee and vanilla, but with something sharper underneath now.
Anxiety. Distress.
"...I know they don't love me..." The words are quiet, almost a whisper, but they hit me like a physical blow to the chest. "...I know. I know. I've always known."
Fuck.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
The raw sadness in her voice cuts through all my carefully constructed walls like they're made of tissue paper. She's asleep. She doesn't know I'm listening. She has no idea that I'm lying here cataloging every broken syllable that falls from her lips. This is her unguarded, her vulnerable, her authentic—the version of Rosemarie that exists beneath all that confidence and sass and bold defiance. The version she hides from the world because she's learned that showing weakness gets you hurt.
This is a woman who knows, on some fundamental level, that she wasn't loved. That she's never been loved. Not really. Not the way that matters. That the people who were supposed to care for her—her family, her pack, the people whose literal biological purpose was to protect and cherish her—saw her as nothing more than a commodity to be traded. A product to be sold. A problem to be managed.
I realize, with uncomfortable clarity, that I've never given her the chance to truly unpack what she's gone through. None of us have. We've been so focused on the logistics—the protection, thearrangement, the deadlines—that we've never actually sat down and let her process the trauma. We've heard bits and pieces—the burned shed, the bounty hunters, the arranged match she ran from, the family that treats her like property—but we've never actually sat down and let her grieve what she lost. Let her rage about what was done to her. Let her feel whatever she needs to feel about the years she spent being treated as less than human.
That will take time. Healing always does—I know that better than most, given my own history with betrayal and loss. But she deserves at least comfort in the meantime. She deserves someone to hold her when the nightmares come. She deserves to not face the darkness alone, to not carry the weight of her past without anyone to help bear it.
She deserves so much more than I've been giving her. Than any of us have been giving her, really, but especially me. I've been so focused on protecting myself that I forgot someone else might need protecting too.
I sigh—a sound of surrender, of walls crumbling, of a decision being made that I can't take back—and move closer before I can talk myself out of it. The mattress shifts as I cross the invisible boundary I established earlier, the line between "my side" and "her side" that suddenly seems ridiculous in its rigidity. What was I protecting? My pride? My fear?
Neither of those things seems worth protecting anymore. Not compared to her.
I wrap an arm around her waist, carefully, gently, pulling her back against my chest. She fits perfectly—like she was designed to be held by me, like the curve of her spine was made to nestle against the planes of my body, like this is exactly where she's always supposed to have been. Her scent envelops me completely now, no longer something to resist but something to sink into. Something to drown in willingly.
She stirs at the contact, mumbling something I can't quite make out. It sounds like "...sweet..." or maybe "...sweets..." or possibly "...Sweetness..." which would mean she's dreaming about Tank, which is a thought I'm going to actively not examine right now. Her body tenses for a moment, instinct responding to unexpected touch, muscles coiling with fight-or-flight reflexes that have probably kept her alive more than once.
I hold absolutely still, barely breathing. If she wakes up, I'll have to explain this. I'll have to come up with some excuse for why I'm suddenly holding her after spending the entire evening insisting I didn't want her in my bed. I'll have to admit that I'm not as unaffected as I pretend to be, that my walls aren't as impenetrable as I've convinced everyone—including myself—they are.
But she doesn't wake up. Instead, she relaxes almost instantly, her body going soft and pliant against mine. Her breathing evens out. The tension in her face smooths away. She settles into my embrace like she's been waiting for it, like this is exactly where she belongs.
Like she's home.
I stay frozen for long minutes, waiting for something to go wrong. Waiting for her to wake up or push me away or react with the confusion and suspicion I would probably deserve. But nothing happens. She just... sleeps. Peacefully now, the nightmares apparently chased away by something as simple as being held.
Is this what she needed? All this time? Just someone to hold her?
My mind drifts to what she said during truth or dare. The bookshelf she wanted. The reading nook she tried to build. The way she described it—"my way of wanting a nest"—with such wistful longing.
Has she ever even had a proper nest? If she didn't have a space of her own—if every attempt to create one was destroyed or forbidden—maybe she's never experienced that fundamental Omega need. Maybe she doesn't even know what she's missing.
The thought is deeply unsettling. Nesting is instinct for Omegas, a biological drive as basic as eating or sleeping. To deny someone that, to take away every attempt they make at creating safety and comfort... it's cruel in a way that goes beyond simple neglect.
Her family did that to her. Her pack did that to her. They took a woman who clearly craves stability and security and systematically destroyed every attempt she made to find it.
