They pull out one by one once their knots deflate, careful not to hurt me, then lift me off the ground and carry me to the nest upstairs. They clean me up and then themselves, and then wrap me in blankets before crawling inside the nest, too. Bastion spoons my back, his arms locked around my waist. Wyatt tucks in close.
Ranier lays his head on my shoulder and murmurs, “You’re ours, you know.”
I giggle, dizzy and delighted. “And you are mine.”
My pack. My loves. My family.
I close my eyes and drift, happier than I’ve ever been in my entire life.
CHAPTER 34
Bastion
There’sno manual for fixing a public relations disaster when half the city thinks you’re the reason an omega had a nervous breakdown and the other half thinks you’re a barely literate gorilla with a juvie record and anger issues.
Which, fair.
By the time morning comes and we peel ourselves from the nest, it’s clear the end of this bad press cycle is nowhere in sight. Which means Ranier’s father will be looming ever closer.
It starts with pings on Ranier’s phone. Pings he tries and fails to hide. He hurries off to his study and blames it on the Council. But as Emery gets herself ready for the day and starts to work on her art, Ranier calls Wyatt and I into his office.
“It’s bad,” is all Ranier says before pulling up his phone’s view on the TV on the wall—a stream of headlines from our PR representative.
LEGACY DISASTER: Everhart’s End
COMMONER OMEGA RUINS EVERHART TRADITION
EVERHART OMEGA ART SHOW: Enough to salvage the pack?
SILVERWOOD SCANDAL TO CANDY OMEGA’S DISRUPTION: Is this the end of Everhart Pack?
They talk about us like we’re a band with the power of monarchs.
“We need to fix what we broke.” Ranier’s words cut through my thoughts. He looks to Wyatt and me with a face graver than I’ve seen on him since the day Christopher died. “And we fix it by giving Emery the best art exhibition we can manage.”
That’s his only directive before Wyatt’s off to contact influencers and tap into his network. Ranier swears to talk to the Council because he’s the only one of us with the stomach for it. And me…
I ride away from the manor on my motorcycle and try my best to figure out what the hell I can contribute. I’m not exactly PR-safe and if there’s one thing I know, it’s that you can’t out-punch a story. You can only replace it with a better one.
So I opt for something simple. I start with the flyers. They’re not even good—just grainy color copies of Emery’s latest painting with the date and location of her show scrawled in blue marker across the bottom. Wyatt made up the image for me in about five minutes over the phone. It took me longer to print them all than it did for him to sneak into her nest studio for the picture.
I take the whole stack and start walking.
The city’s cold. The kind that crawls into your bones and makes you think about all the bad things you ever did. My breath hangs in the air, little proof-of-life statements that evaporate before anyone can use them as evidence.
The next hour is a blur of sidewalks, back alleys, and the hot, oily air of my favorite food stand, where the woman at the window knows my order before I say it. I hand her a flyer with my cash and she tucks it into the tip jar, as if maybe it’ll breed and multiply.
The city is alive, even when it pretends to be dead. Every bar I step into, every smoke break outside a Council building, there’sa crowd hungry for something to talk about. I give them Emery. I give them the show, the better story because of her innate talent for art, but I don’t let them turn it into a weapon. By noon, I’ve run out of flyers and switched to tearing the info out of my notebook and shoving it into anyone’s palm who will take it.
It’s at The Hole—a bar so old the neon sign just says “Bar”—where things get interesting. The place is packed for lunchtime, wall-to-wall with construction betas, old alphas too mean to retire, and the one omega who runs the pool table like a warlord. I order a beer, because coffee makes my hands shake more than they already do, and lean against the bar to watch the action.
Someone tugs my sleeve. I turn, expecting a fight or a debt collector, and instead get a woman in a pea coat with a press badge clipped to her scarf. She’s small and looks at me like she’s already written three versions of this story and hates all of them.
“You’re Bastion Silverwood,” she says, not a question.
“I am.”
She slides onto the stool next to me and nods at the bartender, who pours her something brown and cheap. “You’ve been busy this morning.”
