"I'm glad the structure is helping. I know it's been hard, but you're adjusting well."
My fingers dig into the soil.
He thinks this is progress.
He thinks I've finally been broken in, like a pair of stiff leather shoes.
He doesn't realize that I've just accepted the inevitable. That I'm not adjusting—I'm waiting.
Waiting for the day he decides managing me isn't worth it anymore.
Waiting for him to find a cleaner solution than having a broken omega taking up space in his house.
Waiting to be returned.
"Thank you, Alpha," I say again.
He nods, satisfied, and goes back inside.
I sit in the dirt and stare at my hands.
They're shaking.
That night, I lie in my nest and try to remember what it felt like to be wanted.
Not needed. Not tolerated. Not managed.
Wanted.
The memory is getting harder to find.
Every night, I wonder how many more weeks before Ragon decides isolation isn't working and chooses the cleaner solution.
Every night, I reach for a comfort that isn't there and pull my hand back before it touches anything.
In the garden, things grow.
Inside, I'm not sure if I am.
Or if I'm just waiting to be returned.
Again.
Chapter 12
The garden tells me we have new neighbors before the moving truck does.
The air changes first.
I'm on my knees by the back bed, trimming dead leaves off the basil, when I catch it—faint at the edge of the breeze. New people. Not Ragon home from a site, not Eli's tea-and-ink, not Drake's bright citrus, not Marie's sugar-sweet.
These are... nothing.
That's not right. There's scent, technically. But it's wrong in the way hospital corridors and registry offices are wrong—washed, flattened, scrubbed until everything smells like the same generic clean.
One is faintly sharp, like someone who likes juniper soap and laundry powder.
Another is warmer, coffee and detergent.
