I move through the rooms like a ghost passing through a place it used to haunt. My routine revolves around their absence: chores when they're gone, meals prepared but eaten alone in my room. I time my showers for when no one else is awake. I fold laundry in my bedroom. I exist in the spaces between them.
The alphas remain under Ragon's command not to comfort me.
I find myself strangely unbothered by this.
That desperate part of me—the one that used to crave an alpha's touch like oxygen—has simply evaporated. When Drake's hand reaches for me out of habit and he jerks it back, remembering, I feel nothing. When Eli hovers in doorways with apologies trapped behind his teeth, I slip past him without looking up. When Ragon watches me with that assessing gaze, waiting for me tobreak, I offer him the same pleasant neutrality I'd give a store clerk.
They smell wrong to me now.
Not bad. Just wrong. Like a song played in the wrong key. My body used to lean toward their scents without permission—pine and citrus and tea pulling me in like gravity. Now when I'm in a room with them, my lungs work a little harder, like my body is trying not to breathe too deep.
Marie, on the other hand, floats through the house like she owns it.
She does, in every way that matters.
She's the pack omega. I'm just waiting around to see what happens to me.
The bonding's been put on hold.
Jasper filed his incident report—both the zoo fall and what happened after. Now we're waiting to see if the Omega Protection Agency steps in.
Ragon's not worried. He still thinks he was justified in "teaching me my place." He was furious with Jasper at first, until both Jasper and Eli reminded him that incidents involving unbonded omegas legally require documentation. Between Marie's public fall at the zoo and the nest violation, there was no keeping it quiet.
I overheard Eli in Ragon's office last week, voice tight with something that might have been fear.
"They're going to look at patterns. The kneeling incident from months ago—that should have been reported then instead of kept internal. If the registry sees unreported discipline stacking up, they might pull her custody entirely."
Ragon's response was dismissive. Something about "overreach" and "my omega, my authority."
His omega.
I'm not sure I ever was. But I'm certainly not now.
The zoo footage is beyond our reach. The registry administrators requested it directly from the zoo. The zoo’s legal team has gotten involved. We haven't heard anything back yet.
Not that it matters to me anymore.
Ragon convicted me on Marie's word alone. The truth won't change what he did to me. No apology can erase the feeling of being held in a chair while they ruined the only place I felt safe.
Some things can't be taken back.
Some things shouldn't be forgiven.
The garden has become my sanctuary.
Finn helps sometimes, appearing over the fence with dirt under his nails and terrible jokes. He's a beta—safe in a way alphas aren't. No command in his scent. No pull. Just easy laughter and the kind of friendship that doesn't ask me to be anything other than present.
Alex and Malcolm are different too.
They're alphas, yes. Tall and broad-shouldered and carrying that weight that alphas carry. But they have no claim on me. No control over my life. No ability to take anything else away from me or hurt me in ways that matter.
That makes them safe.
When Alex leans against the fence and asks how I'm doing, I can answer honestly because his opinion doesn't dictate whether I eat dinner at a table or on my barstool. When Malcolm offers to help me carry bags of mulch, Ican say yes because accepting doesn't mean I owe him my body or my bed or my silence.
They're just neighbors.
And somehow, that makes them the only alphas I can stand to be near.
