Expiration date.
She’s cataloguing herself in the language of the people who damaged her. Pricing herself with the currency of a pack that treated her like inventory—use it, depreciate it, replace it when the newer model arrives. She’s giving me exit ramps because that’s what she was trained to expect. That when things get hard—when the Omega becomes inconvenient, expensive, medically complicated—the pack leaves.
Because that’s what her last pack taught her people do.
I huff.
The exhale is sharp. Loaded. Carrying approximately fifteen years of suppressed frustration about the way this world treats Omegas in general and this Omega in particular.
“We all have fucking expiration dates,” I say. “Just because we don’t have a label stamped on our foreheads saying we’re dying tomorrow doesn’t mean shit. Every single person in this building could walk outside and get hit by a truck. Alaric could eat bad shrimp. Oakley could fall off a horse. I could finally piss off someone with a better left hook than mine.”
I move my hand.
And I flick her forehead.
A sharp, precise, index-finger-to-skull contact that produces the exactthwackI intended and the exact reaction I predicted.
“Ow!”
Her hand flies to the impact site, her eyes widening with the outraged disbelief of a hospitalized woman who has just been flicked by the man who kissed her three minutes ago.
“Don’t you ever say that stupid shit ever again.” My voice drops. Not to the Alpha register that would make it a command—I don’t use that with her unless she’s in physical danger—but to the lower, more personal frequency that I reserve for things that are non-negotiable at the human level rather than the biological one. “You’re not wasted goods. And you’re not a geriatric Omega. Are you ninety years old?”
She frowns.
The expression is beautiful.
Not because it’s pretty—though it is, because Hazel’s frown has always done something to me that I’ve never been able to explain and have stopped trying to—but because it’s indignant. Annoyed. The frown of a woman who has been confronted with a question she finds stupid and whose pride won’t allow her to not answer it.
“No,” she says.
“Then I don’t want to hear shit.”
I sit on the edge of the bed.
The mattress adjusts under my weight, the hospital-grade surface protesting the addition of a six-foot-two Alpha who weighs more than the frame’s design specifications intended. I don’t care. I need to be at her level for what I’m about to say because it’s not the kind of thing that gets delivered from above.
“You’re our Omega,” I say.
The words are simple.
The architecture behind them is not.
“It’s legally binding. It’s registered. It’s public record. If the world needs us to prove it, we most certainly can and will, but for now?—”
I take her hand.
The one without the IV. Her fingers are cold. The circulatory compromise that Dr. Winters probably documented in her chart manifesting as reduced peripheral temperature, the extremities losing heat because the heart is allocating resources to survival rather than comfort. I hold them. Warm them. Let my body temperature do what her body temperature can’t.
“No more putting the world first.”
She opens her mouth.
“No.” I cut her off before the objection forms. “I know that face. That’s yourbut the casesface. Yourbut the missing Omegasface. Yourbut someone needs toface. And the answer is no. Not because the cases don’t matter—they do. Not because the missing Omegas don’t deserve justice—they do. But because the woman investigating those cases needs to be alive to solve them, and she can’t be alive if she’s running her body into the ground like it’s a department vehicle with unlimited mileage.”
Her mouth closes.
The pout returns.
