“Is it too small?”
I spin around.
The motion is sharp enough that my ponytail whips across my shoulder, the icy blue strands catching the afternoon light from the window I was just admiring.
“Toosmall?”
I gawk at him.
Full gawk. The undisguised, mouth-slightly-open, eyebrows-at-full-elevation expression of a woman who has just been asked if her palatial accommodation is insufficiently sized and does not have the language to process the question.
“We could move you to the main bedroom,” he continues, as if this is a reasonable suggestion and not a sentence from a parallel dimension. He leans against the doorframe, one shoulder braced, his long frame occupying the space with the relaxed elegance that is characteristically Alaric—every posture deliberate, every angle chosen, the physical vocabulary of a man who is aware of his body in space and uses that awareness the way some people use language. “That’s Roman’s currently,but he’d move without complaint. It’s larger, corner room, two windows.”
“No!”
The word exits my mouth with the velocity of a woman who needs this conversation to stop escalating before someone offers her an entire wing.
“This is—Alaric, this is too much space. I’ve never stayed in a room this big. Like…never. My apartment in the city was half this size and that was the entire apartment. My place here in Sweetwater Falls was a studio with a kitchenette that I could reach from the bed.”
I turn back to the room.
Look at it again.
At the armchair that someone placed beside a reading lamp because they anticipated that the person staying here might want to read. At the dresser with six drawers that assumes the person would have enough clothing to fill them. At the two nightstands that presume a life with enough objects to require surfaces.
“And the furniture,” I say, and my voice does something I don’t authorize—it softens, the competitive edge dissolving into something rawer. “I…um. I’m not used to any of this.”
Not used to rooms that were prepared for you.
Not used to spaces that were designed with the assumption that you deserve to be comfortable.
Not used to a bed with four pillows because your entire adult life, you’ve slept with one pillow on a mattress that was adequate because adequate was the ceiling of what you allowed yourself to expect.
Alaric’s frown is subtle.
I don’t see it—I’m facing the room—but I feel the shift in his scent. The burnt vanilla tightening, the warm cardamom giving way to something sharper. The espresso notes. The analytical,something-requires-investigation frequency that his chemistry produces when information has arrived that doesn’t match the framework it should fit.
He walks in.
The footsteps are measured. Unhurried. The sound of boots on hardwood moving with the deliberate pace of a man who is entering a conversation that has just revealed something he needs to understand.
“Well,” he says, and his voice is warm but careful—the specific, calibrated warmth of a man who is about to introduce a topic and wants the introduction to land without pressure. “This is simply your room. Your private space. Yours to arrange, to fill, to use however you want.”
He pauses.
“But you’re also going to have a nest.”
I frown.
Turn.
The wordnestenters my brain and finds a file that is mostly theoretical—a concept I’ve encountered in Omega health literature and overheard discussed by other Omegas in break rooms and read about in the romance novels with the dog-eared pages, but never experienced. Never built. Never inhabited.
“What do you mean, a nesttoo?”
The confusion in my voice is genuine. Not defensive—genuine. The honest uncertainty of a woman who has heard the term and understands the definition and does not understand why it’s being applied to her.
Alaric stares at me.
