I stare at him.
The silence between us lasts long enough that I can see the moment his expression shifts—the analytical assessment completing its circuit, the data processing, the conclusionarriving with the quiet, devastating clarity of a man who has just realized that the question wasn’t rhetorical.
He arches an eyebrow.
“Have you ever had a nest before?”
I shake my head.
Slowly.
“No?” The word comes out as a question directed at myself as much as at him, as if I’m checking my own files and confirming what I already know. “My last pack said it wasn’t necessary. So I assumed I didn’t need one.”
My last pack said it wasn’t necessary.
The phrase sounds different now than it did when I first internalized it. Back then—years ago, in the apartment that was always too cold and never smelled right—I’d accepted the declaration the way I accepted everything they told me about being an Omega. That nests were excessive. That wanting one was childish. That a real Omega, a functional Omega, an Omega who wasn’t being dramatic, could manage without one.
I believed them.
Because when the people responsible for your biological wellbeing tell you that a fundamental component of your biological wellbeing is unnecessary, you don’t have a counter-argument. You don’t have a reference point. You just have their word and your own growing certainty that the restlessness, the insomnia, the persistent, low-grade discomfort of a body that can never quite settle—that all of that is normal.
That you’re just a difficult Omega.
Rather than a neglected one.
Alaric’s frown deepens.
It’s a subtle expression on him—the muscles between his brows contracting just enough to cast a shadow, the dark eyes narrowing with the specific focus of a man who is not angry atthe woman in front of him but is becoming very, very angry at people who are not in the room.
“What have you done with your pack?” he asks. “Activities. Day-to-day. What did the relationship look like outside of…the things you’ve already told us.”
The last part is careful.
Deliberately vague.The things you’ve already told uscovering the alley and the assault and the mockery at meals and the entire architecture of abuse that I’ve been unpacking in fragments across hospital beds and kitchen tables and cruiser rides.
I stare at him.
Trying to think of what I’ve done.
The mental search is a reel of images that I have to actively sort through—mornings, evenings, weekends, the patterns of shared time that constitute a pack’s daily life. And the reel is…sparse. The images that surface are functional rather than connective. Shared meals that were silent. Living rooms where I sat at the edge. Holidays that I worked because someone had to and it was easier to volunteer than to negotiate a seat at a table where I was tolerated.
“Did you go on regular dates?” Alaric prompts, reading the silence accurately. “Outings. Fairs. Did they take you to—hell, even to the bar?”
I point to myself.
The gesture is involuntary—the instinctive,who, me?motion of a woman who has been asked a question so far outside her operational experience that her body defaults to confirming it was directed at her.
“Go to the barwithme?” I say. “Why would…that’stheirtime. I’m not invited.”
The words come out with the flat, matter-of-fact delivery of a statement that has been repeated internally so many timesit has lost its emotional charge. A fact. Like gravity. Like the weather.That’s their time. I’m not invited.Said the way you’d saythe office closes at fiveorthe station is on Third Street. Information. Not complaint.
Because I never thought to complain.
Because the pack’s social life being separate from mine was presented as natural—as obvious, as the default configuration of a dynamic in which the Alphas had their world and the Omega had her function within it and the two overlapped only when biology or convenience required.
They went to bars. They went to concerts. They had friends, weekends, lives that existed in full color beyond the apartment where I slept alone on a mattress with one pillow and no nest.
And I worked.
