They both looked at me.
"I love him," I said.
It came out plain. Flat. Like reading a clause in a contract. I didn't know I was going to say it until the words were in the air, and then I knew they were true.
"And," I continued, looking Stephen in the eye, then turning to Mateo. "I love you. Both of you."
Stephen went very still. Mateo’s free hand clenched on the arm of his chair.
"I don't know the structure for it," I admitted, rubbing my temples. "I don't know if I'm the manager, or the partner, or just the person who reminds you to eat. I don't know how a Beta fits into a Pack of three high-functioning, trauma-bonded Alphas and their Omega. But I know I love you."
I looked at them.
"I decided," I said. "And I rarely change my mind once I've signed off on a decision."
The silence stretched. It wasn't the heavy silence of the car ride. It was the silence of a room where the air pressure had finally equalized.
"We don't have a map for this," Stephen said quietly. He glanced at Mateo before looking back at me. "None of us have been in this kind of relationship before. There is no precedent."
"I write the precedents," I reminded him.
Mateo leaned forward. The firelight caught the scar on his brow. He looked at me with a hunger that had evolved into something permanent.
"We destroy Vance first," Mateo said.
"Yes," I agreed.
"And then," Stephen said, picking up his glass, "we figure out the rider."
"Agreed."
I picked up my water glass.
We clinked. It wasn't a celebration. It was a ratification.
We sat there in the orange glow, listening to the wind in the trees and the quiet breathing of the Omega in the next room, and for the first time in my life, I didn't need to know exactly what happened next. I just knew who I was doing it with.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Rowan
The fever didn’t break with a cinematic gasp; it just resigned, retreating like a tide that had run out of violence.
The cabin air, which for two days had been thick enough to choke on finally thinned. The scent of scorched earth faded, replaced by the faint, lingering smell of vanilla and rain, like a pie cooling on the windowsill.
Juno sat opposite me at the small, scarred wooden table. He looked like a building where the demolition charges had detonated but the dust hadn't quite settled yet. His hair was a damp, golden ruin, and he was wrapped in a grey wool blanket that swallowed him whole, leaving only his face and one pale hand visible. He was drinking water with a kind of desperate, jerky focus, as if hydration was a tactical maneuver he had to master all over again.
Mateo and Stephen were ghosts in the periphery, moving in the kitchen area, stripping away the debris of the last forty-eight hours, empty protein shake bottles, damp towels, the wreckage of survival.
I looked at Juno. He looked at me.
And the silence wasn't the silence of waiting for a crisis. It was the silence of people who had survived the crash and were now looking at the wreckage to see what was salvageable.
"I have an amendment," I said.
It came out of my mouth before I had consciously drafted the sentence. It wasn't poetic. It was flat, dry, the voice I used when telling a tour manager that the rider explicitly forbade brown M&Ms.
Juno lowered the glass. His amber eyes, usually so sharp they could cut glass, were soft and bruised. "To the protocol?"
