"To the dynamic," I said. I waved my hands to indicate the four of us before placing them on the table, palms flat against the rough wood.
I took a breath. I had been carrying this since the moment I wroteANCHORon their wrists in red marker, since I realized that my desire to protect them had stopped being professional obligation and mutated into something terrifyingly personal.
"I spent fifteen years making myself useful," I said, staring at a knot in the wood between my thumbs. "Because in my industry, a Beta doesn't get to be a muse. We don't get to be the talent. We don't get to be the biological imperative. We are the furniture. We are the infrastructure. If we aren't useful, we are invisible, or worse, trash that's taking up space that could be filled with someone useful."
I looked up. Juno was watching me with a terrible, unblinking stillness.
"I thought," I continued, my voice steady but brittle, "that if I managed this well enough, if I organized the panic and labeled the trauma and negotiated the terms, I would earn my place here. That I could trade my competency for proximity. That I could invoice you for my presence."
I swallowed. It tasted like peppermint and fear.
"But the invoice is void," I said plainly. "I’m not working anymore. I’m not the consultant. I’m just... here. And I don't know how to be here if I'm not fixing or doing something."
It was the most naked thing I had ever said. I had stripped out the legalese, the sarcasm, the armor. I had laid the thing I never would have even contemplated saying aloud before on the table. It was an old wound but a deep one. It was the gnawing fear that without a function, I had no form.
Juno stared at me.
Then, slowly, a ghost of a smile touched his lips. It wasn't his shark smile. It was a mirror.
"And I," Juno whispered, his voice ravaged by the screaming he’d done hours ago, "spent seven years proving I was the smartest person in the room because I knew the moment they scented me, the moment they knew my designation, my brain and my ideas would cease to matter. I would just be a body. A risky, unstable, biological liability."
He let the blanket slip from one shoulder. He leaned forward.
"You think you have to be useful to be seen," Juno said, cutting straight to the marrow of me. "And I think I have to be useless to be loved. Or rather... that if I am loved, it’s only for the biology I can't control, and never for my mind."
The air between us shimmered. It was a moment of perfect, devastating recognition.
We were the inverse of each other. The Beta who thought she had to earn her soul through labor, and the Omega who thought he had to sell his soul to escape his body. We had both been fighting the same diminishing narrative from opposite ends of the spectrum, convinced that the designated hierarchy was quicker than we were.
"It’s a bad contract," I whispered.
"Agreed" Juno said softly. "Unenforceable due to unconscionability."
He reached across the table. His hand was trembling, the aftershocks of the heat, but he laid it over mine. His skin was cool now, fever-broken.
"You aren't the furniture, Rowan," he said. "You're the load-bearing wall."
"And you," I returned, tightening my fingers around his, "are not a liability. You are the architect."
We sat there, hand in hand finally acknowledging the wound we shared.
Then, the environment shifted.
Mateo was suddenly there. He didn't say a word. He simply reached down with one massive hand and shoved the table.
He didn't just shove it. He moved the entire heavy wooden thing as if it were made of balsa wood and slid it four feet to the left, with a muted scrape of the feed on the floor.
The barrier between us was gone.
Stephen appeared in the space Mateo had cleared. He had abandoned the kitchen cleanup. He was in his shirt with the sleeves rolled up, exposing the faint red shadow of theANCHORmark I’d drawn days ago.
"The workspace is closed," Stephen announced. His voice wasn't the cool, corporate drawl of the lawyer. It was rougher, stripped down. "No more negotiations. No more proving."
He dropped to his knees on the rug between Juno and me. The last thing I expected was for Mateo to join him, but he did, settling onto the floor with a groan of shifting tectonic plates. Mateo was big enough that he had to scoot back so his back rested against the sofa, legs sprawled out. He patted the space between his knees.
"Come here," Mateo rumbled.
He wasn't looking at Juno. He was looking at me.
