I wait.
"I'm the one who confronted him," Alex says. "An alpha behind a bar with his omega. He'd been hurting her for a while, I think but that night it escalated and I stepped in." He pauses. "But I didn't start the fight."
"Rhys was there."
"Rhys was there." He says it quietly. Careful. "He was young. Already damaged in ways I didn't fully understand yet. When that alpha swung at me, Rhys was on him before any of us could process what was happening."
I think about what I know of Rhys. The fact that he still can't be around strange alphas without anger rising up.
"He couldn't stop," I say.
"No, he couldn't. Once it started—" Alex stops. "By the time Malcolm and I got him off the man, too much damage was done. The police were already coming, the omega had called them. There was no version of what happened next that was good."
"But you saw one that was less bad."
"I knew Rhys wouldn't survive prison," Alex says flatly. "Not after everything that had already happened to him. Not with his reactions to alphas he doesn't know. He couldn’t be locked in a place like that with no way out." His brows furrow. "He would have been dead within six months."
The certainty in his voice lands.
Not a guess, a calculation.
"I punched the brick wall enough to make my knuckles bleed." He says it matter-of-factly. "I told Malcolm and Finn toget Rhys out of there. By the time the police arrived there was one alpha standing over an unconscious man with blood on his hands. They didn't look very hard for another explanation. The omega never said it wasn't me. Neither did the alpha when he woke up in the hospital."
I sit with that.
"You took the flag too," I say. "Not just the prison. The flag."
"Yes."
"Which means you can't have an omega." I look at him. "Which means you can't have me."
Alex is quiet.
"I hate what it cost," he says finally. "That's the honest answer. I hate that it put us in this situation. That Chase has has to fight this hard to try to get it lifted. That there's still a real possibility he won't be able to." He pauses. "I hate what it cost you specifically. That you've had to exist in this uncertainty because of a choice I made."
"But you'd do it again."
"Without hesitation." The words come out steady. Certain. "Rhys wouldn't have survived it, Vee. He barely survived what happened to him before that night. If prison had been next—" He shakes his head. "There was no version of that where he came out the other side."
I look out the window. The trees, the sky, the ordinary world moving past.
Rhys in the armchair beside my bed comes back to me. His stuttering purr and his hand on the edge of the mattress, waiting. How he flushed when I kissed his cheek like no one had ever done something that simple for him before.
"How do you do that?" I ask after a moment.
"Do what?"
"Lead the way you do." I’m thinking of the living room this morning. Rhys, who could have physically moved Alex out of theway without much effort, standing down because Alex asked him to with calm reasoning instead of a command. "Ragon used his bark constantly. He made everyone feel the dominance of it but you never do."
Alex considers this. "Ragon's authority needed the bark to hold it up," he says finally. "If you have to keep reminding people you're in charge, you're not really in charge."
I think about that for the rest of the drive.
The bistro is small and charming, all exposed brick and hanging plants. Jess is already at a table when we walk in, and she jumps up the second she sees me.
"VEE!" She crosses the space in three strides and wraps me in a hug so tight I can't breathe.
I hug her back just as hard.
