Rhys looks down at me, his expression doing the soft thing it does. He reaches up and tucks a piece of hair behind my ear with one careful finger.
"Stay," he says, a question without being a question.
I look up at him. The scars and the warm brown eyes and that almost-smile that takes work to find but means everything.
I sink back into his side.
Malcolm is watching from his armchair, and he leans forward. "Come here," he says to me.
I blink. "What?"
He holds his arms out.
I detach from Rhys's side, cross to Malcolm's armchair, and barely register what's happening before he's kissing me. It starts soft—tentative, for Malcolm, which surprises me—and then I catch up and kiss him back and the softness burns away. My fingers curl into his shirt. My omega screams, a sound that floods outward, the bond pulling toward him with a want so complete it blots out coherent thought.
His hand cups my jaw and I press into him.
Then Finn is there. Ink and rain and paper scent relaxing me even as my heart rate picks up. His fingers slide around my cheeks from the other side, gentle and deliberate, and turns me toward him, and then he's kissing me with the same hunger and I make a sound into his mouth that I absolutely should not be making in a room with other people in it. He kisses like he does everything—thoughtful, thorough, like he's figured out exactly what he wants from this.
When we finally break apart I'm breathing hard.
My eyes open and land on Alex first.
He's still in his armchair, same position, but he's watching us and his expression is not what I expected—no discomfort, no careful blankness. He looks satisfied. Like he's watching something work out how he hoped. warmth and quiet in his face that makes my chest do something I don't have a name for yet.
Then I remember Drake.
He's in his chair, staring at us with the look I had just a few weeks ago. I want to feel bad for him, but then I remember watching him fix Marie’s plate first without noticing he'd walked right past mine. The mornings he’d beeline past me just to kiss her on the forehead. That emptiness I felt. The sensation of being on the outside of something you used to be inside.
I look at his face and recognize it completely.
The horror I expected doesn't come. Because I spent so long wearing that same expression and nobody in that house cared to stop it. Nobody told Marie to stop. Nobody pulled back to make space for me. Nobody saw the look on my face and reconsidered. I made myself small so they could be big and they took all the room I gave them.
I don't owe Drake my guilt.
I go back to the couch and pull the blanket higher, snuggling back into Rhys’s side. Finn's arm settles around me from his sidewhere he returned. Malcolm's purr drifts across the room. Alex sits in his armchair with that satisfied look.
On screen something slapstick happens. Finn makes a noise that's half laugh and half involuntary. Malcolm says something under his breath and I catch a word and laugh.
And then—before I know it's coming—something rises in my chest, warm and rounded. A vibration I don't have a blueprint for. It bubbles up and out in one small stuttering sound.
An omega purr. Something I don't think I've ever done before. Something I’ve never felt safe enough to do before.
I go still.
Finn's arm tightens. Malcolm makes a sound low in his chest, his purr deepening in response. Rhys goes very still, and then his purr starts too—the broken stuttering of it smoother somehow, like it's responding to something it recognizes.
I sit there and let it happen.
Let my body say what I'm not ready to say out loud.
That I'm here. That I'm warm. That for right now, in this room, I am safe.
Chapter 28
Eli
The chairs outside the hearing room are the kind designed to make you feel small.
