Home, my omega says.
I close my eyes and let it be true.
Chapter 31
Rhys
She's laughing at something Finn said.
I don't know what it was. I stopped tracking the conversation about thirty seconds ago because she laughed and now that's the only thing in the room that matters.
She's standing at the stove with a dish towel over her shoulder, hair pulled back, cheeks flushed from the heat of the pan, and she's laughing with her whole face like she does when she forgets to be careful about it. Open. Unguarded. Real.
The universe gave her to me.
I sit with that fact like I sit with most things—turning it over, trying to find the angle where it makes sense. I was a fighting ring alpha with a face full of scars and years of conditioning that made me dangerous in enclosed spaces. I was the thing people crossed streets to avoid. I was the reason Arden spent months building case notes, therapy frameworks and carefully structured exposure plans.
And the universe looked at all of that and decided:here. This one. She's yours.
My scent doesn't register to her like a scent match should. I know that. The warping of my own scent warped the recognition. But I recognized hers from the moment Arden brought me that blanket. I recognized it so completely that I held onto that fraying scrap of fabric even after the scent had faded to almostnothing, because letting go of it felt like letting go of something important.
I have a name for it now.
She turns from the stove and catches me watching her. Her smile shifts—still warm, but a different kind of warm. The shy one. The one she gives me specifically.
I reach out as she passes the table and run my fingers along her forearm, just to feel the connection, and she doesn't pull away. She never pulls away. She just ducks her head slightly and keeps moving and I feel her pleasure through the contact in a way that’s clean and bright.
I've been touching her almost constantly since the nest.
I can't stop. I don'twantto stop. Every time I lose contact with her for too long there's a restlessness in me that the years of therapy taught me to identify and manage but that I've never before had a reason to simply… resolve. She's right there. I can touch her. It still doesn't feel entirely real.
"We need supplies," Finn announces, dropping into his chair with his coffee. He pulls up something on his phone. "Like, significantly. We've been burning through everything and nobody's restocked in two weeks."
Vee sets plates down. Eggs. Toast. She remembered that I take mine without butter, which I mentioned once in passing four days ago and haven't thought about since.
She remembered.
I look at my plate and then at her. She's already moved on, completely unaware of what that small thing did to me.
"I can go," Malcolm says, reaching for the toast.
"We should all go," Vee says. "I need to get out of this house for a while."
I look up.
"I want to go," I say. "If Vee's going."
The table goes quiet.
Alex and Malcolm are both looking at me with the expression they share sometimes. That specific version ofare you sure, the one that has genuine care built into it but also a significant amount of concern.
Alex sets down his coffee. "Do you think you're ready for that?"
I hold his gaze. "Call Arden."
He reaches for his phone and doesn't argue. That's one of the things about Alex that took me years to trust and that I now trust completely. When I state a preference clearly, he takes it seriously. He doesn't override me. He checks.
He puts Arden on speaker and explains what’s going on.
