"Rules."
"Practical ones." He doesn't look at me. Just the trees. "No contact with Ragon's pack. Unless you want to go straight back, it's best you don't reach out. And please don't tell your friends where you are or that you didn't choose to come."
"Because they might call the registry."
"Yes. If someone reports an unclaimed omega here, you go back to Ragon." A pause. "And I go back to prison."
He says it the same way he says most things. Even. Direct. No cushioning around it.
I appreciate that but the word still catches.
"Prison," I repeat.
"Yeah."
"You've been to prison."
"Yes."
I look at him. The profile of him. The careful stillness. "What for?"
He's quiet a moment. Then he exhales slowly.
"Many years ago, a man almost lost his life in an alley behind a bar. He was beaten badly. Ended up in the hospital's critical care unit. They weren't sure he'd make it." He turns the mug in his hands. "He lived. But I went to prison, and when I got out the registry flagged me. They decided I was too unstable to have an omega or even be around one."
I take that in.
"You can't be around omegas at all?"
"No."
"So you're not even supposed to be in this house with me in it."
"No. I'm not."
"Every time I came to your kitchen," I say slowly. "Every time you were in the garden with me. When you came over to my house for dinner."
"All of it."
"You were risking going back to prison."
"Yes."
I look at him. "Why?"
He turns his head. His eyes find mine and hold them.
"Because you're worth it, Verena."
The words move somewhere deep and sit there.
I look back at the trees and give myself a moment to breathe through it.
"That's why you wouldn't help me during my heat," I say.
He nods slowly. "You can't imagine how much it hurt me not to open that door. But if I'd touched you that way—even with you in heat and needing alphas, even with you being my scent match—the registry wouldn't just have sent me back to prison. They would have buried me. Zero chance of the flag ever coming off. Zero chance of my pack ever being an option for you."
I remember the hours he spent on the other side of that door. The sounds I was making and what those sounds do toan alpha, let alone a scent-matched one. What it costs to choose someone else's future over your own immediate need.
