“But you don’t want to.”
“I don’t want to be what my father is. That’s not the same thing.”
I turn this over. The distinction matters, and I think it’s one he’s only recently begun to make himself. He’s spent years defining himself against his father’s expectations, but the thing he’s actually resisting isn’t leadership. It’s a specific model ofleadership. The all-consuming, identity-erasing kind that cost his mother her life.
“What if there’s another way?” I say.
“Another way to what?”
“To lead. Or to serve, or contribute, or whatever word doesn’t make you flinch.” I turn my mug in my hands. “You told me you went against your father to protect me. You ran patrols alone because the official response wasn’t fast enough. You made decisions about my safety before anyone gave you permission to.” I look up at him. “You keep calling yourself the rebel as if it’s the opposite of being a leader. From where I’m sitting, it looks like you’ve been leading the whole time. Just not the way anyone expected.”
He looks at me for a long moment. I feel something shift, a loosening, as if a knot that’s been tightening for years has given way by a fraction of a millimetre.
“You sound like Maggie,” he says.
“Is that a compliment?”
“From Maggie, everything is a compliment. She’d tell you so herself.”
The afternoon brings a house call that tests my new senses in ways I’m not prepared for.
A farmer on the western edge of the village calls about a ewe that’s gone off her feed. Routine enough. I pack my kit, drive the narrow lane, and spend twenty minutes examining an animal whose only real problemis a mild tooth abscess that’s making chewing uncomfortable.
But the farm itself is something else.
The moment I step out of the car, my body responds. Not to the ewe, not to the farm. To the land. There’s a quality to the air here that I can feel against my skin, a heaviness, a charge, as if the ground itself is humming at a frequency just below audible range. The sensation intensifies as I walk towards the lower fields, and by the time I’m heading back to the car, my skin is prickling, and the hair on my arms is standing up.
I stop at the gate and look out over the landscape. The fields slope down towards the treeline, and beyond the trees I can see the hills rising into mist. It’s beautiful and ordinary and also, somehow, thrumming with something I have no name for.
“Funny sort of place, isn’t it?” The farmer, a weathered man in his sixties called Geoff, is leaning against the fence. “My grandmother used to say the ground has a long memory up here.”
It’s a throwaway remark, the kind of thing country people say about their land. But standing here with my skin prickling and my senses wide open, it doesn’t feel throwaway at all.
“Thank you for seeing to the ewe, Dr Clarke,” he says, whistling for his dog.
“She’ll be right once that tooth settles.”
I drive home with the windows down, cold air washing over my face. Ground with a long memory. Instincts coming online. The quiet, persistent feeling that I’ve been asleep for thirty years and I’m only now starting to wake up.
That evening, Roan cooks. This is a development I wasn’t expecting. He arrived at six with a bag of ingredients and the declaration that if he had to watch me eat toast for dinner one more time, he’d lose his mind. Now my kitchen smells of garlic, onions, something involving chicken that’s making my enhanced senses very happy.
I sit at the table with my notebook and watch him move around the space. He cooks the way he does everything: efficiently, without fuss, with a competence that suggests he’s done this a thousand times but would never describe himself as someone who cooks. The domesticity of it catches me off guard at intervals, tiny jolts of awareness that this is happening, that a man is making dinner in my kitchen, that we are becoming something I didn’t plan for.
“Ask your questions,” he says, without turning from the stove.
“How did you know I had questions?”
“You’ve been staring at me for ten minutes with that expression. The one that means you’re organising a list.”
I do have a list. I’ve had a list since the morning after, growing longer by the hour, and I’ve been rationing the questions because asking them all at once would take days.
“The Omega thing,” I say. “You’ve told me the basics. Emotional core of the pack, rare, stabilising. But there’s a part you’ve been careful about. The heat cycles. Tell me about those.”
He’s quiet for a moment, stirring. “Omegas experience periodic heat cycles. They’re intense. They’re also manageable, once you understand what’s happening and have—” He hesitates.
“A mate.”
“Support. But yes. A bonded mate stabilises the cycle. Which is why those last few days were so difficult for you. Your body was cycling without a grounding presence.”
