“The mate bond creates a stabilising frequency. When I’m near you, your senses have an anchor point. It makes the input manageable.”
“So I’m dependent on you for basic sensory regulation.”
“No. You’re learning to regulate yourself. I’m the training wheels. Eventually, you won’t need them.”
“Will I?” She asks it honestly, without accusation, and the question sits between us with a weight that deserves a truthful answer.
“I don’t know,” I say. “Omega biology isn’t well documented. Most of what the pack knows is anecdotal, passed down. You might always be more settled with me near you. Or you might develop independent control that works just as well. I can’t promise either way.”
She nods. Accepts the uncertainty the way she accepts everything: by filing it under things to investigate further.
I tell her about the rogues over dinner.
Not all of it. Not the scent trail two hundred metres from her garden. But enough: that there arewolves without a pack who’ve been pushing into Mistwood’s territory, that they’re organised, that her emerging scent makes her a potential target.
She takes it better than I expected. The colour drains from her face, and her hands tighten on her mug, but her voice is steady when she speaks.
“A target how?”
“Unmated Omegas are rare. Valuable, in the wrong circles. Rogues without a pack see an emerging Omega as an opportunity.”
“A prize.” The word comes out flat and dangerous.
“You’re being protected. My father has wolves on the eastern perimeter around the clock. Nobody is getting near this cottage.”
“Your father.” She looks at me. “You asked your father for help.”
“Yes.”
“You, Roan Mistwood, who won’t return his phone calls and refuses to attend pack meetings and once told me the pack hierarchy could collapse, and you’d sleep through it. You asked the Alpha for help.”
“Phoebe—”
“I’m not criticising. I’m pointing out that you did something you swore you’d never do, for me, and I’d like you to sit with that for a moment instead of deflecting.”
I sit with it. It’s uncomfortable. Shewatches me sit with it, and there’s something in her eyes that might be pride, or might be love, or might be both.
“The rogues aren’t getting near you,” I say. “That’s a promise.”
“I know.” She reaches across the table and takes my hand. “But Roan? Next time there’s a scent trail near my house, tell me immediately. Don’t decide what I can handle.”
She knows. Of course she knows. Her senses are better than I give her credit for, or she read it in my face the moment I walked through the door. Either way, the omission lasted approximately four hours, which is a new record for the shortest-lived secret in our relationship.
“Deal,” I say.
“Good.” She squeezes my hand. “Now teach me how to identify a rogue by scent. If someone’s hunting me, I want to smell them coming.”
Chapter 28
The Nest
Phoebe
It starts with the pillows.
I wake on a Wednesday morning. The first thing I do, before tea, before the toilet, before any of the mundane rituals that anchor a normal day, is pull every pillow and blanket from the bed. Carry them downstairs. I don’t decide to do this. My body decides, and my brain follows along with the bewildered compliance of someone who’s given up arguing with an instinct she doesn’t understand.
The sofa cushions come next. Then the throw from the back of the armchair. The spare duvet from the airing cupboard. A jumper of Roan’s that he left draped over a kitchen chair three days ago, which I press to my face and breathe in before adding to thepile, and the fact that I’m standing in my living room huffing a man’s jumper like it’s a fucking controlled substance should concern me more than it does.
