“I have an announcement.”
The table stills. Roan’s fork pauses mid-air. Grayson’s hand tightens on his glass. Hunter’s posture, already rigid, goes granite.
“Bethany and I are engaged.”
A beat. Then: “Bethany Lyle?” Grayson’s voice is carefully neutral. “Your beta girlfriend.”
“My betafiancée.” Liam reaches into his jacket and produces a small envelope. Cream cardstock, embossed lettering. He slides it to the center of the table. “Engagement party. Three weeks. I’d like everyone there.”
Roan picks up the invitation, reads it, and passes it to Viv with an expression that manages to be both amused and concerned. Viv reads it and presses her lips together.
Grayson clears his throat. “Liam—”
“I’m not asking for permission.” Liam’s voice is steady and final. He sits back down and takes a sip of wine with the unhurried confidence of a man who has already run every scenario. “Bethany is intelligent, stable, and compatible. We make sense. On paper and in practice. I’ve watched—” He pauses. His eyes move to Grayson. Not hostile. Pitying. “I’ve watched what omega bonding has done to this family. The chaos. The disruption. The complete upending of rational priorities.”
His gaze shifts. Lands on me. On the scarf at my throat. Then back to Grayson, but the message has been delivered—a meaningful, measured look that encompasses the bonded CEO and the omega activist sitting at his family’s dinner table, and finds the picture unacceptable.
Grayson’s jaw flexes. Beside me, Lila’s hand finds mine under the table and squeezes. Across the walnut surface, Hunter stares at his brother with an expression I’ve only seen once before—in the bathroom mirror at the lodge, when he told me he’d use his father’s ghost to stay strong.
“I’m choosing stability,” Liam continues. “Logic over biology. A partnership built on compatibility, not chaos. Bethany and I will build something solid. Something that doesn’t rely on pheromones and heat cycles and—” He waves his hand, a gesture that encompasses the entire table and everything unspoken hovering above it. “This.”
I should say nothing. I’m a guest. This is a family matter. The appropriate response is to study my wine glass and let the Vaughns sort themselves out.
But Liam looked at me. Included me in the wreckage he’s cataloging. And the part of me that has been fighting for omega autonomy since law school—the part that sat across from Hunter Vaughn in a mediation room and argued that omegas do just fine without alphas—recognizes the irony so acutely it burns.
I don’t speak. I don’t have to. Hunter’s knee, under the table, presses against mine. Deliberate. Solid. Not a question—an anchor. And I don’t pull away.
Grayson breaks the silence. “We’ll be there.” His voice carries the authority of a man who has learned, recently and at great cost, that fighting biology is a war you lose slowly. “But Liam—”
“I know what you’re going to say.”
“I doubt it.” Grayson’s blue eyes hold his brother’s. “I was going to say congratulations. And that I hope you never have tolearn the difference between choosing a partner and recognizing one.”
The sentence lands like a closing statement. Liam blinks. Roan stares into his wine. Viv reaches across the table and picks up the invitation and tucks it into her purse with the diplomatic efficiency of a woman who has been managing her brothers’ emotional shrapnel her entire life.
Dinner continues. The lamb grows cold. The conversation never fully recovers.
***
I’m gathering my coat in the foyer when he appears.
The rest of the family is still in the dining room—Grayson and Lila on the couch, Roan mixing a drink, Viv interrogating Liam about Bethany’s ring size with the relentless focus of a woman who intends to judge the setting. The hallway is empty. The coat closet is tucked around a corner, out of the sight line from the main room.
Hunter leans against the wall beside me as I pull my jacket off the hanger. Close enough that I can smell him beneath whatever cologne he applied before dinner—the real scent, dark and layered, the one that lives in the sweaters I’ve stolen and the sheets I haven’t washed.
“I’ll stop by later.”
Not a question. A statement of fact, delivered in the low register that he uses when the lawyer has stepped aside and the alpha is running the conversation.
I shake my head. “Hunter.”
“Later.” His eyes are on me—steady, certain, the gray-green dark in the dim foyer light. “After everyone leaves. Two hours.”
“We said—”
“I know what we said.”
I pull my jacket on. Wrap my scarf tighter—an adjustment that’s become as automatic as breathing, the constant maintenance of hiding the mark he put on me. His eyes track the gesture, and the muscle in his jaw flexes in a way I’ve learned to read as the alpha swallowing something the man won’t say.
