"No." She rounds the table and gets in my face. She's smaller than me, but her fury is alpha-level. "You didn't have to. Youchoseto. You chose to leave. You chose to make her wait. You chose to let her think she wasn't enough. So now she's gone, and I don't know where, and even if I did, I wouldn't tell you."
"She's bonded." The words are a snarl. "She's in pain. She needs—"
"She needs to not be in pain anymore." Paula is relentless. "And you are the source. So figure it out, Mr. Vaughn. Figure out how to fix the mess you made, and when you've actually got something to offer besides panic and excuses, maybe she'll decide to give you another chance."
She turns her back on me.
I stand there for a moment, breathing in the space where Star should be. The worktable is scattered with Queen Anne's lace. Her scent lingers, faint, underneath the flowers. Honeysuckle and grief.
I walk out.
The city blurs as I go back to my penthouse. I call her again. Voicemail. Text. Nothing. I use every contact I have. Private investigators. Security firms. People who owe me favors. I put a trace on her phone—the same phone she's not answering. I check her credit card activity. Nothing. No transactions. It's like she vanished into thin air.
Roan finds me at midnight, staring at the city lights, as if I see into every home. "Anything?"
"Nothing." My voice is shredded. "She's just... gone."
"She's a grown woman, Liam. She has resources. She's not—"
"She's in heat withdrawal," I say. "She's bonded, alone, hurting, and I did that."
"What are you going to do?" Roan asks quietly.
"Find her," I snarl. "I don't care what it takes. I will tear this city apart. I will search every house, every friend's couch, every hotel room until I find her."
"And then?"
I look at my brother. "Then I'll make her stay," I answer, the words dropping into the space between us like stones. "She won't get to leave me again."
Roan’s eyes widen. "You know you can't really do that, right?"
Silence stretches, thin and dangerous. The honeysuckle and grief of her empty shop still cling to my clothes, threads of a bond unraveling without its mate. I breathe them in and let them settle into my lungs. I stare out at the city, every light a place she might be. I think of my father in his empty bed. Of Bethany's face when she realigned her future around my absence. Of Star's steady voice saying I'll find another.
Then I give Roan a cold stare, "Watch me."
Chapter five
Star
My grandfather's been gone three years, yet coming to his cabin feels like running into his arms after a bad fall. I drop my bag on the bare mattress. The thud echoes. That's the only sound. The silence isn't peaceful. It's a mirror. I came here to breathe. To think. To exist outside of him. Instead, I'm tearing through my duffel before the sun even sets, hands shaking, like an addict. I find the pillowcase first. Can't look myself in the eye as I press it to my face. It still smells like him.
Barely.
That's what cuts. The barely.
I sink to the floor, back against the bed frame, and let myself do what I haven't done since I left the shop: I ugly cry, the kind that comes from beneath my skin in broken, heaving waves, straining my ribs and burning my throat, each sob clawing its way out faster than I can draw breath, until there is only noise and need and the animal sound of an omega mourning what she cannot have. I cry until I'm empty. Wrung out. The pillowcase is soaked with tears and snot but it doesn't matter.
I build a nest anyway.
Not on the bed because at this point, I'm just an animal following instinct. I build it on the floor in the corner of the tiny bedroom, on the bare floorboards where the afternoon sun makes a square of warmth. I drag the sheet I stripped from our bed—our temporary bed, the one we shared for three days that might as well have been three lifetimes—and use it as the base. I add the towel from Saturday morning that I refused to wash, even when Paula side-eyed me for shoving it in my bag. I couldn't get rid of it. Couldn't surrender the last wisps of his scent.
Now I know why.
I curl the fabric into a shape. A hollow. A place to fold my body into when the bond pulls so hard, it tugs at my veins, trying to reel me back to him like a fish on a line.
I'm pathetic.
No. I'm just another omega whose bond became a chokehold.Omega of the goddamn year.Scent-drunk and nesting on a floor. The words are sharp in my head, but they don't stop me from burrowing into the fabric. From breathing in the last traces of him. Because when it's gone, there will be nothing left of him. I bury my face into the pillowcase until my lungs burn.
