He tightened his grip on me, deliberately ignoring the sacred Northern protocol that he, as Heir, owed an immediate report of a Pack-Heart discovery to his father. He was choosing the terrified omega in his arms over the politics of his inheritance. "This stays in this room. buried."
"The glowing tether?" Tristan said dryly, pointing to the silver lines on my chest. "That's not easy to hide under a sweater. The magic signature is lighting up the safehouse wards like a distress flare."
"The visible glow will fade," Chris explained, grounding himself with one hand on the mattress frame against the density of Hayes's protective aura. "It's residual friction from our combined suppression. As the fever dissipates over the next hour, the silver lines should fade back into the baseline tissue of the original scar."
"And if they don't?" Tristan demanded. "If she walks onto campus tomorrow radiating the combined signatures of three legacy alphas, we might as well take out an ad in the campus newspaper."
"We keep her concealed until the manifestation vanishes," Hayes decided, already shifting modes from anchor to field commander. He stood from the ruined mattress and carefully lifted my entire body against his chest. I had nothing left in my legs anyway. I wrapped my arms around his neck automatically, driven by the new tether, and buried my face in his shoulder. "We can't take her back to the junior dorms tonight."
"The municipal wards on a standard dorm won't mask the residual scent of what we did down here," Tristan agreed, moving to the door and throwing the deadbolt. "Half the junior class will know by sunrise."
"My apartment," Chris offered. "Heavily warded for my research. It can contain the residual shift."
"Too close to the legacy dorms," Tristan said immediately. "Too much alpha foot traffic."
"We take her to my off-campus neutral house," Hayes said, already moving toward the stairs. He didn't wait for a vote. "Secure, warded by my family's security team, and empty. No one expects me there on a Friday night."
"Tristan — wipe the Knottr logs," Chris instructed, following close behind Hayes and watching the stairs. "Scrub the emergency beacon from the local servers. Three legacy alphas registered to the same stabilization timestamp is a red flag."
"On it," Tristan said, already moving, thumbs flying across his phone screen.
We emerged from the warded basement into the freezing night air.
The narrow alley smelled like wet garbage, rain, and cold concrete — a mundane human reality that shattered the pressure of the warded room below.
Hayes moved fast, covering the dark distance to a black SUV parked at the mouth of the alley. Tristan tossed him the keys without looking up from his phone. Hayes pulled the back door open and settled me onto the leather seat before sliding in beside me. The second he tried to leave space between us to reach for his seatbelt, my body panicked. My hand shot out and tangled into his shirt.
Hayes didn't pull away. He let out a ragged, exhausted breath, surrendered to the pull of the tether, and pulled me back against his side.
"We are comprehensively screwed," Tristan noted from the driver's seat, throwing the SUV into drive and tearing away from the curb.
"Focus on the road," Chris said from the passenger seat, eyes scanning the dark street.
"I'm just naming the physics," Tristan said, weaving through traffic with too much speed. "We inadvertently bound ourselves to a mythic omega with enough political value to start a continental war. And we have to hide her from our own Dynasties while not killing each other over who gets to hold her."
"We are hiding her," Hayes said from the back seat. Low. Resolute. "We protect the boundary. We bury the scent. Tomorrow morning, Wren goes back to being a ghost."
I closed my eyes, the exhaustion finally dragging me down against the steady beat of Hayes's heart.
A ghost.
The reality of the night settled into my brain right before the dark took me.
I wasn't a ghost. I had never actually been a ghost. I was a sleeping, unexploded bomb in the middle of a political minefield. And when the three alphas protecting me finally fully realized the power I was capable of holding?—
They were going to destroy the entire world to keep me.
10
WREN
Waking up this time was different.
No agony in my chest. No phantom throbbing from the broken bond scar. The suffocating panic that had become my permanent baseline since the Solstice Gala was absent from my nervous system.
I opened my eyes slowly, expecting the pink faux-fur blanket of my dorm room or the floral curtains of my childhood bedroom in the North.
Instead: a massive, floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the city skyline at dawn. Morning light, pale blue and cold.
