Behind him, someone breathes: “He looked at her.” The blond alpha, voice wrecked. “He actually looked.” The salt in his scent sharpens: relief so acute it becomes its own kind of pain.
Omega-Omega match.
Impossible. Unheard of. Omegas don't match with other Omegas. That's not how it works. That's not how anything works. But my body knows what it knows.
My body reaches for another omega and nothing inside me recoils.
The alphas want things from me. They always have. But this omega — this damaged man with scarred wrists and exhausted eyes — isn’t trying to possess me or reshape me into something easier to hold. He regards me like he knows exactly what lives inside me because it lives inside him too.
Recognition.
Understanding.
No explanations needed.
He already knows.
I stop caring about the impossibility of any of this. The pack forming around me without my consent. The chaos flooding the room. The scents thick enough to drown in. None of it matters.
I only see him.
The scars crossing his wrists like echoes of my own. The shadows beneath his eyes that say sleep abandoned him a longtime ago. The slight tremor in his hand when he reaches toward me anyway.
My mate. Mine.
Chapter Eight
Aubrey
The dark keeps me soft and warm. Nothing hurts me here. Nothing reaches. Nothing asks. Somewhere beyond the dark, a body exists. It breathes. It blinks. Hands move it sometimes. Feed it. Bathe it. The body allows this.
I'm not inside the body.
I'm here.
The body is there.
Somewhere else.
I like the nothing. I chose the nothing.
The body rocks. I don't tell it to. It just does. Back and forth. Back and forth. The motion helps, somehow. Keeps the screaming quiet.
Scents drift past. Oakwood. Whiskey. It reaches me through gauze, present but not landing.
Kev. He's careful, this alpha. He asks permission the body stopped requiring long ago and waits for answers the body can't give. He purrs all of the time. The body registers it through the sternum. I don't let it mean anything. I sink deeper.
Another scent. Earl Grey. Sandalwood. Sharp and steady. Lex. The quiet one. He reads. The body hears his voice. He doesn't pause for responses. He doesn't leave gaps. He just continues, page after page, as if the words themselves are company enough.“I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees,”and then the next line, immediately, no beat, no waiting, his voice still level, never changing.Alpha. Mate.My body doesn’t respond.
A third. Fresh linen. Ezra. He's the one who touches the body the most. Soft hands. Slow movements. His fingers shake sometimes when he tends the body. He's afraid of causing damage. He hasn't understood yet that the damage is the whole of me. Damaged beyond hope of repair.
A hand touches my shoulder. Warm. Pressure. Light. The body doesn't flinch anymore. The body learned not to flinch.
Another hand. My back this time. Slow circles. Someone is always touching me, these days. They hover. They wait. They won't give up on the body even though I already have. Their grief drifts past me sometimes, far off, muffled. They want me to come back. I hear it in the soft words, smell it threaded through their scents.
I loved a pack once. Thomas, Liam, Matteo. Thomas taught me to drive, his whole face crinkling when I ground the gears, the laugh coming easily, and he saidI love youlike it was the most obvious thing in the world. Liam pressed a bag of paints into my hands outside a shop window, just saw me looking and bought them, and I stood on the pavement holding them and didn't know what to do with being known like that. Matteo sang off-key while he cooked, terrible and completely unashamed, and I used to sit at the kitchen table just to hear it. All three of them, gone in one day. The kind of gone that didn’t let the body mourn.
Then there were… the others. The body didn’t like those. That was when the body learned the dark protected. That it could sink on itself and the pain would be distant.
