He's back. After six months of nothing, Aubrey is back. Touching someone. Holding someone. Whispering to someone. He rocked in that chair while Ezra spooned broth into his mouth. Lex read him Neruda and Rumi never giving up. I started to wonder if we'd lost our scent-matched omega forever. If the male Axel broke was gone for good, we were just tending a body.
But he's not gone. He's right there, in my backseat, with his chin resting against the top of Espie's head and his arms around her like he's the one keeping her from dissolving. Whispering to someone he met an hour ago. To her, not to any of us. I should be grateful. Iamgrateful.
I tighten my grip on the steering wheel. I ease off, check the mirror again. Traffic, Kev. You're checking the traffic.
Their scents have started to merge. Gardenia and clover from Espie. Cedar and chamomile from Aubrey. Together, they turn into something dense enough to seize my lungs on the inhale. Saliva floods my mouth. My cock presses heavy against my thigh, slow and inevitable, and there’s no shutting it down. This isn’t choice. It’s instinct stripped bare. Something ancient waking up after thirty-nine years spent locked inside a cage.
This scent.
My mates.
Filling the car with something that bypasses thought entirely and lands somewhere deeper. Somewhere primal.
Lex, Ezra, and I had already accepted what our lives would be. Three alphas. No mates. Growing old side by side because there’d never been another option. We built something good anyway. Quiet. Steady. A life that worked.
Now it feels like we were only waiting for this.
Thirty-nine years of waiting, and it turns out it fits in our SUV.
I've wanted for six months. Longer, really. Wanted since the moment I walked into that warehouse looking for Leah and found Aubrey kneeling at Axel's feet with a gun pressed to his temple and nothing in his eyes. Cold concrete and dripping water somewhere behind a wall. Him, so still, like he'd already decided it didn't matter. My whole life rearranged itself around that image. Around him. Around the absolute certainty that I would get him out of there or die trying.
“Kev.” Lex's voice is pitched low. “You're doing seventy in a forty zone.”
I don't answer.
“Kev.”
Shit.
I ease off the accelerator. Lex exhales beside me. He doesn't say anything else. Neither do I. Everything I could say would come out wrong. My foot doesn't want to cooperate. Every instinct screams go faster, get them home, wrap myself around them and never let go. My hindbrain has conveniently forgotten that neither of them has any reason to trust an Alpha who shows up scenting like want.
Slow down. Breathe. Drive like a normal person.
My phone buzzes in the center console. Adrian Blackwood. A text with an attachment.
Sera Vidal's file. She's solid. Trust her.
Trust her. Easy for Adrian to say. He's not the one bringing a strange alpha into his house. Into his pack.
I mark the message for later and keep my eyes on the road. I can't think about Sera's credentials right now. Can't think about Adrian vouching for her. All I can think about is the two omegas in my backseat.
Selfish. That's what this is. Aubrey has finally come back to us after six months of disappearing by inches, and all I can think about is that someone else reached him first.
Espie survived years in a place that broke her apart, and instead of focusing on that, part of me is still twisted up over the fact that she's curled against Aubrey instead of one of us.
I know how ugly that is.
Doesn't make it less true.
Sera's scent shifts in the middle row, her blood orange going bitter.
“I know this isn't—” She stops. Starts again. “I'm not here to make it harder.” Her voice is low. Aimed at me, or maybe at the road ahead.
“I know.”
I don't look at her. Looking at her means acknowledging that she has the same claim I do, and we're going to have to figure out how to build something with no precedent and four alphas who've never met each other, sharing two omegas and one house and, eventually, a life. In that order, probably. One impossible thing at a time.
Alphas don't scent-match to other Alphas. You match to an Omega, and if you're lucky, the Omega matches back, and you build a pack from there. Simple. Clean. The way it's supposed to work. Nobody told us what to do when four alphas all match to the same two omegas and none of us have ever met before. There's no chapter in the handbook for this.
