My perfume rises. He goes completely still, the color draining from his face.
Alice opens her mouth, but I don’t hear her. I’m locked in. Watching him.
“Mate,” I whisper.
"No." The word rips from his throat. Gruff and strained. "I… I can't."
Something moves across his face. Fast. Gone before I can name it. He clutches his hand in the fabric of his shirt. Just above his heart. Then turns.
Blood rushes in my ears. My mate just walked out on me.
Alice looks at me. “What just—”
Noooooo!My omega thrashes in my chest, wild and inconsolable in a way she has never been before. Not during heats. Not during grief. Never like this.
Tears threaten in my eyes. A painful ache sits in my throat, one I can't swallow down. My heart hurts.
And then…
A cramp crashes into me so hard I double over before I can stop myself. My fingers dig into the arms of my chair as heat coils deep in my core.
“Lark?”
My omega keens.Gone. He’s gone. He’s leaving us!
Before I can offer her reassurance, another cramp seizes me, sharper this time. My scent spikes, warm caramel gone hot and desperate. So thick it drowns out the remnants of my mate's sharp ginger. That makes my omega cry harder. I don't blame her.
Alice is on her knees in front of me. “Lark, are you—”
“My mate.” The words rip out of my throat in a broken sob. “My alpha.”
He’s gone. And I’m completely alone. Devastatingly so.
Silas
“Can you hand me the tomatoes?”
Graham reaches blindly across the counter for the colander of sliced tomatoes I prepped for the salad. He topples the salt and pepper grinder as he fumbles about.
“Maybe look away from your computer for thirty seconds before you knock them onto the floor.”
He winces. “Sorry. I’m really excited by this new data on scent matches.”
He nudges the bowl closer, eyes moving back to his screen.
“Tell me about it.” This is our thing. I prep dinner every night. Graham reads some new research that’s just published. He gets excited and wants to talk about it. I listen.
It’s usually interesting, just not something I’d pick up myself. Graham makes it make sense. Connects the dots until the implications are obvious.
“According to some new data, statisticians have predicted that seventy-six percent of omegas have a scent match.”
I add the tomatoes to the bowl of toasted bread, onions, and basil.
“If that’s true, why are there so few scent-matched packs?”
Graham adjusts his glasses. “Because omegas and alphas are bound by geography. The earth is a big place, and we are little dots on its surface. Even the most well-traveled, well-connected alphas can only interact with less than one percent of the world’s population. The numbers are stacked against us.”
Graham’s wanted a scent match for as long as I’ve known him. Since we were kids, even. Too young to understand what a scent match was, but he wanted one anyway.
