Jamie turns back with those wide green eyes. “Right now?”
I shrug. “It’s as good a time as any. And it’s the full moon.”
Jamie steps closer to the glass, silver moonlight reflecting in his emerald eyes. “Do you think people really used to roam in packs? Hunting with their bare hands?”
“It’s plausible. But there were probably as many different ways of dealing with it as there were alphas and omegas. Tribes, communes, hidden-in-plain-sight. There are ties back to vampire legends, werewolves, cryptids like the Chupacabra and Bigfoot, even fae.”
“Yet the wolves stuck, huh?”
“Ridiculous,” I say with a slight shake of my head. “Years ago, I joined a renaming committee. But the terms have taken on a life of their own. Wolves will never recover from the reputational damage.”
“Yeah, I was reading that the whole alpha/beta thing was just… a complete misinterpretation of captive group dynamics. Though I mean, props for being the dysfunctional wolf pack that named an entire… I don’t know, biological phenomenon.”
“It’s easy to get credit for a discovery when you make it up.”
Jamie snorts. “Yeah… I guess so… What’s your take on the whole alien DNA thing?” He says it with a twinkle.
I roll my eyes. “Those people need to take an Occam’s razor to the throat.”
Jamie laughs, husky and rich, tone deepened by the shift. “What’s your hypothesis?”
“All science seems like magic until we explain it. It’s metaphysical, yes. But it follows predictable patterns of inheritance and expression. It’s a simple homozygous recessive trait, for fuck’s sake. It doesn’t take a genius to fill out a punnet square.”
“We’re no closer to understanding why any given person is born an alpha or an omega though, are we?”
“A full sequencing study recently hit peer review. It’s not single-gene, that’s for sure.”
“What do you think of the… personality theory?”
I raise a brow at the omega, his green eyes twinklingwith intellectual curiosity despite his nakedness and monstrous form. “Jamie, this is a very technical conversation for me being minutes away from jumping your bones.”
“I’m stalling. Humor me.”
I chuckle, shaking my head as I join him at the glass, eyes sweeping out over the garden. “I find it… extremely plausible. But I keep that opinion quiet.”
“So you don’t get labeled an abuse apologist.”
“Mhm. I might ask Eileen to preemptively block a bunch of bio-essentialists for me because if I see one more of their brain-dead asshat takes, Iwillbe showing up on their doorsteps and dismembering them. So.”
“I kind of… see where they’re coming from…”
“Jamie, when is someone’spersonalityever grounds for abuse? How could someone’s private, intimate preferencesevergive a stranger justification to strip their autonomy away? Just because you want to kneel and beg formycock doesn’t mean anybody elseevergets to touch you.”
My breath comes fast, fury rising. This is the other thing the beast holds, the other thing I push away: the violence that comes so quickly. The strange way I’ve thought aboutallomegas asmyomegas. But now, there’s only Jamie.
He scents my anger, and his pupils widen, spice weaving through his scent again. His breath quickens to match mind, the thudding of his racing heart reaching my swiveling ears.
“I want to run now,” he breathes.
“You have thirty seconds,” I growl, and I begin counting.
Chapter 45
JAMIE
I’ve always been clumsy. I tried to get into sports in elementary school, but it was a disaster. Always too gangly, limbs going this way and that.
But not now. Now I’m bounding through the garden, hands and feet digging into the dirt, and I twist and spring off a tree with all the ease of walking.
