Page 1 of Knot Her Beta

Chapter One

Emily

“Come on, it has to be here somewhere.”

The receipt has to be in this stack on my desk. I’ve turned over three piles of contractor invoices, two material estimates, and what appears to be a hand-drawn sketch of a deck railing that I have no memory of drawing, but still nothing.

The office is cold enough that the chill seeps through my flannel shirt, the February morning pressing in through the single window above the desk. From the kitchen comes the sound of cabinet doors opening and closing, the kettle filling at the tap, and Jared humming a tuneless melody that still fills me with a flush of happiness every single morning since he moved in.

As I drag another stack toward me, rifling through it from the bottom, my fingers catch on a manila folder, thicker than it should be for where it’s sitting, buried beneath a stack of paint chip samples and a hardware order confirmation. The label reads:

Petition for Expulsion from the Lavender Sky Pack.

My hand freezes.

The paperwork is almost a year and a half old, the edges soft from being handled too many times and then ignored just as many. I don’t know how it ended up in the office pile. It usually lives in the filing cabinet, wedged behind the tax returns, where I don’t have to think about it.

Knowing I shouldn’t, I open it.

The name catches me the same way it always does now, with a pull of embarrassment rather than grief.

Lavender Sky Pack.

I’d thought it was romantic when Auren first suggested it. He had this way of tilting his head whenever an idea excited him, his pale purple hair sliding forward over one shoulder, his amethyst eyes wide and bright.

Anything seemed plausible when he looked at you like that. I’d signed the registration form in a coffee shop on a Tuesday morning, convinced I’d made a promise that would last forever.

I was twenty-two. I should have known better.

Naming a pack after someone’s hair color isn’t romantic. It’s a sign that the person doing the naming has never once thought about anyone but themselves.

I flip to the second page, which shows the original sponsorship.

My old superintendent at Harris and Burton Construction had put his signature on that line. He was a blunt, practical man who didn’t believe in pack registration as a general rule, but he’d made the exception for Auren, who he believed was too fragile to survive alone.

What a fool I’d been.

The registration fee wiped out my savings account. The cottage followed, two years of brutal overtime and weekend call-outs, a down payment scraped together through sheer stubbornness to please my Omega while Auren spent every spare dime on trinkets. He even spent dimes we didn’t have.

I was still recovering from that whole mess.

“Em?” Jared calls from the kitchen. “Coffee and breakfast sandwiches are ready. Did you find that receipt?”

I close the folder, shove it beneath the paint samples in one motion, and spot the elusive receipt I’d come in here for in the first place.

It had been under the corner of my keyboard the whole time, half tucked beneath the mouse pad.

I hold it up as he appears in the doorway. “Found it.”

He leans on the frame, already dressed for the docks in his heavy canvas jacket, his sea-glass eyes taking me in. “The water taxi will be waiting for us.”

I fold the receipt and tuck it into the billing folder where it belongs, smoothing the edge down flat. It belongs to a small job I completed in town, repairing twenty feet of fence along the north side of a property near the harbor.

It was a weekend’s worth of labor, and once I send out the invoice to be paid, it will shore up my savings account.

Jared sets my travel mug on the corner of the desk, and I wrap both hands around it, taking the first sip.

Cinnamon. He always does the cinnamon thing for me.