Page 37 of The Bright Omega

I exhale through my nose and keep driving.

I've known what we need for a while now. What each of them needs, specifically, and what I need, and how improbable it is that one person could carry all of it without breaking. I've thought about it more than I've admitted to any of them. Longer than any of them probably realize.

Beck needs someone who can match his energy without getting flattened by it. Finn needs someone who can reach him without frightening him off. Leith needs someone who makes him decide, on his own, that she's worth opening up for. Three very different problems. Three very different men.

And then there's me.

I drum my fingers again.

I'm too much. I know this. I've known it since I was twenty-two years old and watching people recalibrate when I walked into a room, deciding which version of themselves to present. I don't do it on purpose. It's what I am. Intensity without an outlet becomes pressure and I've spent almost twenty years learning to direct it productively, but it costs something. It always costs something.

I need someone who isn't moved by it. Not someone immune because that's not the same thing. I need someone who can stand inside it without flinching and not need me to be less. Someone who is enough of themselves that I have somewhere to put all of it down.

Peace. That's what I need. I'm aware of how that sounds coming from a man who built his empire on controlled aggression, but there it is.

How one omega is supposed to be all of that for all of us is a question I've been turning over for years. It's why Finn's research had lit something up in me the moment he'd explained it. Using DNA sequencing to identify compatibility markers across populations, taking the guesswork out of the match, giving us something concrete to work with. It felt like a solution. Like a way to make the impossible slightly less so.

And then Beck texts me from a hospital that he found our omega.

What if she isn't ours, though? What if she's his and only his and the rest of us are standing in a room with a match that belongs to one person and a pack that needs something more than that to survive? What then? What does that do to Beck, who has never once in all the years I've known him looked at anything the way those texts suggested he was looking at her?

The hospital comes into view. I pull into the car park, find a space, and sit for exactly ten seconds with my hands on the wheel and my jaw set and the alpha in my chest pulling at its leash. Then I get out of the car.

The elevator is too slow. I take the stairs. It's six flights and I do it in the time it would normally take me to do three, which is as much as I'm willing to give the alpha currently doing its level best to take over completely. I find the room number Finn texted and I'm already reaching for the door when a nurse steps into my path.

"Sir, visiting hours are—"

I look at her. She steps aside. I push through the door, and it hits me before I've fully crossed the threshold. Vanilla and lavender. Warm and sweet and so specific that my whole nervous system goes quiet. The alpha in my chest, which has been clawing at me since I read Beck's text, finally stills.

She's mine.

I stand in the doorway and I cannot move. Not because I don't know what I'm feeling. Because I do. Completely. She is mine and I have never been more sure of anything in my life.

And then I look at Finn. At Leith. At the carefully held stillness of two men standing over a woman in a hospital bed like she's something they've been afraid to want. Two of my packmates. Two men I would do anything for.

Two men who already know her.

I set that aside for now, somewhere I can examine it later when I'm not standing in a doorway unable to move because an unconscious omega smells like everything I've been waiting for.

I cross the room.

Finn and Leith both look up. I don't see their faces. I can't look away from her. She's small in the bed. Blonde hair pushed back from her face, makeup smudged beneath her eyes, lips dry and slightly parted in sleep. There's an IV in her hand and monitors tracking her vitals. I’ve not even heard her voice yet and already she’s the most important thing I have ever walked into a room and found.

I don't know how long I stand there. Long enough.

"She's yours," Finn says.

I swallow. Then I nod.

He sighs then stands, gesturing to the bedside chair he's just vacated. Her hand is resting on the blanket where he'd been holding it. I cross the room and sit. Take her hand carefully, noting the IV-line, the slight coolness of her fingers.

"Is she going to be okay?" My words come out steadier than I feel.

Leith makes a sound that is approximately yes. He's sitting on the other side of her bed with his jaw set and his eyes moving between her face and the middle distance like he's holding something back through sheer force of will. Behind him, Finn places a hand on his shoulder. I register the tension in that hand, in the set of Leith's shoulders underneath it, and file it away for later because right now she is pulling every bit of my attention back to her like gravity.

She's pretty. Even like this. She has the kind of face that would stop a room under normal circumstances.

"Beck?" I say.