He seemed to take a moment to acknowledge his hubris, his eyes going wide and staring as he saw something, some moment from his past. His jaw clenched, his eyes burning as he relived it all, over and over, as he talked to me.
“I thought Chloe would make us happy, weld us together, help us see past our differences, but…” Finally, his eyes dropped down and met mine. “Instead, she just tore us apart. Worse, she meant to the whole time. She’d done her research on us and thought we were perfect for her purposes. Well, everyone but Max. He was reclusive, spending less and less time with us, or anyone outside his specialisation, and she figured she could work with that. She’d shunt him off to the side and just use us for her purposes.”
The silver started to bleed through into his eyes now, and I was willing to bet mine were turning the same colour.
“It all came out eventually. Max found enough evidence to support that through some…unscrupulous means, then Lucien forced us to sit down and look at it. She knew we weren’t her true mates. They were back in the town she was born in, but she’d rejected them quickly enough, knowing that her omega allure would take her far in a beta world, and even further in ours. I’d like to think at first, she was just looking for other people who’d walked away from the existing alpha-omega system, but…”
His smile was small, sad.
“Honestly, I don’t think that’s it. As an omega, she knew she would be tied to an alpha pack for the rest of her life, so why not make a play for the ones that had the lifestyle she was looking for? I’m sure she would have been a satisfactory omega for the three of us, as long as we could keep her in the luxury she wanted to get accustomed to. The fact she was able to persuade us we were her true mates so easily was just the icing on the cake.”
He sucked in a breath, his words coming thick and fast now.
“I thought I was making us happy by bringing her to my pack. I thought we’d all be sporting mating marks with a nursery full of babies by now, boys that we’d look after. We’d be able to undo all of the fuck-ups of our childhood, do things right this time, and instead…”
He was always an objectively beautiful man, but right now, it was hard to see it. His face looked like Death’s head—gaunt and drawn.
“Instead, I brought the one thing destined to break us all up.” His lips thinned, and his jaw flexed. “She never wanted the same things as we did. She didn’t even want us. She wanted pieces of our pack and not others, like we were a bowl of mixed nuts to pick over. She didn’t see it, still doesn’t, that when she rejected Max, she rejected all of us, and I know why.”
His breath came in long rattling whistles.
“We weren’t a pack at all. We’d stopped being one as soon as we went to that damn school. Max couldn’t keep his wolf under control when we first started there, and the principal threatened to expel us if the situation didn’t improve, so the dads forced him to. You might have noticed that his wolf is not like him? That he’s rougher, darker, more primal?”
I leaned forward then, stretching in the way that dogs do, this body and my own somehow remembering just how primal he’d been.
“It’s because he locks his down too hard, never letting him out unless he has to, until you. At school, though, that left him with few resources. He could never really be who he was, not like we could. He didn’t fit in, never really found his place, then became a loner” —another breath, then another— “and we let him. He wasn’t getting beaten down or hurt, so there was no real enemy to fight. Initially, we tried to engage him, but he just pushed us away.”
He shook his head slowly.
“Of course he did, because he fucking knew. We were becoming what our fathers wanted—betas with alpha wills. Each of us was pursuing our own selfish interests, not creating a pack of brothers who would always work together. We left him out of things as kids, and when he started to complain about Chloe, we left him out of that too. Max would have to like it or lump it, because everyone else was happy.”
His head cocked to one side, and his gaze was unwavering as he delivered the last of his speech.
“I fucked it all up. I brought her in between us. I kept her around well past the moment when I knew she was bad for us. I was sure if we just tried, really, really tried, this could work and we’d reach that place I was longing for. I let that need for family, for cubs, for a mate blind me to what I was fucking doing, and that was tearing us apart. Then I did it all over again with you, Sage. It was my idea to set us up in the house, because I could just fucking see it in my head. We built that house as a monument to our omega, to the life we were going to live, and back then, we thought it was Chloe.”
His smile was wry.
“Except when I met you, it wasn’t her I saw in the house, it was you. You’d think it beautiful, a suitable nest for a beautiful omega, and you’d just want to nestle down and live there forever. You’d obliterate every damn memory we had of Chloe and replace them with what mattered—you.”
I watched the fur prickle across the skin of his forearms with curiosity.
“We hadn’t been back there since we broke up with Chloe, not for years. We didn’t think about her, didn’t hear from her. She was a wound we kept deep inside, but we didn’t touch it, talk about it, or acknowledge it, ever. Then you walked in and gave us a chance to heal.”
His brow creased then.
“One we hadn’t earned the right to ask for yet. I’m sorry, Sage. I’m sorry I didn’t fucking think. I’m sorry I hurt you. I wish I hadn’t. What I saw between you and Max… I never thought I’d see anything that would rip my fucking soul out like that and have me coming back, begging for more. I didn’t know she still had access to the house. I never thought she would just turn up like that. We ducked down the road to grab some pastries for breakfast, wanting to give you and Max more time together, to consolidate that bond, and instead…”
His hand shook as he reached out and then smoothed it over my head.
“For the first time in my life, it mattered more to me that you and Max were happy than whether I was. I fucking wanted that for the two of you more than my next breath, and she fucking strolled in and stole all of it away. I’m sorry, Sage.”
He kept saying that, over and over, until his voice grew ragged and tears dripped from his eyes. Some instinct had us shifting closer, then jumping up, pressing our paws to his chest, and his hands sank into our fur, stroking and ruffling it as he recited his apologies like a prayer and supplication.
That was what this was, and on some level, I knew that.
They were laying themselves bare for me, letting my pick over their carcasses in the hope that I’d take a bite, that I’d bite them. My muzzle pushed into the place where his neck met his shoulders, where the smell of him was the strongest, and despite the way pain sharpened his scent, I found myself sucking it in.
The wolf was simple. She did not want to go through this pain again and just required some sort of show of remorse, of understanding, to move forward.