The Omega He Couldn't Find

Chapter 2

Chapter 2

Lark

My room was in the attic. Had been since my father died. When Isolda and the girls first arrived when I was thirteen, they’d taken my room with Isolda’s gentle coaxing to my father. Lark’s room is so much bigger than the spare, and the girls have never been separated. They’d fit so much nicer in there.

So we’d switched. I hadn’t minded at the time. She was right. My room was much bigger. But the moment father died, Liana took the spare and I was forced up the stairs to the attic. No chance of being seen up there.

My bed was tucked up near the window that had a cracked pane where the winter chill crept through every year. There wasn’t much else. A closet with a few hand-me-downs. A quilt Edith had made me.

And Mama’s remedy journal under my mattress where Isolda couldn’t see it, her handwriting careful and sure, her illustrations pressed into the pages like flowers pressed between the leaves of a book. Her voice in the margins where she’d written notes to herself—less water for the calendula, it likes to be thirsty—and I read them and heard a woman I barely remembered talking to herself in a garden I’d never see.

Yarrow for bleeding. Calendula for burns. Willow bark steeped, not boiled, for pain.

Nobody in this house knew what I could do with those plants. I knew every remedy in that journal by heart. I’d set bones with comfrey poultices. My own ribs, twice—after corrections that got less careful than usual. I’d treated fevers and infections in pack members who’d come to me in secret because the healer was too far and they’d remembered Mama’s treatments. I’d done it well. I’d done it quietly.

It didn’t matter. No amount of skill with a mortar and pestle would make me worthy. You could name every herb in the forest and still be nothing if you couldn’t shift.

I fiddled with the sprig of dried sage in my pocket–a habit, a comfort, the scent that used to cling to Mama.

A knock tapped on my door.

“Lark.”

The voice was low and warm, and it didn’t belong to anyone who had ever made my body tense at the sound of my name. I opened the door and Edith was standing in the doorway with her gray hair loose at her neck and her shoulders rounded with decades of work and something careful in her pale blue eyes. Pale blue like mine. Like my mother’s.

She’d been part of the Ashvale packhouse since before I was born. She’d known my mother. She was one of maybe three people in this pack who looked at me and seemed to see something other than the omega, the embarrassment, the girl who carried the trays.

“You have a minute?”

Isolda and the girls were almost ready. Twenty minutes before the car left.

“Barely.”

She stepped inside my room and closed the door softly with the gentleness of a woman who had spent her life moving carefully through spaces that weren’t hers. From a cloth bag I hadn’t noticed she was carrying, she pulled a fold of fabric. Pale blue. Soft. Not new, but cared for. Loved. She shook it out and it fell into the shape of a dress.

My chest pulled tight—not pain, or not just pain. Something older than that. Something that lived in the same place as the sealed door.

“It was Sage’s,” Edith said quietly. “She wore it to the Lunar Ball the year she met your father.” She smoothed the fabric with weathered, steady hands. “It’s nothing fancy, but I kept it after. It’s been in my closet since. I know she’d want you to wear it.”

I couldn’t stop looking at it. It was simple, elegant. An A-line skirt with off-the-shoulder sleeves and made of silk. The blue was the color of early morning, before the sun had committed to the day. My mother had worn this dress. She’d worn it the moment that rush overwhelmed her when she’d first scented my father at the ball and known he was her fated mate. She’d danced with my father. Maybe she’d laughed.

“Edith, I can’t.” My throat worked against the tightness. “If Isolda sees—”

“Isolda is going to have every alpha on the continent in one room tonight and a daughter to sell. She won’t be looking at you.” Edith pressed the dress into my hands. The fabric was lighter than I’d expected. Cool against my palms. “Your mother would want you to have one night, Lark. Just one. Where you’re not holding a tray.”

“I’ll be punished.” It came out smaller than I’d meant it to.

“Maybe.” Edith didn’t flinch. She didn’t pretend it wasn’t true. I loved her for that—for not insulting me with false comfort and for offering anyway. “But you’ll have had the night. And some things are worth the cost.”

I looked down at the dress. My fingers had already curled into the fabric without my permission, holding it the way you held something you were afraid would be taken away.

Most things in my life got taken away. That was the rhythm I knew. Receive, lose, survive. Don’t grieve. Don’t reach for things. Reaching just taught you how far the leash went and at the end there were lashes from a silver studded whip waiting.

But my fingers wouldn’t let go.

“Tuck it into the bottom of your service bag,” Edith said—which meant she’d already decided I’d say yes. “Under the spare apron. No one will look. During the night when everyone is distracted and drunk, sneak off to the kitchens and change and then enjoy the rest of the party.”

She reached up and touched my face. Just her palm against my cheek, dry and warm. The most intimate contact I’d had in months. My jaw tightened against the words, “thank you” that I would not let slip in this room, in this house, where even the walls belonged to Isolda.

“You look like her,” Edith whispered. “More every year.”

She dropped her hand, picked up the now empty bag, and left without another word.

I stood in the attic holding my mother’s dress against my chest, and somewhere behind the sealed door, something pressed outward. Not a voice. Not a word.

Just warmth.

I tucked the dress into my bag under my spare apron like Edith had instructed and went downstairs to get my coat.

***

Callum

I hated these things.

I wasn’t going to brood-in-the-corner over it. I showed up. I wore the suit. I shook hands and made the kind of eye contact that reminded other alphas that I could end their bloodline if the mood struck, which it wouldn’t, but they didn’t need to know that.

My reputation did its job. Now I just had to stand around for a few hours and try not to look like I’d rather be literally anywhere else. Which, according to my beta Reid, wasn’t a skill I possessed.

The car rid had taken four hours. Four hours in the back of the limousine while Reid went over alliance briefings and reminders of packs who’d be at the ball tonight, while Chase was glued to his phone texting Elise and when she started ignoring him he’d roll up and down the window pouting. My honorable gamma. His idea of preparation was “we’ll figure it out when we get there,” which was either optimism or brain damage depending on the day.

I tugged at the collar of my suit to stop the choking.

“You’re fidgeting,” Reid said from across the car without looking up from the notes spread across his lap. His brown curls were actually neat for once, which meant he’d put effort in, which meant he was nervous about the political landscape tonight and would never admit it.

“I’m not fidgeting,” I said, loosening my tie. With three wolves in the backseat, it was ungodly hot in this car.

Chase, who had been slouched in the corner with his blonde hair falling out of its tie, and his boots propped on the seat Reid had specifically asked him not to put his boots on, grinned. “He’s nervous.”

“I’m not nervous.”

“You’re nervous, because there’s going to be unmated females there and one of them might be your mate. Then you’d have to actually talk to woman without Reid scripting the conversation first,” Chase teased.

I groaned. “That was one time.”

“The summit in Greymoor,” Reid commented, still not looking up. “You told Alpha Hargrove’s daughter that her dress remind you of funeral parlor curtains.”

I crossed my arms over my chest, my shirt pulling tight across my shoulders. “It did.” It wasn’t my fault. Females were… complicated. If I’d said the same thing to Chase, he would have laughed.

“She cried, Callum,” Reid said, peering up momentarily.

“…It was a nice curtain?” As if that’d make it better.

Chase clapped a hand on my shoulder. “It’s ok, buddy. There’ll be someone who appreciates your excellent tastes in drapery.”

“I’m telling Elise,” I said, taking off my phone from my pocket.

“No, wait!” Chase immediately sat up and launched himself over the seats to grab my phone from my hand. I held him at bay with ease. Alpha privileges.

“Children,” Reid said. “Settle.”

“But he—” Chase pointed accusingly over to me.

Reid quieted him with a hard stare.

Chase grumbled and slouched back in his seat.

I pocketed my phone.

We’d been doing this since we were kids. Reid had been my shadow since we were born, being born to my father’s beta. He was sharp and steady and always three steps ahead of whatever I was about to walk into. If I hadn’t been born an alpha, he’d make a great one. Chase came later—fifteen, feral, and half-dead when we found him in that rogue camp with scars from a silver whip across his back and a grin that made bordered on insanity. He’d looked up at me from the cage they’d kept him in and said, “Took you long enough.”

He’d never left my side after we took him back to Thornhollow and when I took over my father’s role as alpha, he’d naturally slotted in as my gamma.

The car slowed. Through the window, the estated emerged from the thick treeline—old stone, ivy-covered, and lit up with fairy lights in the trees like something out of a storybook. It was neutral ground. No pack had claim here and that was by design. It existed for a few purposes. Trail if a wolf broke one of their sacred laws that went above pack law. Power ascensions where sons took over their father’s roles as alpha of their packs. And tonight—this once in a year ball where unmated wolves came from across the continent to drink, dance, and find their other halves.

I pulled at my collar again.

“Remember,” Reid said, tucking his notes into the folder on his lap with the precision of someone who alphabetized his nightmares. “The head of Ashvale, Isolda, will be here tonight along with her two daughters. She’s been pushing for a meeting. She’s been angling for a match for her eldest, Rowena.”

“A match with who?”

Reid leveled a stare at me.

“Oh.” Me.

“She’s alpha-blooded, has a strong wolf, and Ashvale needs a merger to survive. You’re the obvious target.”

“Wonderful.” With all the perks of being alpha, being hunted like sport by every unmated female he came across was not one of them.

“Just be polite and noncommittal. I’ll extract you if she corners you.”

“I can handle being cornered, Reid.”

“You told a woman her dress looked like a curtain.”

Okay fair point.

Chase stretched in his seat. One of the scars from the rogue camp peeked above his collar, the way it always did when he moved a certain way. He never covered it. I’d asked him about it once, years ago, and he’s said, “It reminds me that the worst thing that ever happened to me ended with my two best friends kicking down a door.” I’d never asked again.

Curtain talk or not, these two would be there for me. Even if it was only a stupid ball with hungry females looking for an alpha to chase.

The driver stopped us at the front gate, and we all got out of the car.

“All right.” Chase cracked his neck and plastered on the kind of smile that made women trip and Reid sigh. “Let’s go find Cal a mate.”

“That is not what tonight is about,” I said.

“It’s literally what tonight is about. It’s a mate-finding ball. It’s in the name.”

“Tonight is about political alliances and—”

“Finding. A. Mate.” Chase pointed at me. “You’re twenty-five. Alcide has been crawling under your skin for months. At some point you’re going to have to accept that the Goddess might actually have someone for you and she might be in that building and you might have to use words to talk to her. Real words. No curtain words.”

Alcide rumbled in agreement in my chest. I rolled my eyes. I did not need my wolf siding with Chase. Alcide had been restless for the better part of a year—pacing, pulling, itching for something I couldn’t scratch that had nothing to do with my territory or threats. Reid thought it was biological. Chase thought it was romantic. I thought they both needed to mind their own business.

“It could be a good idea,” Reid chimed in. “The pack is getting nervous about you finding a mate and settling. Luna’s are good for pack morale.”

Traitor.

“I’m not finding a mate based on pack morale.”

“You know,” Chase began dramatically, hooking an arm around Reid’s shoulder who shrugged him off. “I found my Elise at this ball, you know. Three years ago.”

“We know,” Reid said.

Chase’d retell the story every chance he got. Pack gatherings. Alliance meetings. Every winter solstice while he dragged Elise underneath the mistletoe to kiss. There was no doubt he was over the moon with her. Happy and so in love it bordered on nauseous. It only made Alcide prowl more inside me.

He wanted his mate, and after twenty-five years, I was starting to feel that sting of loneliness too. I had my pack and my friends. I wanted my other half and maybe I really could find her tonight somewhere in these halls under the fairy lights.

“I was at the bar getting drunk, fighting off all the other she-wolves who wanted a piece of me,” he continued.

Reid snorted despite himself.

“And she walked past me and I just…” He trailed off, his green eyes going somewhere I couldn’t follow. “The whole room fell away. Every scent. Every sound. Every person. Just poof—they all vanished. And there she was wearing this yellow dress with these little yellow flowers braided in her hair. She looked like the most beautiful sunset I’d ever seen and I was done. She became my everything.”

My everything. I’d never had that. I’d heard the stories. How it felt like lightning struck when you found your fated mate. How your entire world recentered when you looked eyes and suddenly they were your gravity. My parents had had that. Chase sure as hell did too.

I wanted that too.

Alcide prowled in my chest, bristled, alert.

Chase’s grin snapped back into place like it had never left. “So, you know. Don’t be a coward about it. When it hits, you’ll know.” He nudged my shoulder. “Even you.”

Reid and I slipped on our simple black masks and I took a deep breath before entering the bustling building.

Showtime.