Entangled with the Alpha Brothers.

THE HOUSE RULES

AMANDA

The drive to the human world was long. I knew exactly when the air shifted and the atmosphere changed.

I couldn’t take my eyes off the settlements and large buildings, people roaming around freely, no guards, no rules…they were free.

We arrived at a thirteen-foot-tall golden gate, and an arhat opened automatically, opening my eyes to a new form of paradise. I sat up, mesmerised by the view.

“So this is what they call a mansion?” I said to myself. I was awe. The mansion was tall, emerald and gold. The car went around an active massive fountain and stopped at the entrance.

The butler opened the door and I stepped out. In front of me, the Alpha brothers were already outside, glaring at each other and saying words I couldn’t hear.

I put my amusement behind me, ignoring the adrenaline and facing the issue before me.

I followed the brothers silently while the butler handled our luggage, not like I had anything in particular.

“Miss Amanda,” the mid-forties butler called. “Your room is right in the middle once you go upstairs aim your left.” He turned to the Alpha Noir and only left when nodded at.

The air thickened the moment the man left. I sighed.

“Amanda—”

I didn’t give Noir the room to go on with his sentence. “Before I go to my room,” I started, “you have certain rules that can't and would not be overruled.”

Soir was physically disgusted. His frown deepened where he sat. “Rules? Your voice does not matter here. Who the hell do you think you are?”

“Let her speak,” Noir said.

“No entering my room. No knocking unless the building is on fire and no checking on me when I’m asleep. No following me around. No one can decide what I do with my life on my behalf. I will be invisible to you and stay off your paths, do the same.”

“Alright.” Noir’s agreement sparked anger in me. It was unsettling.

Soir’s sarcastic laughter burned through the room. He stood up. “You are our mate, Amanda. The human world is nothing like the pack. You are a liability—”

“I am an Omega, my scent won’t attract anything anyway. I am not a liability, I am a person. I’ve been caged for nineteen years, Alpha Soir, I would not be imprisoned by you three again. You speak as if I asked for this!”

Soir opened his mouth but no words came out, he shot Noir a blaming look. “You’re right. Noir, fix this!”

Soir’s gaze landed on my lips, before moving to my eyes. A surge of heat swelled in my chest, and my face burned.

The bond.

He turned around, disgusted and went upstairs.

I navigated the house and found the kitchen, anywhere to separate myself from the hazard of being with three powerful men.

Coir had watched everything that happened from the corner of the bar and said nothing until it was over.

“She’ll be fine,” he said to Noir. “Just give her some time.”

Thirty minutes later, the living room was empty. I picked up my littler bag and went upstairs.

I stood confused. There were four doors on the left and two on the right. How was I supposed to know which was mine in the middle?

After a moment of deliberation, I opened one of the doors, scanned, and then settled in. I was about to take off my clothes when Soir came in from nowhere…completely naked.

We both froze.

“What are you—”

“Sorry,” I didn’t want him to finish. I hurried out and slammed the door.

Soir shares a wall with me? Of all three, he had to be the one?

Later Soir had claimed the kitchen table as a workspace and covered it with documents I couldn't read, and he ran calculations on a device the humans called a laptop with the focused intensity of someone trying to solve a problem before it solved him.

He didn't start conversations. When I started one he engaged precisely and then ended it cleanly. I respected that too, even if I didn't like it. He avoided what had happened earlier completely.

Coir cooked.

That was the thing I hadn't expected, that the most dangerous-looking of the three would be the one who appeared in the kitchen at six every evening and made food with the quiet, methodical care of someone for whom cooking was not a hobby but a practice.

He never asked what I wanted. He just made things and left a portion on the counter without comment, and the food was always exactly what I would have chosen if anyone had thought to ask.

I didn't know what to do with that.

The job came from a handwritten card in the window of a café four blocks east. Help Wanted, Part Time.

I'd walked in and asked for the manager and the woman behind the counter had assessed me in under ten seconds and apparently decided I was worth the trouble.

By that afternoon I was learning to operate the coffee machine, which was significantly more complicated than it had any right to be.

"You're doing it wrong," said the girl beside me. Her name was Priya. She had the energy of someone who had been doing things correctly her whole life and found it mildly exhausting. "You have to tamp it. Like this."

She showed me. I did it. The machine made a sound as it approved.

"Better," Priya said. "Where are you from? You look like you've never seen an espresso machine."

"I haven't," I said.

She looked at me. "Seriously?"

"We had different customs where I grew up."

"What kind of customs?"

I thought about bonfires and pack gatherings and the particular sound a crowd makes when it turns on you. "The kind that don't include espresso," I said.

Priya laughed. It was an uncomplicated sound, unloaded with history or agenda. I realised it was the first time I'd heard someone laugh near me without it being aimed at me.

I held onto that for the rest of the shift.

— — —

He was standing outside the building when I came back.

I saw him before he saw me, that half-second of warning, enough to arrange my face into something neutral, enough to slow my steps to a pace that said I wasn't afraid, which was mostly true.

Long looked smaller here. The pack hierarchy that had given his choices a stage, that had made his cruelty legible as power, stripped of all that, he was just a man who had done something he was going to carry for a long time.

"Amanda."

I stopped three feet away. "Long."

He looked at me with the particular expression of someone rehearsing. "I'm sorry."

I snorted. He must be joking.