The Beta's Fire

Chapter 3

I didn't sleep that night. I sat on the edge of my bed with my father's letter in my hands until the words blurred, and I was still sitting there when my window slid open and Tobin climbed through it, the way he'd done since we were kids, except this time he didn't come with a joke ready.

"Figured you wouldn't be asleep," he said, settling onto the floor across from me, back against my dresser.

"You figured right."

"Rhys wanted to come. Cassian too. I told them to give you one person tonight instead of three, because sometimes three feels like an audience even when it isn't meant to."

That was the thing about Tobin. Underneath the grin, he saw people clearly, saw exactly what they needed before they could ask for it. I set the letter down.

"I'm scared," I admitted, because it was dark, and it was just him, and I was too tired to armor myself the way I did in daylight. "Not of Thorne, or whoever did this to Ashfall. I'm scared of what's in me. My whole life I've earned everything I have. Every fight I've won, every rank I've climbed, I bled for it. If there's some gift sitting inside me that I didn't earn, that I didn't even know about, then what does that make everything else I've done?"

Tobin didn't answer right away. He reached over and took my hand, turning it palm up, tracing one finger along the calluses at the base of my fingers, calluses built from nine years of training in that ring.

"It makes you someone who fought like hell for a Beta position," he said, "and who also happens to carry something the goddess trusted you with before you were even born. Those aren't opposites, Wren. They never were. You didn't earn your loyalty either, you were born into this pack, and nobody's ever once doubted that it's real."

"That's different."

"Is it?" He looked up at me, and for once there was no joke waiting behind his eyes. "You've spent your whole life terrified that if something is given to you instead of earned, it doesn't count. I think that's why you never let yourself believe we wanted you. It felt too easy. Like it should have cost you something."

My breath caught. He'd said it plainly, no games, no deflecting, the exact thing he never did. I felt heat climb up my throat.

"Tobin—"

"I'm not finished," he said, gentle but sure. He shifted closer, until our knees touched, until I could feel the warmth coming off him in the cool night air. "It didn't cost you anything, Wren, because you already earned it a hundred times over, every single day you showed up in that ring and let us see you as you actually are instead of who you thought you had to be." His hand came up to cup my jaw, thumb brushing the healing cut over my eyebrow with a tenderness that made my chest ache. "I have wanted to kiss you since we were sixteen years old and you broke my nose defending a first-year omega from that visiting pack's heir. I have been waiting seven years for you to believe you deserved to be wanted without earning it first."

I didn't decide to close the distance between us. My body simply did it, the way it always seemed to around them, and then his mouth was on mine, soft at first, careful, like he was giving me every chance to pull away. I didn't pull away. I fisted my hand in the front of his shirt and kissed him back until the ache in my chest turned into something warmer, something that spread all the way down to my fingertips.

When we finally broke apart, both of us breathing unevenly, he rested his forehead against mine and laughed under his breath, soft and a little wrecked.

"Rhys is going to be unbearable when he finds out I kissed you first," he murmured.

I laughed too, real and surprised, and for one small stretch of time the fear from earlier went quiet.

It didn't stay quiet long.

A howl split the night outside, sharp with alarm, the pack's call for intruders on the border. Tobin was on his feet before the second howl finished, already shifting toward the window, already pulling me up with him.

We reached the training field to find Rhys and Cassian standing over a young sentry sprawled in the grass, alive but barely conscious, a message carved into the dirt beside him in jagged, deliberate letters that made my stomach drop straight through the floor.

SHE IS OURS. BRING HER WILLINGLY OR WE TAKE HER BLEEDING.