31

aurelie

IT WAS EARLY in the morning and I was waking up alone.

Blissfully alone, I thought, stretching as I rolled around in the king-sized bed that I had slept in all by myself.

Everything would have even been more blissful if my phone hadn't been ringing.

I snatched it up. "Ilse," I said in a sleep-ravaged voice, "I want to tell you about a marvelous invention called texting. You want to talk to someone, you simply send them a little message that you type out and the other person can respond at her leisure."

"Oh, whatever. If you didn't want a phone call, you could have put your phone on do-not-disturb," she said. "And I specifically remember you telling me that you wanted to get up early and have breakfast on the terrace. I'm on the terrace. Breakfast is on the terrace. You, however, are not here."

"I said that last night," I said, getting out of bed and going over to pull aside the curtains and look down at the capital city of Arenze, the ancient city, the sun still pink and new on the horizon. "This morning, I want to sleep."

"Too bad," she said. "You wanted a girls' trip, and we're on a girls' trip—no boys, no mates, no babies—"

"That's why you get up this early," I yawned. "You're used to getting up with little Quentin."

"Well, true," she said. "But you're going to be pregnant soon."

"Maybe," I said, turning away from the curtains. "Dmitri would have had me pregnant years ago. I've just wanted… freedom." I smiled at the room.

Was I going to get pregnant?

Maybe. Someday. I hadn't decided.

If I did, I was pretty sure I'd want a baby with each of them, Valhn expectations that the omega only have her husband's babies be damned. We'd already smashed all of the expectations to smithereens, after all.

But maybe I wouldn't at all.

I had time to decide. It wasn't the point of us, of our pack. We'd be us regardless if there were ever any babies.

She snorted at me. "Freedom? You with the four men who follow you around like they're on a leash."

"Hey, someone told me that omegas need to crack the whip, and I can't remember who it was," I sang into the phone.

"Get your butt out here onto the terrace, or I am coming after you," she said, and then she hung up.

I tossed the phone on the bed and sighed.

It was probably good that I was awake.

I did want to enjoy every moment of my little trip away with Ilse. Her son was three years old, and she had been lobbying for a getaway for some time. I had, of course, agreed to go with her, because she needed a little time to not be a mommy, and I needed a little time to not be an omega.

No, that wasn't true.

I liked being an omega. I liked my pack. I liked my men. My husband was the picture of perfection, really. He was still dominant as all fuck, barking orders at four of us constantly. But now he also crawled on his knees and begged to lick my slick and regularly submitted to each of the rest of us.

He was actually a big labrador, I thought, Dmitri. He loved being loved. He loved being enjoyed. He was an alpha who deep-down wished he could be an omega and be universally adored.

Truth was, we all adored him.

I knew that some omegas would say that living a life like that, where I wasn't always the center of everyone's universe wasn't worth living. But I disagreed.

Right after the first time I made Dmitri take everyone in his ass, he turned into a cuddle bear.

The Dmitri I married wouldn't have proudly displayed all my bites to the cameras, or talked about how he and Corentin liked to fight over who was going to spoon the other. "I mean," he drawled to the reporters, "I am broader than he is, so I should be the big spoon, but sometimes I like to humor him." And Corentin said he was taller than Dmitri, and Dmitri said he wasn't, and then they actually measured each other on camera, to the delight of the entire country.

We were beloved, and it was because of him. There wasn't a prince out there who was as easily regal and as easily, naturally a pack leader and alpha, but who was so readily capable of diminishing himself to raise up the other members of the pack.

Things had been good since that heat.

Very, very good.

We hadn't been without our struggles, of course. It often seemed as if one struggle would rise and then we would solve it, and all the while, waiting in the wings would be another one, something else to occupy us, always something there, but these struggles never felt like real threats, only tangles that needed sorting.

The biggest struggle was probably the schedule. Or the lack of a schedule, since none of us wanted one. Dmitri said that if there was inequality in the time we spent with each other, it would create issues. Corentin had raised worries that he'd be left out, only having a small portion of a relationship while I was busy with the other alphas.

And they were both right.

Nikolai and Johannes had a long, deep connection that was about the two of them, and Corentin and Dmitri were primarily connected to me. So, there was this element, over and over again, of it being this tug-of-war between the two of them over me, and I often sought solace with Nikolai and Johannes, because they were less volatile.

We didn't fight about this. There were no more alpha fistfights of Dmitri grandstanding or people threatening to leave. We were in this, and we all knew it. Instead, however, we would often engage in long, long negotiations about whose bed I should be in. Hours of this made us all on edge. It hardly turned us on.

Dmitri and I were a royal couple; we had royal obligations. So, I often had to travel with him. (My Pinterest board from my teenage years? I went to all of those places and waved to crowds of people.)

Sometimes, everyone just came along. But Corentin had a business to run, and even though he stepped back and delegated a lot of responsibility, he wasn't always with us. He wanted me to go with him sometimes. This caused issues.

So, eventually, there was a schedule.

But Dmitri didn't make it. We sat down and hashed it out together, and then we were all relieved, because we knew what to expect and there was no need to have long negotiations.

That solved, something else came up. Nikolai finally decided that he needed to see a therapist, who told him he had trauma-induced OCD, and working through all of that turned out to be a difficult and dark path for all of us.

The things that happened to Nikolai? I get ill thinking about it.

I think Johannes and Dmitri felt guilty about all the things they hadn't known.

Sometimes, even now, I fantasized about going into that prison where those Sector Unius people were being held for the rest of their lives and killing them all in some slow and very painful way. I knew it wouldn't solve anything. It certainly wouldn't help Nikolai, not now.

I wished someone had saved him back then, when he was still a little boy, really, not old enough for a knot, not old enough for any of the things he endured. Why didn't anyone stop it? Why did those people do such horrible things?

And then Corentin began to realize that a lot of things he'd been through while he was running drugs and doing crazy things to try to become an alpha had fucked him up.

But then, somehow, during all of this, the schedule disappeared, and everything coalesced in a way that it hadn't before. Maybe Johannes was right, when he said what he said about connections. And maybe connections were sometimes forged in shared suffering. Maybe the more we saw each other's vulnerabilities—like I'd said to Dmitri—the deeper in love we fell for each other.

In the wake of what ended up being a tangle of group therapy, we often all started sleeping together, all of us, in one of the nests usually, because it would be big enough to accommodate us all.

It wasn't always like that now, but I almost never spent a night alone. I almost never spent a night with just one other man.

I loved our closeness, I did, but this trip with Ilse?

Blissfully alone.

I would never want to be always alone. I wanted to spend my nights pressed between two or three strong, muscled alpha-scented mates. I loved them. I'd be quite happy when I got home to them all. I missed them, even now.

I think we had come through all of our struggles even stronger. And whatever struggles lay waiting for us on the horizon would be met with our shared strength, a strength that grew and grew as we all grew together.

And I think that, through it all, having Dmitri as our rock, the thing that held us together—a true pack leader, in that he cared for each of us, took us on as his own, carried burdens as his responsibility, but didn't abuse his power over us, didn't act better than anyone, just… was one of us—it was one of the reasons why the press became so enamored with us.

We were followed around by the paparazzi all the time, but they loved us, because we were so fun. There was a sheer sense of our love that they captured in every interview.

And even so, sometimes…

I hugged myself, turning in a circle in the hotel room.

I'd be back with my pack soon, snuggled in the close circle that was our love and life and our joy.

But for now, me and Ilse, on the terrace, having breakfast, gossiping about our men and laughing and maybe planning a shopping trip for the afternoon, maybe getting massages and facials, maybe pedicures.

Blissfully alone.

Sometimes, even an omega needed it.

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Thanks so much for reading!