Page 104 of Knottingley Ever After
I take another slow pull of the smoothie.
And I let the small private chamber of my chest catch up with itself, very quietly, with the small honest assessment that has been forming there for two weeks and that I have, until now, refused to write down.
This.
This is what I have been yearning for.
An Alpha with intention.
CHAPTER 20
Grandpa’s Stew
~JUDE~
“I am so so so sore.”
The announcement arrives from the kitchen doorway, full-volume, in the kind of voice a woman uses when she has decided that there is no point in suffering quietly when there are perfectly good Alphas in earshot.
I do not turn around immediately. I am, at this hour, mid-stir on the deep enamelled cast-iron pot that has been on my stove for two hours, and the rhythm of a good slow stew is one of those small inflexible religions I refuse to interrupt for the average kitchen entrance.
She comes around to my left.
Pink hair in a messy bun, half of it escaping. A wide soft headband she has started wearing around the house. Bare feet on the cold tile. Sleep shorts. One small hand absently flicking her own left hip in the experimental punches of a woman trying to convince a tendon to be friends with her again. And, draped on her frame in the soft falling drape of a garment that has, by now, lost its rights to be called a fit, my best season-end T-shirt.
Now we are wearing it. Now we are openly wearing it. In daylight.
Captain. Steady.
“Now,” I say, evenly, tapping the wooden spoon against the rim of the pot, “where on earth did you get my shirt.”
“Oh, this thing.” She glances down at it as though noticing for the first time, which is, professionally, a lie. “You abandoned it on the bench in the locker room two days ago. I took it upon myself to provide it with a second chance at life. Moreover, it was clean. Not plagued by the hockey-stench of death which, may I add, the rest of your unit’s laundry pile in that wing was emitting at the time. So.”
“So.”
“So it is mine now.” Wrinkled nose. “Acquired. Catalogued. Filed under inventory.”
“Kidnapping clothing is, apparently, your strongsuit, O’Shea.”
“You are not even mad.”
She is, with the grin of a small pink criminal, completely correct. I am not. The corner of my mouth does the small thing that I am, against every instinct of professional restraint a captain has, increasingly unable to keep off my face when she enters a room.
Living with Iris O’Shea has been, against the loud and unanimous prediction of every other adult Alpha in our sector, a frankly easy project.
The conversation in the visitors’ changeroom when our roster was first confirmed had been almost theatrical on the matter of an Omega in the house. Brennan’s crew had loud opinions. Hargrove had loud opinions. Petrov had quiet opinions, which from Petrov are sometimes worse. The general thesis: an Omega woman in close quarters with three Alphas was going to be a constant low-grade emotional logistics problem, a perfume crisis, a wardrobe maintenance program, a complaint hotline staffed by us at our own expense. Two weeks ofcohabitation later, I am prepared to write a peer-reviewed paper rebutting every adjective of that prediction.
She has, instead, slotted in.
Our schedule is her schedule. She is up at five for her own training and at six for ours. She reads in our gaps. She runs with us when we go on the loop, and she despises it, and she does it anyway. She has, in the meticulous way of a person trained in a small flat to disturb nobody, taken up the minimum possible footprint in our space and then, over fourteen days, slowly relaxed it.
She is, in the small inner ledger of my captain math, the smoothest housemate I have ever had who was not biologically related to me.
Which is a problem for an entirely different reason.
Matteo has, since the moment she walked in the front door, been visibly all in. He is not subtle. He has, in the past two weeks, kissed her temple in a phone shop, scooped her off a kitchen island, fed her a smoothie at four in the morning, and made the precise tactical decision to publicly out-Alpha his coach with a bouquet, which is the kind of bold move I genuinely admire even as I file it. Rémi has been operating in his own quieter register — the powder-blue t-shirt, the chair he sat very still under for an entire third act of a movie, the bookshelf he has been quietly sketching at the kitchen table. He has not made his moves yet, but he is making them. I can read him.
And I have, throughout, been doing the thing that the captain does. Keep my voice level. My hands occupied. My eyes on the long game.
