Page 84 of The Boss Omega
The words make me blink.
“You’re pack. When you hurt, I hurt.” He shrugs a shoulder like he’s annoyed with himself for saying it.
I stare at him. Silas has never once in seven years said anything like that to me. Which means things are worse than I thought. Or better.
I can't tell which.
“But I can’t help you with this,” he adds. “I don’t know how. Other than to support you.” His gaze flicks upstairs for half a second. “And to remind you not to let what’s in front of you slip away.”
I know exactly who he means.
Lark.
Silas pushes away from the counter. “And seriously,” he says, opening the fridge and grabbing two more water bottles, “consider finding someone to talk to.”
I scoff.
He pauses then turns to look at me fully again. “When Lucy was first diagnosed,” he says quietly, “I was frantic. Having someone listen helped.”
Then he walks out of the kitchen. Just fucking leaves me standing there holding a bottle of water. Staring after him. Silas, who I’ve never once seen ask for help. With anything.
What the hell? Did Silas go to therapy?
Turns out I didn’t need to plan a date tonight anyway.
Lark, Silas, and I are all in the kitchen when the door to the garage flies open and Graham bursts into the house. My hand goes immediately to the counter. Then I see his face.
“We did it!” he announces, a giant smile plastered across his face. “We mapped the scent sequence for omegas!”
Lark’s head snaps up from the laptop on the counter. She’d been scribbling notes while reading something on the screen, but the second the words leave his mouth she jumps off the stool.
“Ohmygod,” she screams before launching herself at him. One second she’s across the room, the next her legs are wrapped around Graham’s waist like a damn koala. A purr erupts from his chest, so loud it’s almost embarrassing. Or impressive. I’m not sure which.
Her caramel scent spikes, sweet and warm. I look away. It’s too damned much.
Silas sets down the knife he’s been using to chop onions and wipes his hands on a towel. “So what does that mean?”
Graham walks farther into the kitchen with Lark still clinging to him. She’s smiling like he just won the damned Nobel Prize. When he reaches the counter he shifts her easily and sits her up on it so she’s straddling his hips. She stays right there. Like it’s the most natural thing in the world.
“It means,” Graham says, pushing his glasses up his nose, “we finally have a framework. Now we need data. If we track enough scent-matches and scent-sensitive packs, we should be able to correlate the results and apply them to others.”
Silas leans back against the counter, arms crossed. “Spell it out for me, Graham.”
“It means he can predict matches between omegas and alphas,” Lark says, eyes bright.
And that’s a fucking gut punch. Because she gets him. It’s not just scent for them. She knows him. Understands his research. She’s perfect for him. She translated a complex research framework in about four seconds and made it sound obvious. Graham's eyes go soft looking at her. He knows it too.
For reasons I refuse to examine, watching them understand each other hurts more than watching them touch.
“Not perfectly yet, but eventually. We’ll need as many scent-sensitive packs and scent-matches as possible to build the dataset. There’s still a lot of work ahead, but this is the part that makes sense to me. It’s how I was trained to research.”
He glances around the room. “Obviously, I’ll want us to be part of the dataset. It’s not easy to find scent-matches. We need every data point we can get.”
Lark nods immediately. “Of course.”
Silas grins. “You already know I’m in.”
All three of them look at me.
