Page 115 of Run Wild Omega

Something inside me cracks.

It’s the wall I’ve been building since I was seventeen. The one I started constructing the night I spent an eternity staring at a pregnancy test that Tess had handed me with shaking hands, both of us too young and too terrified to breathe.

The test was a false positive. The second one I convinced her to take was, thankfully, negative. But the hours between the first test and the second aged me ten years.

I remember the way she looked at me. Not with anger, not with blame. With trust. Absolute, devastating trust. She looked at me like I was the only person in the world who could make it okay.

And I looked at myself, at my empty bank account and my dead father’s name and the one-bedroom trailer that smelled like mildew and propane, and I knew I couldn’t.

I couldn’t be the reason her life got smaller.

“My dad died broke,” I say. The words come out raw, scraped from a place I haven’t visited in years. “Did you know that? Park ranger. Twenty-three years of service. Died on the mountain he was supposed to protect, and they didn’t even cover the funeral. My mom had to sell his truck to pay for the casket.”

Tess’s face crumbles. “Wyatt…”

“I grew up watching her scrape change together for groceries. Watching her cry at the kitchen table when she thought I was asleep. And I told myself, I’m never going to do that to someone. I’m never going to love a woman so much that I ruin her life trying to keep her.”

My voice breaks. I can feel it, the fracture running through my chest, splitting open every sealed compartment I’ve built. My eyes are burning, and I blink hard, but it doesn’t help.

“When we had that scare,” I continue, my voice barely above a whisper, “all I could see was my mother’s face. I saw you, seventeen years old, pregnant in a trailer that smelled like gas, watching her future disappear because some selfish Alpha couldn’t keep it in his pants. I saw you becoming her. Becoming stuck. Becoming less.”

A tear rolls down my cheek. I swipe at it furiously, but another follows.

“I haven’t cried since I was eighteen,” I say, the confession ripping out of me. “Not at my mom’s funeral. Not when I got deployed. Not when I watched two of my men get carried out of a building that collapsed on them. I just… stopped. Because if I started, I didn’t think I’d ever stop.”

Tess drops her crutches and crosses the space between us on one leg, hopping, stumbling, until she crashes into my chest. I catch her. My arms wrap around her on instinct, lifting her off the ground, her cast hanging awkwardly as she buries her face in my neck.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper into her hair. “I’m so sorry, Tess. I should have told you. I should have explained instead of just cutting you off. You deserved better than that. You deserved to know it wasn’t about you. It was never about you.”

“It was about you being scared,” she says against my throat. “You were just a kid.”

“I was a kid who almost became a father.”

She pulls back, her hands framing my face, her thumbs brushing the wet tracks on my cheeks. Her eyes are red-rimmed and fierce and aching with so much love that I can barely hold it.

“You’re not that kid anymore,” she says. “And I’m not that girl. We’re not in that trailer, Wyatt. We’re here. And I’m not asking you to save me. I’m asking you to let me love you.”

I press my forehead against hers. My breath is ragged, my chest hollowed out, and I feel lighter than I have in years. Like the weight I’ve been carrying since I was seventeen just got cracked open and spilled across the floor of this apartment, and she’s standing in the middle of it, barefoot in Miles’s T-shirt, telling me it’s okay.

“If you have feelings for all three of us,” I say, my hands tightening on her waist, “you need to tell Dylan.”

“I know.”

“He deserves to hear it from you. Not through the group chat. Not through a pack meeting. From you.”

“I will. I promise.”

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Okay.” I let out a broken laugh, pulling her tighter against me. “I don’t know what the hell this looks like, Tess. I don’t know how it works. I don’t have a plan.”

“Since when do you need a plan?”

“I always need a plan.”

She laughs, and the sound vibrates against my chest, warm and real and alive. I bury my face in her hair, breathing her in. His scent doesn’t bother me as much as I thought it would.