Page 72 of Run Wild Omega

It takes me four minutes to get my breathing under control. Maggie watches the numbers drop, nods once, and opens the door.

“Five-minute limit,” she says to the people in the hallway. “And if those alarms go off again, I’m sedating her and you can all come back tomorrow.”

Wyatt comes back in first. Then Dylan. Then Miles. My family stays in the hallway—I can see them through the glass, pressed close, watching.

I look at the three men standing around my bed. The men who carried me down a mountain. Who lied to a hospital to stay by my side. Who haven’t slept in three days.

I hate how much I don’t hate them.

“You had no right,” I say, but the fury has drained out of my voice, leaving it flat and tired.

“You’re right,” Wyatt says. “We didn’t.”

“I’m serious. You can’t just⁠—”

“We know.” Dylan sits on the edge of the bed, careful to avoid my leg. “Tess, we know. We’re not proud of it. But in the moment, with you unconscious and no family here, it was the only way to make sure someone who gave a damn was in that room.”

“The ends don’t justify the means.”

“Usually, I’d agree with you,” Miles says. “But right now, that lie is the only thing standing between you and something much worse.”

I look at him. “What do you mean?”

Miles pulls the chair closer to the bed and sits down, resting the tablet on his knee. He takes a breath, and I can see him shifting from exhausted friend to something else—something sharper, more focused. The strategist.

“Let me lay out the situation as it currently stands,” he says. “Because it’s bad, and it’s going to get worse if we don’t act.”

I nod, even though every nerve in my body is screaming at me to tell him to go to hell.

“Problem one: the media narrative. Right now, the story is ’Reckless Unbonded Omega Nearly Dies.’ That narrative is self-reinforcing—every commentator, every panelist, every social media post adds weight to it. It’s already spawned secondary stories about Omega regulation, workplace safety for unbonded Omegas, and whether designation-based restrictions should be reinstated. You’ve become a symbol, Tess. Not a person. A symbol.”

I flinch, but he keeps going.

“Problem two: the predatory packs. The Ashfords, the Voss Collective, the Draven Group—they’re not going away. As long as you’re publicly unbonded and in crisis, you’re a target. They’ll escalate. They’ll go to the state regulatory boards, the family courts, the Omega welfare agencies. They have the resources to make your life a legal nightmare, and they’ll frame it as concern for your well-being.

“Problem three: the lawsuit. Leo’s business is on the line. The lawyers are using your designation as a weapon—the argument being that an unbonded Omega shouldn’t have been in a leadership position on a high-risk excursion. If that argument gains traction in court, it doesn’t just affect Leo. It sets a precedent. Every unbonded Omega who works in adventure guiding, search and rescue, emergency services—any high-stakes job—becomes vulnerable.”

I feel sick. “You’re saying my accident could ruin things for other Omegas?”

“I’m saying it already is. There are op-eds being written right now about whether unbonded Omegas should be barred from certain professions. Your name is in all of them.”

The room spins. I grip the sheets.

“And problem four,” Miles continues, his voice dropping slightly. “The thing you haven’t said out loud but that I can see on your face every time someone mentions the media digging into your past.”

My blood runs cold.

“Whatever happened in Denver, Tess—whatever you’re afraid they’ll find—it’s a vulnerability. And if the press gets even a whiff of it, they’ll weaponize it the same way they’re weaponizing everything else.”

I stare at him. “How do you know about Denver?”

“I don’t know the details,” he says honestly. “But I know the shape of a secret. And I know that an Omega who takes scent blockers every single day, who rebuilt her entire life from scratch in a new town, who flinches when anyone mentions her time at the Academy—that Omega is hiding something she’s terrified of.”

I want to deny it. I want to laugh it off, deflect with sarcasm, do any of the dozen things I usually do when someone gets too close to the truth. But I’m lying in a hospital bed with a rod in my leg and four million people calling me reckless, and I’m too tired to pretend.

“You’re right,” I whisper. “There’s something. And if it comes out, everything they’re saying about me will look true. Every stereotype, every slur, every ’I told you so’—they’ll point to it and say, ’See? This is what unbonded Omegas do. This is what happens when they’re left unsupervised.’”

The silence that follows is heavy enough to drown in.