Page 82 of Run Wild Omega

Mara had scrolled through the threads with me, her jaw getting tighter and tighter, until I finally asked her to stop. She set the phone face-down and said, very quietly, “They don’t know you. Any of them. They’re talking about a caricature.”

But a caricature can still destroy you. That’s the thing no one mentions. You don’t have to be real to be ruined. You just have to be loud enough.

I lean against the window frame, the cold air drying the sweat on my neck, and I feel it—all of it—pressing down on me. The senators. The commentators. The packs offering to “manage” me. The lawsuit against Leo. The drone footage. The comments. The leashes.

I feel dumb. That’s the word that keeps surfacing, ugly and honest. I feel dumb for going up that ridge. I feel dumb for not predicting the cornice. I feel dumb for being an Omega in a world that has already decided what that means.

I feel dumb for ever thinking I could build a life where my designation didn’t define me, because here I am, flat on my back in my parents’ living room, about to be publicly claimed by three men because I can’t protect myself.

And I feel violated. That’s the other word. Someone I’ve never met filmed my unconscious body being pulled from the snow and posted it online, and now millions of strangers have seen me at my most vulnerable, and there’s nothing I can do about it. My worst moment is content. People are having opinions on what happened to me, on what I could have done to prevent it all.

I didn’t consent to any of it.

I didn’t consent to the drone footage, or the comments, or the senators, or the packs, or the lawsuit. I didn’t consent to being turned into a symbol or a cautionary tale or a target. I was climbing a mountain—my mountain, the one I know better than my own reflection—and the world decided that wasn’t allowed.

A tear slides down my cheek. Then another. I don’t wipe them away. I let the cold air dry them on my skin, and I stand there at the open window in the dark, crying silently, feeling small and stupid and furious and so incredibly tired of being a thing that people have opinions about.

I’ve caused a storm. Not the avalanche—that was the mountain’s doing. But everything after. The rescue that cost the town resources. The media frenzy that brought cameras and reporters into Sweet Creek’s quiet streets. The legal threat to Leo’s livelihood. The political grandstanding that’s turning my accident into a referendum on Omega rights.

All of it traces back to me. To my leg, my body, my designation.

If I were an Alpha, no one would be having this conversation. If I were bonded, the packs wouldn’t be circling. If I were anyone other than who I am, the drone footage would have been a thirty-second local news clip instead of a national story.

But I am who I am. And the world has decided what that means.

I close the window. I crutch back to the couch, each step a small act of defiance against the cast, the pain, the weight of everything pressing down on me. I arrange the pillows, prop up my leg, and pull the blanket back over my body even though I’m still too warm.

I lie in the dark and stare at the ceiling and try not to think about the morning—about Wyatt arriving to scent me, about the hospital imaging, about the statement going live with the sheriff’s name on it.

About the fake bond that’s going to make all of this go away.

That’s what they said. That’s what Miles’s probabilities and Daniel’s legal strategy and Wyatt’s quiet certainty all point to: a single, public act that will flip the script, turn the tragedy into a love story, and make me unavailable.

But lying here in the dark, I can’t shake the feeling that it won’t be that simple. Nothing about this has been simple. And the thing that scares me most—the thing I haven’t said out loud to anyone—is that I don’t know if I’m strong enough to survive the solution any more than I was strong enough to survive the problem.

I close my eyes.

Sleep doesn’t come. But I stay still, and I breathe, and I wait for morning.

Dylan

The crevice is different this time.

In my memory—which I’ve replayed so many times it’s stopped feeling like a memory and started feeling like a film I starred in—the crevice is a narrow gap between two slabs of ice, barely wide enough for a body. It’s tight, claustrophobic, but it has walls. It has structure. It has a ceiling that keeps the snow out and a floor that, while hard and cold, is at least solid.

But in the dream, there are no walls.

The ice stretches out in every direction—an endless, flat plain of blue-white nothing, cracked and scored with fractures that glow faintly from within, like veins of frozen light. The sky above is the same color as the ground. There’s no horizon, no reference point, no up or down. Just ice and silence and a cold so profound it doesn’t feel like temperature anymore. It feels like absence.

And Tess is in the center of it.

She’s lying on her back, her arms at her sides, her hair fanned out beneath her head like a golden halo. She’s wearing the clothes she had on the mountain—thermal top, cargo pants, hiking boots—but they’re frosted over, encased in a thin layer of ice that makes her look like a statue. An exhibit. A thing on display.

Her eyes are open.

That’s the worst part. In real life, when we pulled her from the crevice, her eyes were closed. She was unconscious. But here, in the dream, her eyes are wide open and fixed on the sky—that flat, featureless sky that isn’t a sky at all—and they’re clouded and glassy. The color of frozen milk.

She’s not breathing.