Page 92 of Run Wild Omega

Three white. No blue.

I stopped taking the scent blocker on day two. Not because anyone asked. Wyatt had come by at seven, leaned in, and nuzzled my throat for ninety seconds, and left — and by noon there was nothing on my skin but me. The blocker was eating it. Flattening it into a blank the way it flattens everything.

So I left the blue pill in the bottle. Then I did it again the next morning, and the morning after that, and at some point it stopped being weird and was my new normal.

I've taken that pill every day for two years. I took it the morning I came home from Denver. I took it the day of Mara's wedding. I have never once, in twenty-four months, let a room full of people smell what I actually am.

Now three Alphas can find me by scent from across the café, and I haven't put the bottle back in the drawer.

It's care. Practical, unglamorous care.

And I don't know what to do with it.

Because care from Marcus looked different. Marcus’s care was controlling disguised as concern—“You shouldn’t go out tonight, baby, you know how you get in crowds”—and his attention came with conditions. These men don’t ask for anything. They just show up, do what needs doing, and leave.

It’s confusing. It’s more than confusing. It’s destabilizing in a way I wasn’t prepared for, because every time one of them leans in to refresh my scent and I feel the warmth of their breath on my neck, I have to fight the urge to turn my head and close the distance. Every time Wyatt’s hand brushes my back while he’s guiding me through a doorway, I have to remind myself that this is strategic. Every time Dylan flashes that crooked grin at me across the café, I have to look away before my face does something embarrassing.

I’ve gotten good at not kissing them. Fourteen days of forced restraint has given me a kind of miserable expertise in the art of wanting something and not taking it.

But the wanting doesn’t stop. If anything, it’s getting worse.

On day eight, I couldn’t take it anymore. I was lying in bed, unable to sleep, my skin buzzing with the fading residue of Dylan’s scent from that morning, and I pulled out my phone and started researching.

I knew the basics—everyone does. Scent marking is the primary way packs signal ownership and affiliation. Alphas produce potent pheromones that can be transferred through skin-to-skin contact, particularly through the breath and lips. The scent settles into the Omega’s pores and lingers for a variable period depending on the method of application, the Omega’s individual chemistry, and the depth of the bond.

What I didn’t know—what I’d never had reason to know—were the specifics.

Deep scenting, the articles called it. The kind that happens during sex.

During sexual arousal, Alpha pheromone production increases by a factor of four to six. The chemical composition shifts too—the scent becomes more complex, more layered, with undertones that don’t appear in non-sexual marking. And because sexual scenting involves prolonged skin contact, friction, and the exchange of bodily fluids, the pheromones penetrate deeper into the Omega’s dermal layers.

The result: a scent that lasts two to three times longer than standard marking. Sometimes more, depending on the intensity of the encounter and the compatibility of the pair.

I stared at my phone in the dark, the words glowing on the screen, and understood something I’d been trying not to understand.

The reason their scents keep fading isn’t because something is wrong with the marking. It’s because we’re not having sex. The scent is surface-level—applied and evaporating, applied and evaporating, an endless cycle of refreshes that will continue indefinitely unless we escalate the method.

Which we won’t. Because this is fake. Because I’m not going to have sex with three men to make a lie more convincing.

But knowing the science doesn’t stop my body from reacting to the reality. Every time one of them leans in, my brain catalogs the sensation—the heat of their mouth, the pressure of their lips, the scrape of stubble or the smooth press of skin—and adds it to a growing inventory that I review in the dark, when I’m alone, when the wanting is at its worst.

I haven’t touched myself.

Not once. Not since the morning after the marking, when I woke up drenched in sweat with Wyatt’s scent still vivid on my neck and my hand already drifting downward before I caught it and pressed it flat against the mattress.

I won’t. Because if I do, I know what I’ll think about, and thinking about them while I’m—while I’m doing that—feels like crossing a line that the fake bond hasn’t drawn yet. It feels like making it real in the one place where I still have control.

So I don’t touch. I lie in the dark and I ache and I wait for the feeling to pass.

It always passes. Eventually.

The news doesn’t die down.

That’s the thing no one prepared me for. Daniel’s statement worked—for about forty-eight hours. The sheriff’s endorsement got picked up by a few regional outlets, and for a brief, shining moment, the narrative shifted from “reckless Omega” to “unprecedented weather event.” I let myself believe it was working.

Then Senator Morrison from Montana went on another Sunday show.

This time, he had a chart. A literal chart, with graphics, showing what he called “the statistical correlation between unbonded Omega autonomy and preventable incidents in high-risk environments.” The data was bullshit—I recognized the kind of selective sampling and tortured methodology that makes statistics say whatever you want them to say—but it looked authoritative on television, and the anchor didn’t challenge it.