Chapter One: Leo
Leo wakes up alone in the nest, and he doesn’t like it at all.
Last night, Gideon had dragged him, Finn, and Rowan into bed around 9:00 p.m.—no explanation. Just pushing and shoving, and, in one instance, scruffing Rowan like a kitten before lying on top of him. Rowan had settled surprisingly quickly with the weight of his alpha weighing him down.
He’d returned from the Art House smelling of sadness and frustration, and as usual, he kept the particulars to himself.
Finn had managed to get Riordan on a video call, and—without revealing too much about their situation to his boss—he’d learned that Arlo healed quickly, too. Not in an instant like Nix, but faster than even enigmas.
Nix’s list of “superpowers” was growing longer by the minute, and Finn had told them, in a hesitant voice, when they’d finally settled in the nest, that he was thinking of making omega care his specialty—Omegan Andrology, he called it.
Before, Finn had always maintained that his medical interests were varied, and Riordan had encouraged him to spread his talents across the hospital’s many departments, even going so far as to authorize a rotation schedule that suited their young prodigy.
Finn had once told Leo that he liked all aspects of providing care but had never really found any specialty that gave him that spark—the kind of spark LRH felt on stage or that Grayson felt when he was covered in paint. Finn was happy, but he’d craved a true purpose, and maybe he’d been waiting for Nix to light the fire under his own passion.
It was surprisingly philosophical for their scientifically-minded Finn.
Leo believed everyone deserved to follow their passions, and he couldn’t help but agree with Finn. How many choices in the pack’s life had been made in preparation to welcome their omega? How many more were coming their way?
That line of questioning made Leo feel like he shouldn’t push too far into what life might have been if Hayes had not interfered with his evil. That pendant had hidden Nix when maybe fate—or whatever—had been working to get Nix into their lives all this time.
He wondered where Jay and Nix might have been when they’d met Luca and Leo. How different life might have been for all of them? It was nothing he could change, no matter how much he might have wished things had been different.
There were already too many people in his family harboring enough fear and regrets; they didn’t need any more. That didn’t mean he wasn’t scared for Nix or any of them because this court case—and everything that followed—was going to be hard.
Maybe the hardest thing they’d ever have to do as a pack.
But Leo had never been one to shy away from doing the hard thing. Maybe because his life had been relatively smooth. He’d had wonderful parents, lived a life of luxury, got along with his sister, and loved his job—and usually, it loved him, too.
Leo was an anomaly in this pack. Each of his mates had triumphed over some hardship in their early life—Rowan losing his father, Grayson presenting early, Finn’s parents being absent, and, of course, Jay’s and Gideon’s parents being the scourge of the earth. And, of course, Nix.
Leo knew he was lucky. Or blessed. Or whatever.
He had lived a near-perfect life, and you’d think that would make it hard for him to understand where his mates were coming from most of the time. But Leo had always tried to make it just the opposite. He used his good fortune as a light to shine on those around him, supporting them however they needed, in whatever way they needed.
So, alone in the pack nest, Leo decided he was going to do what his familyneeded again: be their support where he could and try to focus a bit on his own relationship with their omega today. Although he wasn’t as driven as the alphas, Leo was very interested in cementing his bond with Nix.
He hadn’t asked Finn about how his incomplete bond felt, but to Leo, it felt a bit like a sparking live wire. He imagined it was like when an electrical wire fell from a pole after a lightning strike—bucking and spiraling, searching for a ground. That was his bond with Nix, crackling and untethered in his chest, looking for its anchor in his mate.
It wasn’t painful; Leo’s wolf had never been loud, but this had certainly made him more aware of their man-wolf connection. Leo was happy that Grayson had finally settled his soulmate bond last night.
He knew how hard Grayson had worked at first, respecting Jay’s right to the first bite and then watching Rowan claim him, even if it had been all Nix in the driver’s seat. When Gideon and Luca had added theirs, Grayson had seemed so unsure after so many days of being driven hard by his wolf.
Leo hoped that this connection would mean Grayson no longer felt the need to hide parts of himself—that Nix could be his grounding force, too.
If Gideon and Luca were anything to go by, the soul bond would only strengthen the pack’s foundation.
Just thinking about Luca and the pack brought to mind the shit show from the gym.
Everyone had seen that Nix was, thankfully, alright and that Gideon had been remorseful. It had been an accident.
But it had laid bare the deepest fears Jay had and scraped back the facade of calm acceptance. Frankly, Leo had never, in the almost ten years he’d known and loved Jay, ever seen him so…desperate and miserable. It broke Leo’s heart to see him struggle.
Luca claimed that Jay was being a fucking-jerk-face-alpha-asshole, but Leo wasn’t motivated by the same traumas Luca carried from his own life, growing up with a terrible alpha father. To Leo, it was obvious that Jay’s surface anger was pure terror.
Their Pack Alpha had lived without Nix once, and it had broken off pieces of him, leaving them scattered to the wind.
Leo had been a part of Ripley when rumors of the terrifying Jay Rhodes—who had reduced four rooms in his apartment to dust in his grief—had made the rounds. He hadn’t even had to see it to know he struck fear into every single person, from staff to intern, in the process.
