Page 49 of Knot All is Forgiven

"I wanted to warm her up first. Didn't want you to go in all aggro and scare her off." He sniffles, turning those bloodshot eyes on me. "I sent her gifts. I was trying to court her before you came in there, demanding she be ours."

My hands loosen, and his shirt drops from my grip. "You can't go off making decisions like this on your own! We decided to approach her together. She's ours!"

"Not anymore," he says softly. "She's bonded."

Those two words shatter my tenuous hold on my sanity, and I pick up my empty glass and hurl it at the wall. Rafe swears under his breath, jumping to his feet and pacing throughout the room.

"Who is this fucker who stole our Omega?" I growl. "I will fucking end him."

"He's pack."

Rafe skids to a stop. "He's what now?"

"He's pack," Simon repeats with a shrug. "He's her scent match, too, and I met him. Without a doubt, he's pack."

"That's good, isn't it?" Rafe says, his eyes lit up with excitement. "He'll want to pack up with us. Pack draws are strong, too. This may be the in we need."

Simon chuckles darkly. "No, he doesn't care. She doesn't want us, so he doesn't either."

"This is unacceptable." I look at the shattered remains of my glass, regretting that I now have to dodge the shards on the floor. "We need to speak to her. To tell her everything."

"I doubt she'll listen. She said something…" He looks up at the ceiling, blinking rapidly. "She said we made her question her own mind. That we made her think she was insane."

"When she was right all along," Rafe murmurs. "We basically gaslit her."

"There is no basically," Simon says. "We told her what she knew was true was false. And now that she's an Omega, we're finally accepting that she was right."

For a long time, we're all silent. I'm sure the others are spinning around that final conversation with Jordan in their heads, too. Thinking back to all the things we said to her, the ways we tried to distance ourselves the year before.

Of course, I regret what we did. How could I not?

I regretted it almost immediately, but I knew it was what was best for her. Loving someone means doing things that are good for them that they may not like.

But now all of us know better, and she's punishing us, she's punishing herself, and she's punishing her Alpha by keeping him from his pack. It's selfish.

It's immature.

But it's understandable.

"What'd she smell like?" Rafe asks softly. "Did you get to scent her?"

"Yeah." Simon's voice takes on a dreamy quality. "She smelled like peach milkshakes."

The image of a freckled seventeen-year-old Jordan drinking a peach milkshake through a striped red and white straw fills my mind. I'm not surprised that's what she smells like to Simon.

He didn't call her peaches for nothing.

"Did she say what you smelled like?" I ask, despite the jealousy eating me alive that he got to see her, to scent her.

"Chocolate malt."

His order at the diner. The diner she dragged us to at least once a week from the moment we were old enough to walk home on our own.

How was there ever a doubt those two would end up with anyone other than each other?

It makes me feel so fucking stupid. How did I miss it all those years ago? That we were fated for one another?

With the way those two fit together it should've been obvious.

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