Page 88 of Knot Just A Fan

And then there were four.

“Guys, I think we need to say what’s on our minds. All our minds. To Briella.” I turn to her, wetting my lips with my lager. “Briella, we each have chosen you as our Omega. We’ve each marked you, at our request, and your agreement. We want to make you officially part of the Arcadia Echo pack.” I look down into my glass then up at her wide eyes, bare of makeup but dark and alluring as ever.

“We all scented you, in our own time, in that first year you were with us. We’ve discussed it,” Enzo says, looking around, and Ronan and I nod solemnly. Briella doesn’t move a muscle, just listens.

“This is where I need to say something,” says Ronan, and I know what he will say. He and I have never discussed this. But we should have.

“We believed Willow was meant to be our Omega. And you know my story now. Words can’t express how much I appreciate that you gave me a chance, and didn’t judge me for what I struggle with. How I didn’t want anyone, not even Willow, really, because I was afraid to lose again. But I know—I knew and I know, that I need to risk it to be in the world at all. To feel things, in order to make things.”

His voice is gruff and he stares at his fidgeting hands clamped together. Briella watches with empathy in her eyes but also wariness. She’s been subdued as her body gets used to the much stronger suppressants. But also, I think she’s fearing that other shoe, too.

“This isn’t about blaming Cami,” he says slowly, then picks up speed as the confession unfolds, and my gut coils up, ready for impact. “Otherwise I would’ve asked she stay present. It’s about me. I approached Cami two weeks into your stint with us, ten years ago. I asked if she knew how much you and Grayson clearly were attracted to one another. She did. And she said she didn’t want you getting hurt. That she’d been hurt, and your mum had been hurt. And I didn’t want us having an Omega, Willow or otherwise, but I had already scented you, Brie. I knew you were meant for us, if anyone was. But I fought it.”

Briella’s breathing picks up, her nostrils flaring as she continues to stare, her hands in her lap and her fizzy water untouched at her side. Her pink hair is pulled back in a slick ponytail at her nape, and her nail polish is badly chipped. She’s still the Omega I’ve wanted since day one.

“So Cami and I made a pact to keep Grayson’s feelings for you silent, and your feelings for him silent. If they told each other, fine, but we would do what we could to downplay theother’s potential as a partner. So I would tell Gray things like it seemed obvious she wasn’t into him, she didn’t need to be told that an older, spoken-for Alpha from a band going nowhere would be interested because why should she care? All that kind of total horseshit.” He shakes his head and closes his eyes as though feeling the pain of this dagger he’s sticking her with. “And he believed me, because who doubts the band empath?” He says this with a humorless, wrecked-kind of smile.

He’s sticking me with it, but I’m taking it, because I deserve it.

Ronan continues. “Cami told me she was already anti-pack and pretty well anti-Alpha back then.”

“Ash has changed that, it seems, at least the Alpha bit,” Enzo says. “Good on him!”

“Yes, well, back then, she told me she hated the idea of how we operate, how society gives us more leeway and Omegas have theirs taken away. Or at the very least, controlled,” Ronan says. “And of course it’s all true. We know it. Decent people all know it.”

Briella’s face pales. “So let me get this straight. You persuaded Grayson I couldn’t possibly be interested in him, and that, I suppose, made the move to America easier?” She’s looking at me now, accusation in her eyes, but still no tears or rage.

I nod. “It made the move easier, yes. I was already used to hardly ever seeing Willow. So not seeing you again, well, it seemed for the best. But I dreamt of you. Almost every night, Briella.”

Enzo nods. “He fucking did. At least around me, he brought you up pseudo-casually in every conversation he could. ‘Briella would do it this way, remember when Briella said this? That one photoshoot Briella did for the second album, it was exactly whatwe need now. Why is no one as good as Briella?’ You might’ve been out of our lives, but you werenotout of our minds.”

“Focusing on Willow seemed practical, and sensible,” I add, feeling my gut churn at this admission. “Until it didn’t.”

“Cami told me Willow showed up last night. Is she still pissed? Why was she here? Did she leave?”

“Yeah, she demanded we sign her bloody paperwork,” Enzo says, lip curled. “Alejandro ripped it up and stuffed in a fucking urinal.”

Briella lets out a snort and Ronan chuckles. But then the somberness returns.

“She’s going to try to cause shit online. She doesn’t have a legal standing, but insists we were a quote-unquote ‘common-law pack.’ What she can’t prove is that I ever said she would be our Omega when she was ready. I invited her verbally, many times. But I never once put it in writing.”

Briella looks doubtful, then drinks her whole bottle down.

“Ash has his own lawyers at the ready, so I’m confident we’ll never need to speak with her again. She’s revealed her true self. I’m sad to lose that friend, but childhood friends sometimes need to be left in childhood. We all grow, and change. Eventually.”

Briella shifts in her seat, crossing her legs and sitting up straight, then crossing her arms and staring at me, unblinking. I flash back to kneeling before her in the limo, sliding my fingers under her panties and into that sacred space I dreamt of for so long. Of her pressing me up against the hotel window in Barcelona, and opening her legs to me in the DJ booth. She has given me everything.

And now, she’s about to destroy me, which is no more than I deserve.

“I don’t care about Willow. Her intentions are clear. What I’m concerned with, Grayson, is how can I trust you now? If youstuffed your feelings away then, how do I know you’d ever be truthful with me now?” Her gaze shifts to Ronan, then lands on Enzo, then back to me. “How can I believe any of you? Gray, how can I trust you to be the Alpha leader who will come to me with his truth if you let others dissuade you from your true feelings back then? All those years I never heard from you, I thought I’d made it all up in my head, the chemistry I felt. That was the darkest time for me, and I felt shittier about myself in those years because I believed I must’ve been wrong, that I couldn’t trust myowninstincts. So tell me, how do I believe this is really for real and not just for now?”

We’re silent, and if I know the other two like I believe I do, we’re all scrambling for the one right response that will assure her.

“Willow’s not the real problem,” Briella repeats softly. What she doesn’t say screams into the silence that follows.

We’rethe problem.

So we have to be the solution.

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