Page 87 of Reckless: Collision

I’m pulling out my phone when Ryker appears in the doorway, all carefully contained alpha energy. “Pack meeting. Now.”

Right. The breach. Quinn’s warning. Reality crashes back like a system failure.

“But it’s snowing,” Cayenne protests, and for a moment she sounds young. Hopeful.

“Later,” I promise, setting my phone on the counter. “If we get enough accumulation, I’ll show you the best hills on the property.”

Her smile almost makes me forget what I’m about to tell the pack. Almost.

I follow Ryker out, my mind already processing how to present Quinn’s information, how to plan our infiltration, how to protect everyone I care about from what’s coming.

Sometimes the biggest breaches come from the smallest oversights.

Chapter 19

Cayenne

Is he fucking testing me?

Finn’s phone sits on the granite countertop like a digital apple in Eden, forgotten or perhaps deliberately placed. The screen’s dark face reflects morning light, tempting me with possibilities and promises. One swipe and I could have everything—news, data, connection to the world beyond these walls.

Unless this isn’t oversight but a test. And if it is, it’s one I might spectacularly fail.

I slide off the stool, deliberately turning my back on temptation as I carry my plate to the sink. The coffee pot offers safer distraction, its familiar routine a poor substitute for the electronic pulse I crave. Out of sight, out of mind—isn’t that what normal people say?

Except I’ve never been normal, and right now that phone calls to me like an unsecured network, begging to be breached. The need to know—to see, to understand, to connect—burns in my fingertips like withdrawal.

Damn you, Finn, you sneaky beta.

Lightning strikes my lower abdomen without warning—muscles contorting in a vise-grip spasm that forces myfingernails into the countertop’s edge. The contraction radiates outward in pulses, each one charting neural pathways like a system diagnostic revealing damaged connections. Sweat beads at my temples despite the room’s controlled temperature, my vision blurring momentarily as my body’s resources redirect to managing the internal rebellion.

The sensation drags me from digital abstraction into brutal biological reality—this flesh prison with its beta limitations, its hormone-driven demands, its evolutionary dead-ends. My uterus contracts again, reminding me with perfect clarity what society never lets me forget: I am beta. My category exists in the margins of designation hierarchy, my fertility compromised by design, my place in society as secondary as my reproductive potential. Each cramping pulse whispers the message my body delivers monthly—backup system, redundant hardware, anomaly in the natural code.

We’re the ones who slip through the cracks. The ones whose children rarely survive to term. The ones who get sick, who die young, who fade away while alphas and omegas thrive. My mother proved that better than most—the strongest beta I knew, brought down by a disease that rarely touches thesuperiordesignations.

Maybe that’s why I leave the phone where it lies. For once in my life, ignorance feels like a choice rather than a sentence. For once, I can walk away from the weight of knowing, of seeing, of trying to fix a world that’s never wanted me to begin with.

Instead of retreating to the basement, I find myself drawn to the mudroom. A rocking chair near the window calls to me, the blanket draped over its back promising comfort I rarely allow myself to seek. Up here, the snow falls in fat flakes that paint the world in shades of possibility and peace.

I curl into the chair, tugging the blanket around me like armor against more than just the cold. The coffee warms myhands, its heat a poor substitute for the electronic pulse I usually use to keep the quiet at bay. But for once, the silence doesn’t feel like failure.

Through the window, nature executes the world’s most elegant code—each snowflake a unique string of crystalline data, collectively transforming the landscape byte by byte. No administrative access required, no authentication challenges, no encrypted barriers to overcome. The branches outside bow under the accumulating weight, pixels of white against the greyscale morning. The gentle hiss of falling snow reaches my ears like white noise machines but infinitely more complex, more perfect in its random patterns.

My fingers press against the cold glass, leaving temporary heat signatures while something in my chest—a region I’ve firewalled for years—begins throwing unexpected exceptions, system alerts warning of permission changes, of barriers being quietly, beautifully bypassed.

I don’t notice Theo at first, but his scent reaches me before his footsteps do. Vanilla—not the artificial sweetness of candles or baking, but something darker, wilder. Like orchids blooming at midnight, exotic and dangerous and achingly pure. The kind of scent that belongs in fantasy worlds, in places where magic still exists.

He stands in the doorway, every inch the omega of stories—hair tousled from sleep, that ridiculous mustache defying gravity, chest bare as if winter is merely a suggestion. Those low-slung pants should be illegal in at least three states. I let my eyes trail over him, cursing my hormones and their spectacularly bad timing.

“May I sit with you?” The question emerges barely above a whisper, yet somehow fills the room completely—each syllable carrying harmonics that make the air molecules between us vibrate with intent. His omega presence manifests not as anintrusion but as an offering, a melody seeking harmony rather than domination.

“It’s your home.” I raise my coffee mug, creating a physical barrier between his ethereal beauty and my suddenly unshielded expression. Steam curls between us, carrying the bitter notes of my uncertainty along with the rich scent of arabica.

“It’s your peace,” he counters, his body flowing into the adjacent rocker in one fluid movement that barely disturbs the air. The chair accepts his weight with a gentle creak that somehow complements the hushed symphony of falling snow outside. The temperature in our shared space rises three degrees, though the thermostat remains untouched.

His words hit something raw inside me—a wound I didn’t know I carried until he named it. Peace. Such a simple word for such a complicated concept. No one’s ever offered it to me like this before—not as a cage to contain me, but as a space I’m allowed to claim. To share.

Looking at him now, bathed in the grey light of dawn, he doesn’t feel like an intrusion into my solitude. He feels like a natural extension of this quiet moment, as if he belongs in the story the snow is writing across the morning.

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