“You bit me.”
“Yes. But I thought I was biting a beta. I thought it was just sex.”
The admission hits like a physical blow.
My mind flashes back to the beach – the sand under my feet, the rush of adrenaline, the heat of the chase in the cold of the storm. The moment I thought it was part of the game. Part of whatever reckless energy we’d built between us.
Not something that could change me.
“I didn’t mean to trigger your presentation,” he says, and for the first time there’s something raw in his tone. “If I’d known you were?—”
“Were what?” I demand.
His silence is answer enough.
“You really do think I’m an omega,” I say flatly.
“I think you’re presenting like one.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“No,” he agrees quietly. “It isn’t. But it’s the most likely answer here, Lani. Be logical.”
My breathing turns shallow.
“And the sickness?” I press. “That was, what? My body just collapsing for fun?”
“Destabilisation,” he says. “Your system trying to recalibrate after the bite accelerated what was already there.”
“And when you stayed away?” I ask.
He doesn’t answer quickly enough.
My stomach twists.
“That made it worse,” I say slowly. “Didn’t it?”
“Yes.”
The honesty burns.
“So let me get this straight,” I say, stepping back because I need distance or I might do something stupid. “An alpha bites me. That triggers something I didn’t know existed. My body spirals. And the person who did it stands at a distance andwatchesme fall apart. Watches me get sicker and sicker, to the point that someone else had to step in just to keep me alive. And the whole time, heknewwhy.”
“I stayed away because I didn’t trust myself not to destabilise you further,” he says.
“You already had. I can’t see how being around me could have made it any worse, Sol.”
Silence.
The room feels smaller. Thicker. My pulse is roaring now – with fury and something dangerously close to betrayal.
“You don’t get to decide what this makes me,” I say, voice low and shaking. “You don’t get to change me and label me an omega just because you couldn’t hold yourself together.”
“I didn’t decide,” he says quietly. “It was already there.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do.”