"She lost her mind," he says. "Genuinely. In the study. We told her we had moved on and she started taking her dress off."
I look up.
"What?" I say.
"She decided," Santos says, "that the best argument for her case was a physical demonstration of what she was offering." Hepauses. "Security escorted her off the island. In a sheet. Carmen arranged it."
My strawberry scent does something open and honest in the air and I can feel all three of them notice it, the subtle shift in the room, and I look at my pasta and take a breath.
My rose does the soft thing.
I can't help but start laughing, and it's as if I open a gateway, because all of them start too.
Matteo demonstrates what she did, and we roar into laughter again. It's as if in this moment we're no longer uncomfortable with each other, but back to how we were in Vegas. Laughing. Enjoying each other's company. And I forget in a split second that I'm supposed to be leaving this island in the next few hours.
"She was never ours," Tomas says, from my left. Quiet and plain, the way Tomas says things that are simply true. "We used each other for knotting and heat cycles, but she was never really our omega." He looks at me. "We've never had one, thinking that it would come between us. That an omega won't bring us together but drift us apart."
I don't tell them that Carmen already told me about Chiara, because part of me feels that by doing so, I'll break Carmen's trust.
We eat for a while in the comfortable quiet of people who have run out of things to be cautious about and are sitting in what's left of it.
Santos eats with the easy pleasure of someone who has always loved food and considers a meal a full sensory experience and not just fuel, and he keeps looking at me like I am the most interesting thing in the room and he is not going to pretend otherwise.
Matteo eats precisely, which is how Matteo does everything, and every time he looks up his pale eyes find mine and hold them for a moment longer than strictly necessary before movingon, and his warmth is sitting warm and dark in the air and my nose keeps finding it before I tell it to stop.
Tomas finishes his pasta, sets his fork down with the quiet care he brings to everything, and turns to look at me.
Santos leans forward across the table with his forearms flat and his saffron warm and his warm brown eyes on my face and he says, "Stay for dinner."
I look at him.
"I'm making dinner," he says.
I'm supposed to be leaving.
But he offered you dinner,my omega says.
I thought she'd stopped talking.
"Santos," I say, not wanting to make this more complicated than it needs to be.
"Dessert too," he says. "I have a recipe. Carmen has concerns about the recipe but I believe in the recipe."
"What's the recipe," I say.
"Tiramisu," he says. "My grandmother's."
"Your grandmother's tiramisu," I say.
"She was from Naples," he says. "It's the real thing, because it takes three hours and requires a specific type of biscuit that Carmen had to order from the mainland."
I look at him for a moment.
"But how did you know I would come to lunch, let alone stay for dinner?"
My strawberry scent opens fully in the warm air.
I feel all three of them respond to it, their scents shifting warm and open in the air around mine.