Chapter 1
ARI
I have a system.
Every Tuesday, I get to the library by two. I take the back route, the one that runs along the east wall of the humanities building where nobody really walks unless they have to. I find my corner in the back stacks, the one behind the periodicals that nobody under forty ever touches. I put both headphones in. I open my laptop.
And for a few hours, I disappear.
That's the goal, anyway. Disappear. Take up no space. Be nobody.
I've gotten pretty good at it.
My name is Aria Lennox. I'm twenty one years old and I have been a student at Thornwood Elite University for three years on a full academic scholarship, which is the only reason someone like me is here at all. Thornwood is old money and legacy admissions and Alphas who've known since birth that the world belongs to them. It is not, historically, a place for curvy, glasses-wearing scholarship girls from small apartments in Cincinnati whose parents are both betas and whose omega designation showed up on a pediatric screening at age nine and has been causing problems ever since.
The biggest problem being this: I am twenty one years old and I have never presented.
No scent. Nothing. Three years at a university where your biological designation is basically your social security number and I am walking around with a blank where mine should be.
Dry omega.
I heard it the first time sophomore year, in the dining hall, loud enough that the table next to me went quiet. I remember exactly what I was eating. I remember the specific way Cara Hensley said it, like it was funny, like I was funny, like the fact of me was a punchline she'd just discovered and couldn't wait to share.
I've heard it maybe two hundred times since then.
It stopped hurting around the hundred and fiftieth time. Now it's just a thing that happens, like bad weather. You don't enjoy it. You just wait for it to pass.
Anyway. Tuesday. Library. My corner.
I have both headphones in and chapter seventeen open on my laptop and I am, for the first time all day, completely fine.
I should tell you about chapter seventeen.
I write erotica. Specifically I write omegaverse erotica, and specifically specifically I write reverse harem omegaverse erotica about a curvy omega who gets claimed by multiple Alphas who take her apart piece by piece and worship every part of her she's spent her whole life hiding. I've been writing it since freshman year. I post it anonymously on a platform where, as of this morning, forty three thousand people follow my account and lose their entire minds every time I update.
Chapter seventeen is the one where she finally stops fighting it. Where she realizes that the thing she's been running from is exactly what she wants. It's the best thing I've ever written and I've been working on it for two weeks and I am right in the middle of a scene that is making even me a little breathless when the headphones come out.
Not by my choice.
Cara Hensley pulls the right one out of my ear and drops it on the table like it's something she found on the floor.
I look up.
Her. And the two girls who follow her everywhere, whose names I have never learned because learning them felt like giving this more than it deserves. All three of them in a semicircle at the end of my stack, looking at me the way cats look at something small and cornered.
"I've been looking for you," Cara says.
"Congratulations," I say. "You found me."
She smiles. It doesn't reach anywhere near her eyes. "You know what I heard today? I heard Professor Ellis curved the midterm because one person scored so high it broke the grading scale." She tilts her head. "That was you, wasn't it."
I don't answer.
"See, here's my thing," she continues, pulling out the chair across from me and sitting down like I invited her. "You come here on your little scholarship and you mess up the curve for everyone else and you walk around like you belong here and you don't even—" She pauses. Wrinkles her nose. "You don't even have a scent, Aria. You're twenty one years old and you smell like nothing. Like a blank. Like there's just nothing there."
One of her friends laughs.
I look at my laptop screen. Chapter seventeen. The cursor blinking patiently.
"A dry omega with good grades." Cara leans forward. "Must be so embarrassing. Being the smartest person in the room and still being the least desirable omega on campus. The Alphas don't even look at you. You know that, right? You're invisible to them. You'll always be invisible to them."
Here is the thing about humiliation.
When it first started, sophomore year, I used to go back to my dorm room and sit on my bathroom floor for a while. Not crying exactly. Just sitting. Waiting for the feeling to pass.
I don't do that anymore. Mostly because the feeling has changed. It's not sharp now. It's dull and heavy and it sits in my chest like something I've been carrying so long I've stopped noticing the weight.
Invisible. Yeah. I know.
I look at Cara across the table and I think about chapter seventeen and I think about the dining hall order I'm going to pick up on my way home and I breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth and I wait for her to finish.
And then something happens.
Heat. Starting low, below my stomach, spreading outward slow and then fast. Warm and strange and completely, entirely not mine to control.
I go very still.
A smell reaches me. Sweet. Deep. With something underneath it that makes my brain go quiet in a way I have no word for. It takes me a full five seconds to realize I'm smelling myself. My own scent. Coming off my skin like I've been holding it for three years and my body just decided, right now, in the back stacks of the Thornwood library, that it was done waiting.
Cara stops talking mid sentence.
I watch her face change. Watch her lean back. Watch her eyes go wide and then strange and then she looks at me like she's seeing something she doesn't know what to do with.
"What is that," one of her friends says, very quietly.
I can't answer. I'm busy noticing that I am soaking through my underwear at the library table, which is a sentence I never expected to have to think. My body is doing things completely without my input and the humiliation of that, on top of everything Cara just said, should be devastating.
It is not devastating.
I don't know what it is.
From somewhere deeper in the library, three chairs scrape back. Same moment. One sound.
Cara grabs her bag.
She doesn't say another word. She just leaves, both friends right behind her, and I sit there alone in my corner with my omega scent blooming three years late and my chapter seventeen still open on my screen.
I grab my laptop and I run.
Twelve steps to the nearest study room. I get inside. Lock the door. Press my back flat against it and stand there breathing.
My heart is loud enough that I can hear it.
Slick is running down my inner thighs and my glasses are crooked and my brain is doing that thing it does when chapter seventeen is working, when I'm deep in the scene and everything feels too real, when the omega in my story is backed into a corner and the Alphas are coming and she should be scared but she isn't, she isn't, she—
The door handle moves.
I stop breathing.
Then a voice. Low. Unhurried. Like it has all the time in the world.
"We can smell you through the wood, little omega."
A pause.
"Open it. Or we will."
I know that voice. I've heard it in interviews after football games and in clips that circulate campus every time the Blackwood triplets do something worth filming, which is often.
All three of them. Right outside my door.
I press my back harder against it. My hand is shaking. Not from fear. I wish it was fear. Fear would make sense. Fear would be a normal, reasonable response to being cornered in a study room by three massive Alphas while my body broadcasts my scent like a beacon.
What I'm actually feeling is the thing I write about. The thing I have been writing about for three years in a folder I keep buried on my laptop. The thing I have forty three thousand readers for.
The want.
Specific. Embarrassing. Crawling up my spine and settling at the base of my neck like it was always supposed to live there.
The door opens.
I don't remember deciding to open it. My hand just moves.
And there they are. All three of them, filling the doorway, identical and enormous and looking at me, really looking at me, at my flushed face and my crooked glasses and the slick visible on my inner thighs, like I am the most interesting thing they have seen in years.
Jett's eyes travel down my body and come back up slow. He smiles, and it is the most dangerous smile I have ever seen in my life.
"Baby," he says. "You have no idea how long we've been waiting for you."
I soak through what's left of my underwear before he finishes the sentence.
