Page 49 of Knot Your Basic B*tch

This was not real. I didnotjust go from feeling thehappiest I could ever remember feeling, to being right on the verge of hyperventilating.

I couldnotbe known as the omega of the Fanny pack.

Absolutely not.

“If it’s the twin’s name that’s bothering you, we can come up with solutions. It’s not exactly unheard of for packs to take the last name of the alpha who isn’t the pack lead.”

I took a deep breath to calm myself down.

I was falling in love with these men; they were my alphas. I’d been on the cusp of telling Brutus that yes, I wanted to move in with them. Yes, I wanted to be his, and everything that came with it.

It didn’t make sense to throw that all away just because the pack name sounded a little silly. Especially when there was a reasonable course of action we could take about it.

But no. I should have known that it couldn’t be that simple.

I didn’t think that I could be more horrified, until Brutus told mehislast name.

CHAPTER 29

CHLOE

Graduation was on the horizon.

The thought of graduating from the Institute had been my own little ray of hope, promising that I wasn’t going to be drowning in quizzes and studying forever. In just a few weeks, I was going to get the instructions for my final exam. I didn’t know when the countdown to the end of my classes had started weighing me down with its never-ending ticking and tocking like the countdown to a bomb.

I hadn’t expected to like my scent matches.

Meeting all of them and realizing that I liked them, maybe even loved them, threw even more of a wrench in my plans. It was more emotionally devastating than if it turned out that we just weren’t compatible at all. I had been emotionally prepared for a bit of heartbreak and to live my life alone in a studio apartment, living on my modest salary from my receptionist job—not to fall for my alphas.

Relationships made everything so much more complicated.

Brutus had spoken to me matter-of-factly about how things would be if I moved in with them, and about his plans for remodeling and personalizing my nest.

The whole concept of nesting was still weird to me. Yes, I’d been an omega for a while now. Yes, I knew that my moms and sisters had nests. But this was me, and I wasn’t a fucking bird. I couldn’t get the association of a bunch of little sticks surrounding a batch of eggs out of my head.

But that wasn’t the point.

Moving in with my scent matches was a huge fucking deal.

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be with them—I did.

The thought of a future without them made my limbs feel weak, as painful pressure built up in my chest—No.

I wasn’t going to give up my alphas. But did that mean that I had to give up on my dream? After doubling my academic load at the Institute with my online classes, and nearly being done with them both, was I going to throw it all away? And to do what exactly? From what I’d seen with my sister, Rebel, it looked like all she did all day was her alphas… in various positions and pairings.

Wait. Honestly, that didn’t sound awful…

But no. As much as I wanted to be with them, how could I give myself up in the process?

My mind was a dumpster fire, and nothing was helping. I wouldn’t even mind an alpha interview during lunch right now, because it would take my mind off things. But even that had started to slow down. Titus hadn’t texted me the contact of any new alphas in an entire week. Which was odd, because from the moment he’d come up with his hair-brained alpha interview scheme, he’d sent at least one, sometimes two or three alphas for me to interview a week.

Figures as soon as I actually wanted to do it, the interviews would dry up.

I got to class early.

I had all the space I needed to focus.

A few months back, I thought my academic year would be fucked after everyone realized I was related to the Stryker pack, but I’d used the incident to my advantage. Maybe I could have lied and said that there wasn’t any connection to Titus, but it turned out that glaring at the other girls and hinting that I could ruin any chance they had with my brother worked just as well. The other omegas not only kept their distance, but treated me with a whispered reverence.