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My family had always been understanding, maybe they wouldn’t have been if I wasn’t the youngest and the only one in the family they felt they could give the freedom to do whatever I wanted. If I’d been my brother or sister, I knew I wouldn’t have ever been able to stray from the path of success, or so they put it.

Thankfully, I was my own person, and even after they stressed me about changing my life, they knew they couldn’t sway me, not even slightly. I wasn’t going to join the family company, and I wasn’t going back to Georgia with them. Although one of the biggest surprises to come from them showing up had been them acknowledging Vasilis as the guy I’d been housing all those years ago. I didn’t question it, I didn’t need to know how much they knew, just that they approved, even if they were pushing marriage on us, and I was not ready to rush into anything right now. I was in my thirties, but getting married now still made me feel like I was losing my autonomy. What if I wanted to be alone?

My parents left with the promise they would send money to the omegas who had been dealt the awful hand by the Serpentine Syndicate. They had admired my committment to using my trust fund, and wanted me to save that for when I eventually settled down, which they definitely hoped was sometime soon.

Vasilis drove my car and I continued to drive the truck. The omegas trusted me now, although they didn’t trust Vasilis, but they didn’t say anything to me directly, only stuff I overheard from them talking to the others. I didn’t blame them, he had been an asshole, and I hadn’t really explained to them what had happened with them, but that was more because I didn’t want to emasculate him by telling them he was so easily poisoned and mind controlled.

We dropped each omega off at their home and gave ech of them my cell number in case they ever needed anything. I wanted to help in whatever way I could, but money was the biggest thing for them, and I’d already promised them all large cheques to see them go without for at least a couple of years.

After the last omega left, we took the van to an impound lot and got them to destroy it. It was in condition, they fought us on the destruction of it, claiming they could sell it and get more than they could if they sold it for scrap metal. But I’d made the promise to myself and to everyone who had been thrown into the back of it that it would never be used again.

I stood with Vasilis by my car as we watched a man operating a large machine throw the large excavator head on the truck down against it and tear chunks from its side.

“What’s next on our agenda?” Vasilis asked me, with his arm hooked in at my side, he pulled me in and kissed my forehead. “I think taking down the Arizona and California branches of the Syndicate.”

And something I hadn’t mentioned to him yet. “Right. Well, you’re probably going to hear about it on the news soon anyway, but—”

“What?”

“My aunt, Sophia, she filed a lawsuit against your family, well, the Syndicate, and we’re using the testimony of the omegas kidnapped, alongside the ledger of names I still have,” I said. “We’re going to put everyone else in prison. That’s the hope, and plan.”

He smiled at me, after telling him I was about to put his mother in prison, he still smiled at me. Near giggled and kicked his feet too if he could. “I guess I need to reinvent myself,” he said. “Unless, she’s going to come for me as well.”

I squeezed him into my side. “We’re going to play the card that you died in that explosion,” I told him. “And I never want to see you dressed in dark clothes again. They’re far too depressing on your skin. You’re already glowing with color.”

“I feel like I’m already glowing,” he said, kissing the top of my head again. “I don’t think I could have done any of this without you.”

We could agree on that. “For starters, I don’t think you would’ve ever broken free from whatever they were using to hold you in that contro,” I said. “That’s a lie. The doctor hade notes made about some type of berry. I’m wondering if it was a native berry to where you’re from. Well, where we’re both from.”

“I still don’t know how you managed to cut through all the poison like you did,” he said.

I had inklings of ideas as to why I had been able to do it, but nothing I wanted to tell him about. This was supposed to be a time we were saying bye to all the bullshit. We were ready to start fresh, and if we were still thinking about the past, we were never going to leave it.

We enjoyed watching the truck being crushed and pounded by the excavator until it was small enough to fit into the large press machine that would cube and crush all the metal into something that I imagined would one day be used for something good.

There was no plan now. I’d burned myself out running on adrenaline since I was stuck at the compound, shifting constantly was a drain on my energy, and being thrown into a heat cycle and then a sickness. I was desperate for a vacation now.

Vasilis drove us as we headed up out of the state, trying to find ourselves in the mountains of Idaho and probably further to Montana where the air wasn’t so dry and the earth wasn’t covered in a thick layer of sand and dust.

“I love you,” I told him. It came out in a blurt. “I love you.” And now I couldn’t stop.

“Don’t make me stop this car and show you how much I love you,” he said, swerving on the empty road as if demonstrating how distracted my words had made him. “I will absolutely pull over just to make sure I heard you.”

“I said what I said,” I shouted from the top of my lungs. “I love you!”

He wasn’t lying. He pulled over on the road of the road and turned to me in the driver’s seat. “Soren Quillen. I’ve known for you ten years, and I don’t know how long I’ve felt this, but I do love you. It’s—”

“I thought you were an asshole when we first met,” I said before he could finish his thought. “You were so admant you wanted to die and then I saw the tattoo, which we’re gonna have to get removed, by the way. I just thought you were another Alpha who wanted to throw his power around everywhere.”

Vasilis stared at me. “For a long time, I think that’s exactly who I was. An Alpha, throwing my power around, and showing off for the Syndicate.”

“Showing off?” I wiggled my brows. “Is that what they call it?”

He placed his hand on my leg and squeezed my knee, pinching in above at my thigh. “That’s a very naughty thought,” he said. “I don’t know exactly what you mean by it, but I know what you mean , by it.” He winked at me.

“Yeah, I was talking about your dicks, plural.”

His fork tongue flickered, which I now knew was a reflex of how excitable he was. “If we weren’t so close to the border and getting out of this state, I’d have—” he glanced into all my clothes and other mess in the back of the car. “Maybe not.”

I planted my hand on his thigh now, squeezing it, going further up until I found one of his cocks. “Are they separated?” I asked, feeling around outside the shorts to feel the other cock snaked down the other pant leg. “Oh my god.”

“They need space to breath as well,” he said. “It’s boiling out here. I’m sweating up a storm.”

“Great, now I’m turned on,” I said, giving the head of one trouser snake a whack. He flinched forward. “Keep driving. I really want to fuck, and I need a bed.”

At that point, it was just teasing, but I had been serious about it. I didn’t want to be fucking in this poorly air conditioned car where neither of us were going to be able to move around enought to have the fun we wanted-

We headed to the border, unfortunately, not into the state we assumed. I’d been far too distracted to realize we were headed up to Oregon, but it didn’t matter too much. We stopped over for the night at the border in the small town settled there. There were motels and a couple stores alongside a very small sprawling neighbourhood.

The room we booked was nice with fresh linens and a large air conditioning unit in the window.

As soon as we got into the bedroom, we started kissing and undressing each other. Ultimately, falling asleep on each other within minutes of getting into bed. The exhaustion of everything we’d done finally caught up with us. Both the mental and physical toll was greater than either of us imagined.

We slept for fourteen hours, waking for brief moments of clinging to the other and being pulled into a giant chest-hugging hold. I hadn’t realized how much time had passed until I was seeing the sun, at first, I thought it was setting, and then saw the time. It was rising. And the light was splashing over our bodies, holding us with its light.

Sat on the edge of the bed, Vasilis came up behind me and held me. “I think your father had a point,” he whispered in my ear. “We should get married.”

“Just because he said that, it doesn’t mean we should,” I told him. “But if we were ever going to get married, we should’ve just done it in Vegas.”

“Well, we—”

“I’m joking. When and if we get married, it’s going to be a spectacular event,” I told him. “That’s just not what I know will happen, it’s what my family will want.” I’d done a lot of life my way, but there were definitely parts of my life my parents would have more say. “The one thing I am solid on is no kids. I don’t want to bring life into this.”

“I don’t want to bring kids into this world,” he agreed. “Although that was when I thought giving them the Rotmor was a death sentence.”

“Which you have me to thank for,” I said, spinning myself onto the bed with one swift motion and pouncing on him, pinning him back onto the mattress. “You don’t have to thank me for it.”

Vasilis excerised his strength, wrapping his arms around me and turning me over into the bed until I was the one pinned under his weight. “I’ve thanked you more than once.” He stared at me and lowered his face to mine, planting a kiss on my lips. “I will thank you every single day for the rest of my life, if that’s how long it takes.”

I didn’t need him to thank me all the time. I just liked playing with him. He was the Vasilis I knew from ten years ago, even if I never really knew him at all. “Are you going to tell me why you left?” I asked. “It seems like you never gave me a straight answer before.”

He hold on me grew relaxed and he nodded. “I didn’t want my family going to war with your family,” he said. “I knew they would try and kill you all. But I guess that was silly of me because you would’ve saved me years of pain and torture as I infected omega after omega with that fucking disease.”

“But they wouldn’t have found you,” I said. “They didn’t—”

Blinking, he nodded, his eyes screwed shut for a moment as a single tear formed in the corner. “My brother knew,” he said. “He’d found the blood. I remembered seeing him through the window, he drove up to your house and delivered a package. Someone showed him out, but he looked right at me through the window. I had to leave.”

I pulled Vasilis’s head into my chest. “It’s all ok now.” It’s all I could offer him. My words of support were just words, and I hoped he felt them deep down, reassured by my actions where I’d saved his life, tiwce, or three times now, and knew for certain that everything was going to be ok now.

This felt like it was how it was always supposed to be, except we’d taken the long way around, and his family had tried to take over the world with disease in order for us to get to this point in our lives. It forced us together, again, and I never wanted to leave him alone again.

“You can cry,” I whispered. “Let it out.”

All Vasilis needed was encouragement to express himself however he wanted. No judgements, just years of emotional abuse expelled through heavy sobs in the duvet cocoon I created to keep us together.

We were healing together.

Forever.