Page 5 of Want It All

‘Have you seen this?’ Sebastian hissed, showing me his phone.

I had seen it. Banksia House had strict rules about what could be shared on social media; no photos of the manor or its immediate grounds, and no photos of any enrolled student or staff member taken on the property could be shared.

To make up for it, Banksia had its own – albeit simple – social media app, and the clip of the dark-haired alpha snarling in the dining hall after outing the pretty little omega had been posted multiple times.

‘Yeah, I saw it,’ I nudged his plate. ‘Eat.’ I opened my laptop.

‘Aren’t you going to eat?’ he said pointedly.

I shoved a forkful of chicken in my mouth and clicked into the student administration system.

I’d gained access before we’d arrived; for an institution with so much cash flow, I’d have thought they’d have better system protections.

We already knew who the alpha was: Byron Griffiths, youngest child of Banksia House’s new Dean, Professor Carla Griffiths. The omega in question was more of a mystery.

‘Rosemary Morris,’ I murmured a moment later. ‘Twenty-six years old.’ My eyebrows rose; I pushed my glasses up my nose. ‘A graduate of our university, same year, same faculty. She majored in ancient history.’ I looked across at Sebastian. ‘Surely we would have had some of the same classes.’

‘You can take history online,’ Sebastian said.

An emerging designation was a shock to anyone, but it was especially difficult for omegas.

Their hormones took longer to settle, and their heat cycles could be erratic for several years.

They were more sensitive to scent than any other designation, so public places could be an uncomfortable experience.

In that context, online study made a lot of sense.

I clicked into her offer documents; my eyebrows rose further. I cleared my throat. ‘She’s a scholarship student.’

Next to me, Sebastian went still. I met his clear blue gaze.

The pretty omega could be his biggest threat.

All the students at Banksia House were impressive.

But the scholarship students were next level.

There were thousands of applications for the two scholarship places each year, and the students who got them deserved them.

They hadn’t bought their place here, not with money, nor their family name. They’d earned it.

Sebastian was, without a doubt, the smartest person I’d ever met. His parents were all Banksia alumni, but while his mother had gone on to win a Nobel Prize, and his fathers to win awards that were equally impressive – if not as well known – none of them had ever won a prize at Banksia.

Despite Sebastian’s achievements, his mother saw only his easy smile and warm manner.

Nothing he did was ever good enough, and if it was , she’d infer he’d used his looks to get there.

Sebastian isn’t serious enough , she’d say one visit, and he simply doesn’t have the aptitude the next.

It made me livid, but it hurt Sebastian, deeply.

And so he was determined to win the Banksia Prize and prove his mother wrong.

It wasn’t a healthy obsession, but I wasn’t one to talk.

‘You’re getting that prize,’ I said quietly.

He hooked his foot around my ankle. ‘I know, alpha.’

He didn’t know, not really. Not even I knew the lengths I would go to ensure his happiness.

I clicked into the pretty omega’s personal information, and noted down her room number, along with a few other details – her home address, her parents’ names, her birthday – before skimming through her application documents.

As expected, her admissions essay was well-written, eloquent, and the perfect balance of emotive and respectful.

While I wouldn’t say it was better than Sebastian’s, it was certainly equally as good.

As I’d suspected, her education summary showed a gap of a few years after high school, probably when she’d emerged as an omega. Sebastian was right, too; she’d completed her Bachelor degree and Honours year online, after what seemed like a short-lived foray into art school on campus.

I wondered what had put an end to that ambition, but suspected I could guess.

When designations had started to appear, there had been a period of significant upheaval as workplaces and schools adapted to the new needs of employees and students.

Tertiary academia, however, had always done things at its own pace.

It had taken a few horrific – and very public – incidents caused by barely-human alphas for universities to start changing their policies around scent blocking and rut suppression, but by then, the damage had been done.

Omega enrolment sank so low that the designation made up less than two percent of all higher education students across Australia.

Everything was stacked against them: alpha and beta teachers who didn’t understand the complex needs of an omega body, harassment from fellow students and even teaching staff, and the nature of the term structure and assessment deadlines, which demanded that omegas change to meet them , rather than allowing for flexibility to flow the other way.

There was a lot that needed to change.

Sebastian’s foot traced up my calf. I turned to him, my lips curving into a smile, and took his fingers in mine. ‘Have I ever told you that I love you?’

He rolled his eyes, grinning. ‘Only a hundred times a day for the last six years.’

‘Hmm. That doesn’t seem like enough.’ I caught a movement from the corner of my eye and looked up to see a handsome woman standing opposite us, smiling.

‘Is this seat taken?’

There was a sea of seats elsewhere, many of them closer to other groups of students. I wasn’t bothered so much by that , though.

What bothered me was the way she was looking at Sebastian, the way her eyes caressed his golden hair, traced over his lovely face, and locked onto the delicious stretch of tanned skin beneath his collarbone.

My instincts bristled. ‘There are plenty of seats elsewhere.’

‘I was asking the beta, not you,’ she returned, her smile widening.

The alpha inside me snarled his displeasure. ‘Do you mean my beta?’

She glanced at me for the first time. I knew what she’d be seeing: someone who was tall but slender, a messy crop of brown curls falling over his glasses.

‘I don’t see a bite,’ she said dismissively.

I smiled, showing my teeth. ‘What makes you think I’d bite his neck?’

‘If you’ve both finished pissing on my leg,’ Sebastian said tightly, laying down his fork, ‘I rather think those seats are taken. If you’re looking for a beta, might I suggest a different tack next time? Betas aren’t possessions to be had.’

She scowled. ‘What else are you good for?’ She turned and strode away, settling near a group of students closer to the salad station.

Sebastian sighed, rubbing his eyes. ‘For fuck’s sake.’

‘I’m sorry she was an asshole, Seb.’

He huffed. ‘I’m annoyed at you, too. You might have asked first, Tris, instead of refusing her straight away. I’d like to make friends here, if that’s all right with you, alpha .’

‘She didn’t want to be friends , baby.’

He glared at me. ‘I’m not a glass vase. I am perfectly capable of finding that shit out for myself.’

I took up his hand and rubbed my cheek along his knuckles. If I’d not been on blockers, my scent would have covered his skin, marking him. ‘I know you are. I’ll do better next time. I’m sorry.’

He deflated. ‘Urgh. I can never stay angry at you. My instincts love when you do the whole mine thing.’

‘Maybe you could use your signal next time.’ We had a long-running sign for when Sebastian wanted my help: he tapped his fingers on his thigh. ‘If I don’t see the signal, I’ll leave you to handle it.’

‘Deal.’ He shot me a smile that made my stomach go tight, then peered at my laptop screen. ‘Find anything interesting?’

All anybody talked about for the next few days was the omega, who sensibly stayed barricaded in her apartment.

Someone was delivering food; we’d seen a tray in the corridor outside her room.

The administration was clearly aware of what had happened, evidenced by a worried-looking woman we’d seen knocking on her door, a woman I knew from the Banksia website to be the new Dean.

Though I suspected that personal visits to students probably didn’t fall within her job description, as it had been her son who’d caused the problem, she probably felt a measure of responsibility for the situation.

The son in question had also been mostly absent, emerging from his lair at mealtimes only, wearing a fierce scowl, his monitors, and clean-but-identical black shirts and black jeans each day.

He was handsome as fuck, even with his face twisted into a frown.

He wasn’t someone who could fly under any radar, so as much as he tried to avoid attention, he simply didn’t.

I mean, six-foot-six . He took up most of whichever room he happened to be in.

It didn’t help that he was textbook alpha: huge, muscled, and oh-so-savage looking.

Whenever I saw him, I couldn’t shake the feeling of a storm on the horizon, the clouds just waiting to roll in and electricity thick in the air.

I’d already stalked his socials, which consisted of erratic posts about music gigs and the occasional annotation of a quote he particularly liked; his profiles all hosted a tiny bisexual flag next to his name.

‘If we were looking for a pack …’ Sebastian said, his blue eyes darkening a little as he stared dreamily at Griffiths one lunchtime. ‘But we’re not, are we?’ He’d patted me on the shoulder in a manner that was supposed to be comforting. ‘We have everything we need.’

I certainly felt that way, but I was less convinced about Sebastian.

He brought up the idea of a pack so regularly that he must have thought about it often.

I wasn’t completely opposed to it, but the problem was finding someone good enough.

I’d never met anyone I’d considered being even close to deserving Sebastian.

I certainly didn’t deserve him; I was simply selfish.

He’d already shared rumours of an upcoming scent party, where students would stop taking their blockers for twenty-four hours and shower without reapplying cancellers, then head into the gardens with alcohol and a determination to make bad decisions.

Stopping blockers for a day wouldn’t reveal a person’s full scent profile – the blockers worked cumulatively – but it would give potential partners a taste of someone’s scent, which could be enough to cement an offer to join a pack, or to pair with others who had complementary scents.

Scent parties were illegal in every Australian state and territory but the ACT, where they were thrown by the local government and strictly monitored by police.

It was convention instead for students on blockers to exchange scent cards with potential partners.

Scent cards were pieces of fabric, worn on the skin until they were imbued with scent, then fixed to a cardboard or thin wood backing.

They were usually the catalyst which determined whether a relationship would be pursued or not; it was difficult for romantic relationships to succeed long-term if the scents involved weren’t complementary.

At Banksia, I’d taken to sleeping with Sebastian’s scent card beneath my pillow; it settled my alpha down when he became frantic about Sebastian’s missing scent. It wasn’t against the rules to have scent cards here, but university guidelines specifically mentioned that they advised against it.

Scent parties were a much wilder way to determine complementary scents, which didn’t deter Sebastian, who was all but bouncing at the notion. ‘Who knows,’ he’d said, his lips curving into the smile I loved so much. ‘Maybe you’ll find your scent match.’

It was a nice thought – who wouldn’t want to find their perfect match?

– but statistically, it was more than unlikely that in a world with over nine billion people, a scent match would just happen to be here.

In reality, if a match even existed in the first place, they were probably on the opposite side of the globe, living a life that would never weave into mine.

It was why packs were usually founded on complementary scents, which were more common; research showed an individual’s scent would be complementary with around ten percent of the wider population.

A head alpha would bring complementary packmates together and keep them that way, taking on responsibility for the pack’s physical and emotional wellbeing.

Sebastian’s scent was certainly complementary to mine, but we’d been on blockers since we’d met, so I’d never felt its full force.

I didn’t care that we weren’t a scent match – I loved him so deeply it was almost a madness anyway – and he didn’t seem to mind, either.

He’d been begging me to bite and bond him since our early twenties, but I’d gently resisted, wanting him to meet others with complementary scents first, to be absolutely sure it was me he wanted to bond.

I’d die if he chose not to, but at least I’d know I hadn’t taken the option from him.

And if he chose me … How could I ever want anything more?