He looked at her with those silver eyes that carried centuries and right now carried nothing but the present moment and what was in it.
"So am I," he said. "More than I expected to be."
He lowered himself beside her and the real work of the evening began.....not the energetic, urgent intensity of a feeding that needed to happen quickly, but something more patient. More thorough. The kind of attention that could only be given by someone who had nowhere else to be and nothing else they wanted.
He touched her like she was worth every moment of it.
Elena, who had spent years being quietly competent and reliably present and largely unremarked upon, lay in the amber lamplight and felt every careful, precise, devoted thing he was doing to her, and understood for the first time with complete clarity what it felt like to be someone's specific choice.
Not the available option. Not the convenient solution. Not the overlooked omega who worked in the kitchens and never caused trouble.
