Taming the Wild Beast of Alamina

Sylvia decided not to get involved in whatever Dean and the others were trying to find out about Andrea and Claudia’s Palace.

Thomas loved that she was mostly focusing on getting better.

Sylvia, however, had another demon to face.

Well, not quite... Her parents.

They would visit a week after she had been installed in Tom’s house and hers, as Tom protests at her first phrasing.

"It is our house," he had said.

Sylvia had stared at him from the bed, wrapped in blankets, medical bracelets, and righteous exhaustion. "Tom, I have lived here for seven days. I still do not know which cabinet has glasses."

"I can show you."

"That was not the point."

"It can be."

She had refused to argue after that because Thomas had looked too pleased by the word "our," and Sylvia was not strong enough yet to fight a dominant alpha made soft by domestic terminology.

Now, standing in the sitting room attached to the east bedroom, she regretted many decisions.

The house had been prepared too well. The windows were open just enough to let in garden air but not enough to irritate her new gland. A low fire warmed the room, though the morning was not cold. Tea waited on the table, along with soft biscuits her father had sent ahead and Seven had reluctantly approved after Mrs. Avel promised they contained no citrus, no surprise raisins, and no aggressive spice.

Thomas stood beside the sofa like a man awaiting inspection.

Sylvia looked at him. "Stop looking like that."

"Like what?"

"Like my parents are generals."

"They are your parents."

"That is worse?"

"Yes."

She stared at him.

Thomas did not appear to understand why that answer was alarming.

Before she could explain, footsteps sounded in the hall.

Her stomach tightened.

Thomas noticed immediately. His field stirred, dark and protective, before he forced it down.

Sylvia reached for his hand.

He gave it without hesitation.

Mrs. Avel opened the door. "Mr. and Mrs. Croft, my lady."

Her mother entered first, carrying a small bag with the determined expression of a woman who did not trust any house but her own to contain proper socks. Her father followed with another container of biscuits, because apparently one approved batch was not enough when your daughter had survived a battlefield and turned into a dominant omega.

They stopped when they saw her.

Sylvia hated that pause.

She hated the way their eyes went to the soft protective collar at her nape, then to the medical bracelets, then to the careful way she stood with Thomas’s hand around hers.

Her mother recovered first.

"Oh, sweetheart."

Sylvia tried to smile. "I look worse than I am."

Her father’s voice came rougher than usual. "That is not comforting."

"It is accurate."

Her mother gave her a look. "Those are not the same thing."

"They often overlap."

"They rarely overlap when you say them."

Sylvia almost laughed, and that almost hurt worse.

Her mother came closer, slowly enough not to startle the new instincts everyone insisted she now had, and touched Sylvia’s cheek.

Her father stood behind her mother, looking like he wanted to hug Sylvia and also feared breaking something important.

"I am fine," Sylvia said.

Her mother’s brows lifted.

"I am becoming fine," Sylvia corrected.

"That is better."

Her father looked at Thomas.

Sylvia felt Thomas straighten.

"Mom, Dad," she said before the silence became absurd. "This is Thomas Lancaster."

Her mother looked at her very slowly. "Tom."

Sylvia winced. "Yes."

"The Tom who fixed your apartment lock?"

Thomas said, "The lock was decorative."

Her father’s eyes narrowed. "The Tom who sent a car during the flood?"

"Yes."

"The Tom who brought soup when you had a fever."

Sylvia glanced at Thomas. "Apparently soup is a recurring theme."

Thomas did not smile, but his thumb brushed once over her knuckles.

Her mother looked between them. "You did not mention he was Commander Lancaster."

"I called him Tom because that is his name."

Her father stared at her. "Sylvia."

"What?"

"That was a relationship."

Sylvia opened her mouth, then closed it again.

Thomas answered before she could build a defense out of sarcasm. "It was. I should have met you sooner."

Her parents turned to him.

Thomas bowed his head, controlled and serious. "That failure is mine."

"It is not only yours," Sylvia said quickly.

"It is partly mine."

"It is mostly mine."

Her mother’s expression became deeply unimpressed. "So both of you were being ridiculous."

Sylvia lowered her gaze. "Yes."

Her mother sat beside Sylvia and took her free hand. "They told us you manifested on the field."

The lie entered the room quietly.

Sylvia held still.

"Yes," she said.

"Dominant omega," her father said, as if testing the words.

"Yes."

"After all these years as beta."

Sylvia nodded. "Apparently nearly dying made my biology dramatic."

Her mother’s hand tightened. "Bad joke."

"I know."

"Very bad."

"I know that too."

They looked at her for a long moment.

Sylvia kept her face steady because Dean, Arion, Seven, and Marianne had all helped build this lie into something that would hold. A rare late manifestation under extreme mate-threat pressure. A misclassification corrected by battlefield trauma. Dangerous, frightening, but natural enough for records and parents.

Better than the truth.

Better than Andrea, Nero, stolen command, and a choice made while Thomas bled.

Her father asked the real question. "Are you safe?"

Sylvia did not joke.

"Yes."

Thomas’s hand closed more securely around hers, but he did not speak over her.

Her mother watched that.

Something in her face softened.

"Are you dangerous?" Sylvia’s father asked Thomas.

"Yes," Thomas said.

Sylvia closed her eyes. "Tom."

"I am."

"To her?"

"No."

The answer came instantly.

Thomas looked at Sylvia first, then at her parents. "I love your daughter. I loved her before this. I did not need her to be a dominant omega to choose her, and I will not use what happened to her as an excuse to hurry anything she is not ready for."

Sylvia looked at Thomas.

At the man she had kept unnamed because temporariness had once felt safer than hope. At the commander who had become Tom in her apartment, in her kitchen, in the small ordinary places where she had never expected him to fit and where he had somehow remained.

"He is mine," she said.

Thomas went very still.

Her mother laughed softly through wet eyes. "Well. That sounds like you."

Her father rubbed a hand over his face. "You could have introduced him before the near-death manifestation."

"I could have," Sylvia admitted.

"You should have."

"Yes."

"You will both come to dinner when you are cleared."

Thomas straightened. "Yes, sir."

Sylvia’s father looked startled by the immediate obedience, then slightly pleased.

Her mother opened the biscuit container and offered it to Sylvia first. "Seven approved these."

"Under protest," Sylvia said.

"Most good things are approved under protest."

Thomas looked at the biscuits as if evaluating them for threat potential.

Sylvia’s mother offered him one.

He accepted with the gravity of a peace treaty.

Sylvia watched him take a bite under the combined supervision of her entire family and felt something in her chest loosen.

Her father sat down across from Thomas. "So. Commander Lancaster."

Thomas paused with half a biscuit in his hand. "Sir?"

"How do you feel about dinner on Sundays?"

Sylvia stared at her father.

Thomas looked at Sylvia, then back at him. "I am in favor of it."

Her mother smiled. "Good. Then we begin when she is strong enough."

Sylvia sank back against the sofa, exhausted and warm and dangerously close to crying.

Thomas’s thumb brushed over her hand again.

Outside, the garden moved under the quiet Roslew morning.

Inside, Sylvia sat between the parents she had tried to protect and the man she had finally allowed them to meet, a newly omega, and held by an ordinary family that had accepted the impossible the same way they had accepted Alamina three years ago.

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