Chapter 201: A New Normal
Life felt almost easy now, which was still strange enough to make me pause and think about it twice. I was surrounded by five alphas who loved me far too much, and somehow, I had gone from being someone people used to hurt to someone they now fussed over, guarded, and watched like I might vanish if they blinked.
Lily still shocked me the most. She had once felt like my enemy, someone I could never trust, someone who had hurt me too many times to count.
And yet she had also saved me, and now she was one of the five alphas donating pheromones for me, which still made my brain trip over itself whenever I remembered it.
I kept wondering why everyone liked me so much. Lily was the original heroine of this world, an alpha who had lived as an omega in plain sight because nobody had bothered to truly look into her records.
The absurd part was that her gender had been public all along; people just hadn’t searched carefully enough to notice. The male leads had liked her because they thought she was an omega, and after the truth came out, they redirected all that attention toward me instead.
Honestly, they had behaved like pests, always hovering, always interfering, always making my life more complicated than it needed to be. Thankfully, they were no longer part of my life, and that alone felt like a miracle.
So maybe I really was the heroine now. The protagonist. The one who had been kidnapped, hurt, hated, desired, and then slowly, inconveniently, loved. I had built a business, become a model, survived too many terrible people, and somehow ended up with my own group of lovers and protectors around me.
The more I thought about it, the more it felt like my life had turned into the kind of story that would sound impossible if someone else told it. And yet it was happening to me.
I had been one of the hated ones, and now people actually cared whether I smiled, ate, rested, or got upset.
At first, Lily had not been accepted by the other alphas. Or maybe I should call them fathers now, because that word fit just as strangely and just as perfectly.
But once I told that Lily had already marked me, none of them had any choice but to acknowledge her place. The marks on my body told the story plainly enough—Hellen at my neck, Reyes on my inner thighs, Ivory at my cleavage, Ana at my lower belly, and Lily at my nape.
I sat at the dining table with my two-month-and-one-week pregnant belly still mostly flat, though I could already feel the difference in myself.
Being pregnant is a too difficult thing. I was hungry, emotional, and oddly protective of every little feeling that rose in me. Everything inside me felt a little more vivid now, a little more important.
All the food in front of me had been arranged to match my cravings, and I had mixed everything together in a way that made perfect sense to me and probably no sense at all to anyone else.
On my plate, there was flaky pastry torn apart and stuffed beside thick slices of pickle, a small bowl of spiced noodles, sweet fruit on the side, and a spoonful of something creamy that made my mouth water just looking at it.
The combination looked ridiculous to them, but to me it was perfect.
Their food, on the other hand, was neat and orderly—plain rice, grilled meat, vegetables arranged in tidy rows, soup kept separate from bread, everything looking sensible and almost suspiciously normal.
The alphas sat around the table with pale faces, all of them looking like they were waiting for me to do something unpredictable. I glanced at their plates, then back at mine, and felt a flicker of stubborn amusement.
"You should eat too," I said, nodding toward their untouched food.
Hellen looked at my plate first, then at hers, and frowned. "That is not a meal. That’s a dare."
"It is a meal," I said immediately. "A very good meal."
Ivory’s gaze lingered on the pastry-pickle combination as if it had personally offended her. "You put sweet and sour together on purpose?"
"Yes," I said, offended now too. "And it’s delicious."
Ana pinched the bridge of her nose. "You’ve made a crime against nutrition."
I gasped dramatically and clutched my chest. "How rude."
Reyes stared at the pile on my plate with undisguised horror. "That can’t possibly taste good."
I scooped up another bite anyway and ate it with open satisfaction, chewing slowly just to make them watch. "You’re all missing out."
"On what?" Ivory asked flatly. "Confusion?"
"On happiness," I shot back, lifting my chin. "Which, for your information, is also part of pregnancy."
That made Hellen snort softly, though she was still trying not to look too curious about my food. Her own plate sat untouched in front of her, perfectly balanced and sensible, and the contrast between our meals only made me want to tease them more.
"You should try it," I said, pointing at their food with my fork. "At least one of you. You all eat like you’re attending a formal negotiation."
Ana glanced at her own plate. "This is called normal eating."
"This," I said, waving my fork at my mixed-up plate, "is called advanced taste."
Reyes shook her head slowly. "You’re impossible."
"And you love me anyway," I said, because it was true and because I liked watching them struggle with that fact.
The table went quiet for a second after that. Not uncomfortable quiet—just the kind that carried warmth, the kind that meant they were all aware of me, my cravings, my mood, and the strange little world we had built around this pregnancy.
Finally, Ivory sighed and gave me a resigned look. "You really want us to try that?"
I smiled at once, because she had just admitted weakness. "Yes."
"Absolutely not," she said, though there was less conviction in it than before.
Hellen leaned back in her chair and looked at me with a fond sort of disbelief. "You have the strangest cravings."
"And the strangest family," I replied, taking another bite of my very strange plate.
That, at least, made all of them smile a little, even if they still refused to touch my food.
