Myron looked down at his phone as it buzzed for the twentieth time on his ten-hour flight from the quaint Western pack of Southbend to London. He sighed as he scrolled through the myriad pictures of his brother and his new family. Nicholas and Avery looked as proud and exhausted as a mated pair ever had, and he could tell Nicholas hadn’t had permission to take the last photo of the newly awakened omega holding their newborn daughter in his arms.

She’s very cute, Myron texted back. Quite possibly the cutest baby in the known universe. Now will you please let me get some sleep?

Nicholas started typing back immediately and Myron groaned. He knew his younger brother was just trying to make him feel included, but there was a reason he’d chosen that day to be four-thousand miles across the Atlantic Ocean.

It wasn’t that he wasn’t happy for his brother and Avery. He knew he showed it about as well as he showed any emotion that went beyond the spectrum of mild irritation to disgust, but he loved them both more than he’d ever dare to confess out loud. Avery had been there for Nicholas in ways the rest of the family hadn’t even known he’d needed, healing wounds inflicted by a traumatic past Nicholas had felt the need to keep from his own family until recently. Their father’s death had brought many things to the surface, some more painful than others, but Nicholas was finally happy and Myron was ecstatic for him.

Or at least, he was whatever the equivalent of ecstatic was when heartache had burned out any ability to feel anything other than shades of apathy.

When he returned home, Myron fully planned on being the son, brother and uncle his family needed—but this week, it was still too fresh. Fresh on the anniversary of the day the woman he’d planned to spend the rest of his life with had turned everything upside-down. Fresh on the day she’d told him she was leaving him for an Alpha who could give her the “real” family she’d always dreamed of, and just last month, she had given birth to a healthy baby boy. He knew because despite his best attempts to purge her from his mind with alcohol and every other mind-erasing substance at his disposal, the evidence of her picture-perfect life without him was plastered all over his timeline on social media. He was just enough of a masochist to look.

Not that it would’ve mattered. Inara still lived in the same pack, and if he didn’t see her on his way to the store, he was sure to run into one of her family members. She might have at least had the decency to cheat on him with a jock from the next pack over instead. To be fair, when she’d told Myron she didn’t want to see him anymore, she’d made it clear she had never viewed their relationship as serious or legitimate in any sense of the word.

After all, they were both omegas. Their love had always had an expiration date. She might have been the only person he’d ever loved, omega or not, and the three years they’d shared might have been the best he’d ever had or ever would—but to her, he was nothing more than a phase. Something to dull the boredom while she waited for a real mate to come along.

And he had.

Brady was everything Myron wasn’t and never would be. In fact, just about the only thing Myron had on him was half an inch in dress shoes. How he measured up in other areas, Myron didn’t care to know, but it didn’t matter. Brady was an Alpha. He had a knot and could easily give her pups, and that was a hell of a lot easier than going through an endless series of fertility treatments that stood a slim chance of working anyway.

Easiness. Convenience. Stability. That was what was important to her—to most omegas, really—and Myron had failed at every level. Sometimes he found it comforting to remind himself that even if Inara had been able to look past the fact that he wasn’t an Alpha, she still would’ve rejected him because it was too difficult to deal with a mate who spent most of his time caring for his dying father. When Myron had first moved home, Edgar Myer had seemed like he was barely holding on, but the Alpha had managed to stretch his dying days out a full year. Myron had once hated Nicholas for leaving him alone to pick up the slack, but now he only hated himself for the relief that came with his father’s death.

What a fine mess he was. It was almost comical that Charles Metcalf wanted to interview him, of all people, to be the second official spokesman for the improved Futurus Initiative breeding program. Then again, from the way Myron’s brother-in-law told it, the Alpha and CEO was as desperate for new blood in the company as Myron was to get the hell out of Southbend. At least until he could stand to be there without making himself appear as weak as Inara had always known he was.

Get some rest, and tell me when you land so I know you got in safe.

Myron rolled his eyes. He knew Nicholas meant well, but the fact that his younger brother felt compelled to look out for him just drove the knife in deeper. Even worse was the fact that Myron had failed so miserably at doing the same for him.

God, he hated himself. Maybe that was why he’d agreed to get on that plane in the first place. He made about as much sense as a replacement for Avery as anyone’s drunk uncle would have, but it was so far from everything he was that there was a certain appeal in the idea of running from himself.

Or maybe he’d just wanted the free trip. That was the problem with numbing out to the things you wanted and felt. Eventually, when you actually wanted to know, you lost the ability to tell what was what.

Myron grabbed the sleep mask the flight attendant had brought him and slipped it on over his head, deciding to at least get a little rest so he wouldn’t look as shitty as he felt when he finally met the mysterious CEO of the Futurus Initiative.