They said I set the fire. They were wrong, but nobody in this town cared about wrong when the right people were pointing fingers.
The morning they arrested me, I was eating a bowl of cereal. Honey Nut Cheerios, the kind with the cartoon bee on the box that smiles at you like life is simple. I remember thinking the milk was about to expire. I remember thinking I needed to grab more almond butter from the store. I remember the spoon halfway to my mouth when the front door came off its hinges and six officers in tactical gear decided my kitchen was a crime scene.
My name is Elliot Vance. I am twenty-four years old. I am an omega. And for the record, I have never set anything on fire in my life. Not even a birthday candle, because my ex-boyfriend Marcus always insisted on doing it himself. He said I held the lighter wrong.
Marcus Aldean. Alpha, pack heir, the love of my life for three years, the man who watched them handcuff me and did not say a single word.
I want you to sit with that for a second. Not because I need your pity, but because I need you to understand exactly the kind of silence I am talking about. Not the confused kind. Not the shocked kind. The careful kind. The kind a person produces when they have already decided what they are going to do, and they are simply waiting for the scene to finish so they can move on to the next part of their plan.
That was Marcus. Calm, still, hands in his pockets.
And standing just behind his left shoulder, close enough that her perfume reached me even over the six officers in their gear, was Naomi Fletcher. Omega, daughter of the Fletcher pack, the woman who, three weeks later, Marcus would mark and marry in a ceremony I read about through the prison tablet because someone in the facility had a subscription to the Colorado Springs Pack Gazette.
She wore white. Of course she wore white.
Now, let me tell you about my power, because it matters. I was born with psychometry. That is the ability to read the emotional and physical history of an object the moment I touch it with my bare skin. Gloves are my best friends. Crowded spaces are my personal nightmare. And evidence rooms, as I would later discover, are basically haunted houses for people like me.
When I was seventeen, I accidentally touched my grandmother's wedding ring and spent forty minutes crying on the kitchen floor because I felt every argument she and my grandfather ever had compressed into a single gold band. My mother handed me a glass of water and told me to get it together. She was not wrong, but she also was not helpful.
The power has rules. It does not work on living skin, only on objects. It cannot be faked or blocked. And it cannot be unheard once it speaks.
Which means the moment I touched the accelerant-soaked lighter they claimed they found in my apartment, I felt everything. Not my memory. Not my panic. Not my fingerprints, metaphysically speaking. Someone else's fury. Someone else's plan. Someone else's hands.
But I was in handcuffs, and nobody in that courtroom believed an omega with a psychometry ability and a motive — at least the motive they invented for me — deserved to finish a sentence.
The judge gave me three years.
Marcus did not look at me when they read the verdict. Not once. I kept waiting for it. I do not know why. Maybe I thought some sliver of the man I loved was still in there behind the pressed shirt and the pack sigil pinned to his lapel. Maybe I thought three years together counted for something in the math of human decency.
It did not.
Naomi touched his arm as they led me out. He covered her hand with his. And I thought, with the kind of clarity that only comes when everything is already destroyed, that I should have seen it earlier. That there were signs. That I had touched enough objects in that apartment — his jacket, his keys, a coffee mug he left on my counter for six months — and felt things I explained away, because love is an extraordinary liar.
I did not cry walking out of that courtroom. I made myself a promise instead. Not out loud. Not dramatic. Just a quiet thing that settled into my chest like a stone dropping into still water.
I will find out who did this. I will dismantle everything they built on my silence. And when I walk back into Colorado Springs, I will not be the omega they framed. I will be the thing they should have been afraid of from the beginning.