Page 174 of Knot Their Soldier: Part Three

I crouch to bring us eye to eye, and confidence floods through me like a second heartbeat.

I have no clear plan for the words I’m about to speak, and no neat explanation for how my Omega Command is going to stop an army.

I only know that it will.

The certainty sits deep, below thought and fear. It's not logical or strategic. It's something older, quieter, and far more absolute than either of those things.

I call for my O-space and draw it up from my core into my chest. It spreads through my blood, and the familiar shimmer gathers at the edges of my vision.

The battle keeps raging around me, but it stops reaching me.

Gunfire stretches thin. Shouts drag into silence. The officer’s frightened face becomes the only fixed point in front of me as O-space pulls me beneath the normal rules of time.

And with this, the strange confidence I’ve carried for weeks finally opens into recognition.

Oh. Of course.

The understanding is so sudden I almost laugh at the timing of it.

It's my Omega.

Why didn't I see it before?

This peculiar confidence I've been feeling since I came back from the dead is my inner Omega.

When I came back, it wasn't only my body that had healed, because it wasn't only the part of me that was broken.

My Omega healed.

She isn't frozen anymore, trapped at twenty-one, terrified by that first brutal heat and every violation that came after it. For so long she felt separate from me, like some wounded, desperate thing I had to wrestle into silence or keep caged before she took control. Every time I used Omega Command, it felt like standing on a fault line with her beneath me, powerful and unpredictable and just as afraid as I was.

She's not afraid now, and she's no longer lost and clawing at the walls of me in fear and pain.

She stands beside me at last, whole and unashamed.

That is where this strength is coming from. I feel her in my bones, in my blood, in the deepest part of my soul. She is not a burden or a weakness anymore — she is finally what she was always meant to be.

A fighter.

I think I finally understand what she's done for me. Even when she was weak and unable to fully embody her natural instincts as an Omega, she was still there, under the surface.

There has always been something bigger than me buried beneath every stubborn refusal to lie down and accept what the world said I was.

It was my Omega all along.

She has been tugging me forward for years, even when I didn’t understand what she wanted from me.

She was there, giving me bravery when I made my escape in my father's beat-up old truck.

She was there when I was in Barkrood, trapped in the Omega Division. I still wanted more with a hunger I could not explain. I wanted motion and a purpose. A future bigger than the cage they built for me and a body they'd already dismissed as broken. Even then, when I had so little left to believe in, something inside me kept whispering that I was not finished.

When Knox pushed me to my limits with bruising lessons, humiliation, and orders I could barely swallow, she was there telling me to hold on. To wake up every day and give it my all in training.

When I left my Pack, lost my Omegas, and all of my hope faded, she still didn't let me give up.

And she was there when I died. When the white light swallowed me whole, and I crossed to the other side. Even then, she would not let me give up. She pushed me to do the impossible and claw my way back from the dead.

Keep going. Don't give up. Become better, faster, stronger, smarter, wiser.