Page 7 of Claimed By My Exiled Alphas
I gestured toward the shelves surrounding us, feeling the comfort of this shared connection to my grandmother’s memory. “Books are good at holding complexity. The kind of stories that don’t have simple endings or easy morals. Real life is messy, and I’ve always thought our reading should reflect that. Gran taught me that.”
The mention of my grandmother seemed to relax something in Talia’s posture. “She had such a gift for matching people with exactly the right book at exactly the right time. I remember being twelve and going through a difficult phase with my parents’ divorce, and she handed me this novel about a girl whose family was falling apart. It was like she could see exactly what I needed to read.”
“That’s exactly what she did. She always said libraries weren’t just about books, they were about understanding what people needed to heal or grow or just make it through the day.” I leaned back in my chair, struck by how natural this conversation felt now that we’d found our connection. “When she left me this place, she said I already had the instinct for it. I just needed to trust myself to see what people really needed.”
She nodded slowly, like someone recognizing a truth she’d been carrying without words. “I used to read constantly when I was younger. Before...”
She trailed off, but I could fill in the silence. Before whatever had taught her to catalog exit routes and hold herself so carefully. Before someone had made her world feel dangerous enough that stories became a luxury she couldn’t afford.
“What kind of books did you love?” I asked, though I suspected I already knew part of the answer.
“Cookbooks, mostly.” A small smile crossed her face, the first genuinely relaxed expression I’d seen from her. “But not just for the recipes. The good ones told stories about where food came from, why people cooked certain things at certain times of year. There was this one writer, M.F.K. Fisher, who wrote about hunger like it was both a physical need and a metaphor for everything else we crave.”
Now it was my turn to smile. “The Art of Eating. I have a first edition somewhere in the rare books section. Fisher understood that feeding people was about so much more than nutrition.”
“Exactly.” Talia’s voice grew stronger, more animated. “She wrote about how the way someone cooks tells you everything about how they see the world. Whether they believe in abundance or scarcity, whether they think pleasure is something to be earned or just part of being alive.”
I found myself leaning forward, caught by the passion in her voice. This was what she’d been like before, I realized. Before someone had convinced her that taking up space was dangerous, that her expertise was somehow threatening.
“Is that what drew you to cooking professionally?” I asked, then immediately wondered if I was pushing too hard. But she didn’t flinch away from the question.
“Partly.” She wrapped her hands around her teacup, using its warmth like an anchor. “I loved the precision of it, the way youcould transform simple ingredients into something that made people happy. There’s this moment when you taste something you’re working on and realize it’s exactly right, perfectly balanced. It’s like... like solving a puzzle, but with flavors instead of pieces.”
She paused, and I could see her deciding whether to continue. The careful weighing of trust against vulnerability that I recognized from every damaged person who’d ever found their way to my door.
“I was good at it,” she said quietly. “Really good. I worked my way up through some of the best kitchens in Chicago, learned from chefs who’d trained in France and Italy and Japan. I thought I was building something that couldn’t be taken away from me.”
The way she said it, past tense and wistful, told me everything about what came next. Someone had taken it away. Someone with enough power to destroy what she’d built.
“What happened?” I asked, then immediately wished I could take it back. Too direct, too much like pushing for information she might not be ready to share.
But she answered anyway, staring into her tea as if the leaves might hold some kind of absolution. “It’s the same story you always hear. A rich man who didn’t like the sound of the word no. Vincent Carmichael. He owned restaurants all over the city, had connections everywhere that mattered. He decided he wanted me, not just as his chef but as his omega. His property.”
Her voice got very quiet, very controlled. “When I made it clear that wasn’t going to happen, he made sure I’d never work in a serious kitchen again. Blacklisted me with every restaurateur who mattered. Spread rumors about my professionalism, my stability, my ability to work under pressure.”
I felt something cold and angry settle in my chest, but I kept my voice level. “That must have been devastating.”
“It was.” She looked up at me then, and I saw something fierce and broken in her hazel eyes. “The worst part wasn’t losing the job, though. It was realizing how easily it could all disappear. How little control I actually had over my own life.”
I thought about a passage from one of James Baldwin’s letters, where he’d written about the particular kind of violence that came from having your humanity questioned by people who held power over your survival. “He took more than your career,” I said. “He took your sense that the world was a place where talent and hard work mattered.”
She blinked, surprised. “That’s exactly it. How did you...”
“I read a lot of stories about people rebuilding after powerful people tried to destroy them. It’s a more common theme than you might think.” I set down my teacup, meeting her eyes. “The thing about bullies with power is that they can take away your platform, your opportunities, even your reputation. But they can’t actually take away what you know, what you’re capable of creating.”
“Sometimes it feels like they can.”
“I know. That’s the insidious part. They don’t just attack your career, they attack your belief in your own competence. Make you question whether you were ever as good as you thought you were.”
Talia was quiet for a long moment, processing this. Then she said, “How do you know so much about this?”
I considered how to answer that without sounding like I was claiming expertise I didn’t have. “I’ve spent fifteen years watching people find their way back to themselves through books. You start to see patterns in the stories that help, the themes that resonate with people who are trying to rebuild.”
“What patterns?”
“Stories about competence, mostly. Books that remind people that skill is something that lives in your hands and your mind,not in other people’s opinions of you. Memoirs by people who lost everything and found ways to start over. Fiction about characters who discover that their real strength was never dependent on external validation.”
I stood up and moved to one of the nearby shelves, pulling out a book I’d been thinking about for days. “Maya Angelou wrote about this better than anyone else I know. The way people can survive having their entire world dismantled and still find ways to create something beautiful from the pieces.”
