Page 129 of What We Don't Say: Part One

“Because this is a legal issue.” Garrett’s voice is calm again, with blood still at the corner of his mouth and fury sitting just behind his eyes. “She knows what I do.”

Idris’s hand stays on my arm. “Show us the message.”

“I’ll update you once I understand what’s happening.” Garrett reaches for his jacket from the chair just inside the sunroom door, already moving like the decision is finished. “Right now, you need to calm down and take care of Theo.”

I take one step, and Idris’s grip tightens again. “Garrett.”

Garrett looks at me from the foyer side of the hall. “No. You don’t get to follow me while you’re like this. You don’t get to bring that temper near campus and make things worse for Calliope because you can’t stand waiting for answers. I’ll be backbefore the next spike, and by then you’d better have yourself under control.”

From the sunroom, Theo makes a hurt, sleepy sound. Not loud. Not dramatic. Enough to turn every instinct in me back toward him, because he’s still in the nest with Callie’s sweater under his cheek and a heat his body thought it had a few more days to prepare for.

Garrett hears it too. He uses the pause with the ease of a man stepping through a door someone else opened.

“Take care of your Omega,” he says.

Then he leaves.

The front door closes a minute later, and the house settles around the absence of his footsteps. I stand in the hallway with Idris’s hand still on my arm, my knuckles throbbing, Garrett’s blood drying across two of them, and the echo of that pressure crawling through my jaw. My first instinct is still to run. Find my keys. Find Callie. Tear the campus apart room by room until I know why she would ask him for help and leave the rest of us in the dark.

Theo whispers my name.

I go back into the nest because he reaches for me before I can decide what kind of man I’m going to be in the next ten seconds. Idris is already there by the time I climb in, one arm under Theo’s shoulders, his other hand moving slowly down Theo’s spine. Theo’s injured hand stays tucked against his chest. His other fist catches my shirt with barely any strength at all, and the weak pull stops me harder than Garrett’s command did.

Theo’s next spike brushes close enough to leave sweat at his hairline and a tremor in his thighs. Idris presses the cooling cloth to the back of his neck while I keep one hand over Theo’s stomach and the other near my phone, where Callie’s name sits silent and unchanged.

When Theo slips toward sleep again, I look over his bent head at Idris. “He used his Alpha on me.”

Idris doesn’t ask what I mean. He doesn’t soften it into stress, instinct, or the spike leaving everyone raw. His eyes meet mine across Theo, dark and clear and furious in a way he rarely lets anyone see.

“I know,” he says. “I felt it too.”

The words bring back the pressure in my teeth and the second my body locked before I could choose whether to move. “That’s why I froze.”

Idris’s hand pauses on Theo’s back, then starts again before Theo can feel the change. “So did I.”

Theo makes a sleepy, wounded sound and presses deeper into Callie’s sweater. I lower my mouth to his hair and breathe through the urge to get up, to run after Garrett, to find Callie, to do anything except sit in this room while the wrong man drives toward her.

“She wouldn’t text him first,” I say.

“No,” Idris says. “She wouldn’t.”

My hand tightens over Theo’s stomach. The phone beside my knee stays dark. Somewhere outside this room, Garrett is taking the only road I want under my own feet, and I’m curled around an Omega who still needs me through the heat rising under his skin.

Idris looks at the phone, then at me. “The second Theo is safe enough for one of us to move, we go.”

I nod because that is the only promise I can keep without leaving Theo shaking in the center of the nest. Callie’s sweater is trapped beneath his cheek, her scent fading into his skin, and my bite in her shoulder feels far away and too quiet. I keep my hand on Theo. I keep my phone where I can see it. I wait for Callie to answer.

Calliope

The sister campus is prettier than I expected, and I hate that I notice.

It sits almost an hour and a half from home, tucked into a small college town with old brick buildings, rain-dark paths, and trees planted close enough to the sidewalks that their branches lean over everything like they’re listening. The humanities building has tall windows and worn wooden stair rails polished by decades of nervous hands. There’s a courtyard behind it withiron benches, a stone fountain, and a crooked little coffee kiosk that smells like burnt espresso and cinnamon syrup.

I should be taking notes. I should be asking questions about course loads, committee expectations, office space, student demographics, how much flexibility they’d give me for literature and ethics programming. I did all of that in the interview, and I did it well enough that one of the panelists smiled before she remembered she wasn’t supposed to give anything away. Now I’m being shown the campus by a junior faculty member with silver rings on three fingers, and my body keeps pulling in the wrong direction.

There’s heat in my chest.

It isn’t mine. I know that in the way a person knows the difference between grief and fever. This is a tug under my sternum, a warm, anxious pressure that keeps turning my attention toward the parking lot, toward the highway, toward the house where Theo should still have days before his heat opens fully. My shoulder aches beneath my blouse where Sloane’s bite rests, not sharp, not painful enough to stop me, just present in a way it hasn’t been all morning.