Page 71 of What We Don't Say: Part One

“You abuse it constantly.” Her smile is tired but real, and when I draw her closer, she comes without hesitation. “Your phone didn’t ring?”

“It was upstairs.” My hand tightens once at the back of her neck before I smooth it away. “I don’t like that.”

“It happens.” She shrugs against me, easy and competent and not remotely fragile. “I called, then I solved the thing. That’s generally how adulthood works.”

I almost smile. “You are impossible.”

“I learned from Sloane.” She kisses the corner of my mouth, then glances toward the den when Theo makes a sleepy sound. Her hand twitches once at my side, a tiny start toward himbefore she stops herself and looks back at me. “I’m going to grab my laptop and sit with them.”

I let her go because she's telling me the truth. She's fine. She's loved, capable, steady enough to tease me while her hair is still damp from rain. She's also learning, quickly and quietly, to ask herself whether reaching for Theo will make the room react.

Garrett finds me ten minutes later in the hall outside the den.

Calliope is on the couch with her laptop balanced on one thigh and Sloane’s arm around her shoulders. Theo is on the floor cushion near Garrett’s knee, blanket around him, eating the last of the toast in slow bites while he watches Calliope more than the food. From the doorway, it almost works: Theo near Calliope’s hand, Sloane quiet beside her, Garrett close enough to call it structure.

“Idris,” Garrett says from behind me. “A word.”

I turn toward him, then step farther down the hall so our voices won’t carry into the den. “Make it quick.”

Garrett’s expression remains calm, but the morning has left him rougher around the edges. His sleeves are rolled to the forearms, and there is still a faint crease at one cuff where Theo gripped him. “This morning is why hierarchy matters when an Omega is close to heat.”

The word lands wrong immediately.

I wait.

“Theo was in crisis,” Garrett says. “You, Sloane, and I responded as Alphas. He settled. Then Calliope reached in while his body was still sensitive, and the room corrected before anyone had language for it.”

“She reached because he wanted her.”

“She reached because they wanted each other.” Garrett doesn't deny it, and that makes the argument harder to dismiss. “That doesn’t mean the timing was safe.”

I look back toward the den. Theo has shifted closer to Calliope’s foot, and she has lowered one hand from her keyboard to rest palm-up near her knee. She's waiting for him to choose it. She isn't taking the choice from him.

“She knows how to be careful,” I say.

“She does,” Garrett agrees. “And still, she apologized. That should tell you something.”

“It tells me she was startled.”

“It tells me she understands there are rules in those moments even if none of us have named them cleanly yet.” Garrett keeps his voice measured, almost gentle. “Clear roles protect her too, Idris. If she doesn’t know when to step in and when to let the Alphas anchor him, she’s the one who will keep getting hurt.”

“Theo isn’t only anchored by Alphas.”

Garrett’s gaze flicks toward the den, where Theo has finally set his fingers in Calliope’s waiting palm. “I know.”

The quiet answer should reassure me.

It doesn’t.

“She’s part of this pack,” I say.

“No one said otherwise.” Garrett looks tired when he says it, tired enough that the concern seems real. “But being part of the pack doesn’t mean standing in the center of every biological spike. She’ll try, because she’s Calliope, and because he reaches for her. That’s exactly why we need structure before heat makes everything harder.”

His reasoning has too many true pieces inside it.

Theo was in crisis. Sloane was riding the edge of rut. Garrett did growl on instinct, and I have heard Sloane do the same. Calliope didn’t fall apart; she adjusted, explained, and came back warmer than before. The biology is real enough to shelter the rest of what Garrett is saying.

“You keep using structure when you mean hierarchy,” I say.