Page 66 of What We Don't Say: Part Two

“Dash, if this is another trick—” she starts, and the rest does not make it past her mouth.

“Then I will end the visit before it reaches you. You aren't alone in this house.”

Headlights cut through the rain before she can answer. They sweep across the wet gravel of the driveway, flash against the window, and turn the glass briefly silver before the engine dies.The sudden absence of sound has weight. Callie goes very still behind me, one hand at her throat, fingers pressed near the place where Sloane’s bite sits under the robe and whatever scars the last three months left beneath it.

I move to the door, slow enough that she can tell me to stop. She doesn’t. The Alpha in me rises with every step, steady and territorial in a way I usually keep buried under grading rubrics and committee meetings. This is my brother outside. This is also my house, and Callie is behind me. Both things are true, but only one of them matters if Sloane forgets where he is.

The knock isn't hard. That makes it worse. It isn't the knock of a man demanding entry or an Alpha announcing ownership. It is a broken sound, hesitant and uneven, as if the hand that made it almost failed before reaching the wood.

I open the door only far enough to fill the frame.

Sloane stands on the porch in the rain, and the first thing I think is that my brother looks wrecked. His dark hair is plastered to his forehead, his coat soaked through, water dripping from his jaw to the collar of his shirt. None of that is what stops me. It is his eyes. They are hollowed out, bloodshot, and frantic with a grief so raw it has made him dangerous in the way starving men are dangerous. Not because they want to harm, but because they have forgotten there is a world outside what they have lost.

“Dash,” he says, and my name sounds like it has been dragged over glass. He takes half a step forward, one hand lifting toward the doorframe before he catches himself or sees my face. “Please.”

“Stay there,” I say, my voice low enough that it won't carry far behind me but firm enough to make the boundary unmistakable. “You don't take one more step toward her until I understand exactly what happened three months ago. I watched her break,Sloane. I am not letting your grief become another thing she has to survive.”

He flinches as if I have hit him. His hand drops to his side, empty and shaking. Whatever he expected from me, it was not mercy. Maybe it was not even suspicion this sharp. Maybe he thought blood would buy him a softer threshold, but blood isn't the currency in this house tonight.

Behind him, another man steps into the porch light. He's taller than I expected, controlled in the way men get when control is the only thing standing between themselves and violence. His hands are open in front of him, palms visible, his soaked cuffs clinging to his wrists.

“We have proof,” he says, his voice a controlled rasp that keeps itself leashed. “Not all of it in a form she needs to hear on a porch in the rain, and not from us before she chooses to listen. But Garrett did this. We didn't let her go.”

Sloane’s face twists at the last sentence, but he does not interrupt. That restraint tells me more than anything he could have said. The Sloane I remember from our childhood filled every room he entered, loved too loudly, fought too fast, and never learned how to lose an argument gracefully. This man looks like he has been remade around a silence he could not break.

My gaze shifts to the third figure.

The Omega stands partly under the controlled man’s coat, though coat is too generous a word for the way he's swallowed by it. He's slight, trembling hard enough that I can see it from the doorway, his hands locked around a piece of gray wool pressed to his chest. His face is tilted toward the house with such bare, desperate hope that for a second I can't look at Sloane at all. The boy looks like a ghost who has followed a scent trail back to his own body.

The air changes behind me.

Callie has moved closer. I feel it before I hear it, the slight shift in warmth at my back, the tiny catch in her breathing. Her hand brushes the back of my arm, not grabbing, not hiding, only asking for space without words because words are too expensive right now.

I don't want to move. Every instinct I have wants to keep myself between her and the rain, between her and my brother, between her and the entire pack that arrived at my door carrying three months of damage in their mouths. But this can't be my choice. If I make it mine, I become another locked door in a life that has had too many of them.

I step aside only enough to open the line of sight.

Callie’s gasp is a sharp, broken thing. Her eyes don't go to Sloane first. They don't linger on his ruined face or the way he's shaking in the rain. They don't go to the controlled Alpha with his hands open and his grief held behind his teeth. They go straight to the Omega clutching the gray sweater.

“Theo?” she whispers.

His name leaves her like something pulled from somewhere deep inside of her. The Omega makes a small, keening sound that cuts across the porch and seems to enter her body before the rain can touch her.

Theo’s sound reaches her before anyone else does. Callie’s hand tightens on the back of my arm, then loosens, and I know before she moves that I have already lost the right to keep her behind me. This isn't surrender. This is recognition. She steps into the rain with her robe pulled tight around her shoulders, and the Omega on my porch breaks her name open like he has been holding it in his mouth for three months.

Calliope

The rain hits my face before I understand I have stepped outside.

One second, Dash is beside me in the doorway, solid and warm and careful, his arm near mine without closing around me. The next, the porch boards are cold under my bare feet and Theo is in front of me, shaking so hard the oversized coat around his shoulders keeps slipping down one side. He's thinner than he was when I left. His warm brown skin is drawn tight with exhaustion, his cheekbones sharper, his dark hair damp from the rain and plastered to his temples. One of my old graycardigans is crushed against his chest beneath the coat, the sleeves twisted in his fists like he has been holding on to it for all three months.

He makes a sound.

It isn't a word. It is a broken, high-pitched hitch of breath that bypasses every careful place in me and goes straight to my marrow. My body moves before fear can stop it, before memory can remind me of police lights and recorded voices and the awful, sterile language of being removed. I reach for him because Theo is standing in the rain with my sweater in his hands, and every version of myself that tried to survive without him tears open at once.

Dash’s hand touches my shoulder, steady and warm. He does not pull me back. He does not close his fingers. He only leans close enough for his voice to reach me through the rain and says, “Callie, I need to know you’re choosing this.”

I can't find my voice. I nod so hard my throat hurts, and Dash steps with me instead of in front of me. The door stays open behind us, light spilling across the porch, and I feel him remain close enough to catch me if my knees fail while leaving the space in front of me.