Page 3 of What We Don't Say: Part Two

Garrett exhales behind him. “Belief isn’t evidence.”

Sloane’s hands tighten on my face for half a breath, but when he speaks to me, he keeps every sharp thing out of his voice. “I’m bringing her back, okay? Fuck, I’m bringing her back. You stay with Idris. You let Dr. Mercer finish checking you. You don’t listen to anyone who tells you she didn’t love you.”

My mouth trembles. “You promise?”

“I promise.” He kisses my forehead, hard and fast, like he’s sealing the words into my skin. “I’m going to find Callie, and I’m going to bring her home.”

“Sloane,” Garrett says, and there’s a warning in it now. The warmth is gone. “If you leave this house in your current state, you’ll create exactly the kind of record Bellwether can’t ignore.”

Sloane rises. Slowly. It’s worse than if he lunged. His hands fall from me, and the loss of them makes me curl tighter around the sweater, but his body stays angled toward Garrett like every bone in him has become a weapon.

“You don’t get to say Bellwether to me right now,” Sloane says.

Garrett’s jaw flexes. “You’re a bonded Alpha in acute distress, attempting to abandon an unstable Omega placement to chase a Beta who has expressly requested distance. Think carefully before you make this worse for everyone.”

Idris moves before Sloane can. He puts himself beside Sloane, not in front of him, and the two of them together make the sunroom feel like it has run out of air. “Theo isn’t being abandoned. I’m here. Dr. Mercer is here. You’re the one who left this house and came back with explanations that don’t survive a single question.”

“I won’t be spoken to like an enemy in my own pack,” Garrett says.

“Then stop acting like one,” Idris says.

The monitor shrills.

Dr. Mercer’s voice cuts through the room, firm enough that even Sloane flinches. “Enough. Theo needs one Alpha calm and present, one person handling the external stressor, and no further dominance escalation in this room. If you want this documented as a pack capable of stabilizing him, start acting like it.”

For a second, no one moves. Then Idris turns away from Garrett and comes back to me. He kneels where Sloane was, hishand warm and steady at the back of my neck, and the pressure of him helps my body remember the floor is under us.

“I’ve got you,” Idris murmurs. “I’m staying.”

Sloane looks at me one more time. His face is wet now, though I don’t know when that happened. He doesn’t wipe it away. He looks like he wants to climb back into the nest and split himself in half so one part can stay with me and the other can run toward her.

“Bring her back,” I whisper.

“I will.” He turns before Garrett can put another word in his path, snatches his keys from the side table, and walks out of the sunroom with every light in the house seeming to shiver around him.

Garrett follows him into the hall. “Sloane, stop.”

Idris’ hand tightens gently at the back of my neck, holding me in place when I try to look. The front door opens hard enough to hit the wall. Garrett says Sloane’s name again, sharper this time, and Sloane’s answer comes back through the foyer, low and vicious enough to raise every hair on my arms.

“Get out of my fucking way.”

A second later, the door slams. The engine starts before the echo has finished moving through the house, tires spitting gravel as Sloane tears down the drive toward Callie. Garrett stands in the hall with his hands empty and his face stripped clean of softness, while Dr. Mercer’s monitor keeps screaming beside me.

Sloane

The tires spit gravel behind me as I take the drive too fast, the house shrinking in the rearview until the trees swallow it whole. Garrett’s voice stays in my head anyway, polished and poisonous, telling me Callie asked for time, telling me she chose distance, telling me every word like I’m supposed to accept a story that doesn’t have her heartbeat in it. My hands are locked around the wheel so hard the leather creaks under my palms, and the place in my chest where the bond used to live is a cold, cauterized wound that keeps trying to open.

I call her before I hit the main road. The line rings once, then drops to voicemail, and the sound of her recorded greeting nearly takes me off the road because her voice is still soft there. Warm. Alive. “You’ve reached Calliope. I can’t get to the phone right now, but leave a message and I’ll call you back as soon as I can.” The beep sounds, and my throat closes around everything I need to say. I hang up because if I leave a message, it’ll come out as a scream.

I call again. One ring. Voicemail. Again. One ring. Voicemail. Again, because the part of me that’s bonded to her doesn’t understand phones or privacy or campus schedules. It only understands that a moment ago there was terror. A flash of it came through the bond before she cut me off, sharp enough to make my teeth ache, cold enough to turn my blood to ice. Callie was terrified, and then she was gone. People don’t choose distance with fear like that ripping through them. My baby doesn’t close a bond while terrified unless something has her cornered.

“Answer me,” I say into the empty car, hitting call again even though I already know what I’m going to hear. My voice comes out too low, ruined at the edges. “Come on, Callie. Baby, where are you? Pick up. Let me hear you. Let me know where you are, and I’ll come get you. I don’t care what happened. I don’t care what he said. Just answer me.”

Voicemail again.

I nearly throw the phone against the passenger window. My arm jerks with it, rage blazing up so fast it blinds me for half a second, but I force my hand back down because this phone is the only line I still have to her, even if the line keeps turning into a wall.

I send a text instead, thumbs punching too hard against the screen while the car eats the road beneath me.