Page 65 of What We Don't Say: Part Two

“She’ll let you when she’s ready again.”

“I should have done it before.” He looks out the windshield, face carved from grief and control. “I thought waiting was care.”

I can't comfort him. Not because I don't want to, but because I know the wound is true. “We both thought the love we had already given her would be enough proof.”

“It was proof,” Idris says. “Garrett just learned how to forge louder.”

The sentence sits between us for a long time.

The rain turns harder as the miles disappear beneath us. Idris keeps one hand near mine without touching unless I reach for him, and Theo stays curled in the back seat with Callie’s sweater tucked under his chin like prayer. I want to arrive as the man she remembers. I want to arrive as the Alpha who never stoppedloving her. But wanting does not make me safe. Wanting does not undo three months of silence wearing my voice.

So I drive through the dark and make myself one promise I can keep.

When I see her, I won't take a single inch she does not give me.

Dash

I don’t tell her until I have the glass of water in her hand. It isn't strategy in the cold sense, not the kind of calculation that belongs in a courtroom or faculty review or whatever version of hell Sloane’s pack has been living inside for the last three months. It’s just survival.

Calliope Monroe has spent too many weeks going pale around phones, flinching when a notification lights up, and pretending her hands are steady because she thinks the rest of the world will punish her if they aren’t. So I make her sit on the edge of thesofa first, with the heavy wool of her robe pulled tight around her shoulders and the glass pressed carefully between both palms.

Rain drums against the extension windows in a hollow, relentless rhythm. The lamps are low because bright light has been too much for her since I woke her and brought her out here after the call, and the throw blanket around her shoulders is pulled tight beneath her hands.

“Callie,” I say, crouching in front of her so she does not have to look up at me. “Sloane is coming. He’s about ten minutes out, and he’s not alone. The rest of his pack is with him. The Omega too.”

She goes quiet in a way I hate, a total shutdown so complete it feels like she’s stepped out of her own skin and left her body sitting politely on my sofa. Her gaze slides to my phone on the coffee table, and she stares at it like it is an animal that has already bitten her once and is waiting to see if she will offer her hand again.

“He found me,” she whispers.

“Sloane called you. I answered,” I tell her, keeping my hands visible on my knees because every Alpha instinct I have wants to cover, contain, and lock every door in this house. “He's my brother, Callie, but this is my house. You don't have to see him. You don't have to see anyone who arrives with him. My house has locks, it has cameras, and it has me. I don't care whose blood he shares if you say no.”

Her eyes finally lift to mine. They are dark and searching, moving over my face like she's trying to find the seam in it, the place where a lie might be stitched under the skin. For three months, I have been the one bringing tea, checking in before I knock, walking her to her car without making the walk feel like surveillance. Now I am the person telling her the storm has made it all the way to the porch.

“They’re coming here?” she asks, and the last word cracks just enough that her mouth tightens around it. She glances toward the hallway that leads to the bedroom, then back at the phone, and something bruised moves through her expression. “With Theo?”

“Yes,” I say, because anything softer would feel like handling her. “Sloane says there are things you don’t know. Things done to both sides. Forged. Manipulated. I don’t know the full story yet, and I’m not going to pretend I do. I only know he sounded like a man trying not to come apart while he begged me not to wake you up with his voice.”

Her breath catches. The glass finally trembles, water ticking softly against the side, and I reach out only far enough to steady the bottom without taking it from her. She looks down at my hand, then at her own, as if surprised to find both still attached.

“I don’t know if I can hear him,” she says. “I don’t know what happens if he says my name and I believe him. I don’t know what happens if I believe him and it turns out I’m still stupid.”

The word stupid makes something in my chest go cold. Garrett’s name has not been spoken in this room yet tonight, but I can feel him in the shape of that sentence. I can feel him in every careful apology she makes to furniture, weather, doors, men. I keep my voice level because rage would only give her another thing to manage. “You aren't stupid, Calliope. You’re sitting in a room with a man who answered your phone and found his brother on the other end. That isn't a small thing. You’re allowed to need time before your body understands what your head hears.”

She closes her eyes for one breath. When she opens them, she looks toward the main house instead of the extension bedroom. The movement is small, but I know what it means. She's deciding where to be seen, and I hate that she has to decide it at all.

I moved her to the living room of the main house ten minutes ago, before I told her, because I refused to let Sloane’s first sight of her be in the bed she has been sleeping in beside me.

I wanted her to meet them somewhere she could walk away easily. Calliope deserves to meet the wreckage of her old life from a room with lamps and books and a door she can walk through, not from under twisted sheets like a secret I am keeping from my own blood.

“I need to be ready,” she murmurs, standing too quickly. The robe slips off one shoulder, and she catches it with a jerky hand before smoothing her hair. It does nothing to tame the loose curls at her temple, but I don't tell her that. “I need to look like I’m not—”

“Like you’re not what?” I ask when she stops, but I don't move closer. The question comes low, quiet, and edged with the kind of care that does not require an answer.

Her throat works. “Like I have been waiting for him to come and hoping he never would.”

I stand with her because staying crouched now would feel like trying to keep her small. “Those can both be true.”

She looks at me then, and the look lands harder than anything Sloane said on the phone. Callie has spent months making herself legible in tiny pieces: the tea she prefers, the hallway she avoids, the way she can laugh during lunch and go silent before the sound is finished. Now the whole of her is in front of me, terrified and aching and still capable of choosing the door.