Page 163 of Pack Baby for the Silver Foxes

Lincoln yelled at Damien, “Get out.”

Damien looked at him. “What?”

“Not from London. Not from our lives. From this room. Now.”

“You’d throw me out for her?”

My heart dropped to the ground.

Hudson’s voice was rough. “We’re asking you to leave this room because you’re hurting someone who doesn’t deserve it.”

“Someone,” Damien repeated. “Right.”

He looked at me then, and for one awful second I saw the boy beneath the pretty face, the child who had been left and had grown hatred around the abandonment. Then he turned away. “Fine.”

“Damien,” Lincoln said. Damien stopped but didn’t look back as Lincoln’s voice lowered. “You owe her an apology.”

Damien’s shoulders went rigid. “Sorry.”

The word came out flat and false. Then he walked back into the elevator, and the doors closed while the rest of us stayed exactly where we were.

I looked at Hudson and saw devastation in his face. Lincoln looked furious or afraid enough to shake. Neither of them looked regretful.

The next morning, I woke before the city.

The room was gray, and the Thames beyond the glass looked like a strip of dull metal. Hudson and Lincoln weren’t in bed. Their sides were cool, but their scents were still in the nest, heavy enough to make my chest ache.

I lay still, one hand on my stomach. “Well,” I whispered, “I hope today is better.”

I sat up slowly. My head felt thick from crying, my face felt swollen, and my heart felt like something someone had dropped and then tried to put back on the shelf at an angle.

Voices reached me from the hallway, not loud at first, then louder. Damien.

“You don’t get to do this,” he was saying. “You don’t get to pretend I’m the problem because I reacted badly to finding out my fathers knocked up my ex-girlfriend.”

I froze as Hudson answered too quietly for me to catch.

Damien laughed.

“No, go on. Tell me I’m being cruel again. Tell me she’s delicate. Tell me I have to be nice to the girl who vanished and then turned up in your bed.”

Lincoln’s voice cut through. “Enough.”

“No, it’s not enough. It will never be enough. You chose her before I even walked in.”

“That isn’t true,” Hudson said.

“It is. You looked at me like I was the threat.”

“You were hurting her.”

“Because I was hurt.”

“Pain isn’t permission to hurt another person,” Lincoln said.

“How do you know she never planned it to hurt me? You trust her, but not me?”

The hallway went quiet as I held my breath.