Chapter 9
Two days on the new pills and I almost feel like a regular person.
Vincent brought them back that first afternoon like he said he would—a little white paper bag from the pharmacy on Halsted, set on the counter without ceremony. Only one direction: take them with food. They're better than the old ones, I can already tell.
It's a small thing and an enormous one: the skipping in my chest has smoothed to something I can mostly ignore, I climb the stairs without the world going gray, I woke this morning and my heart wasn't the first thing I noticed. Two days and my body's quieter than it's been in years.
Which would be good news, except a quiet body has room to notice other things. Like the fact that I can't stop watching them.
Right now it's Calder.
I'm on the couch in the big living room with a book open in my lap, and I have read the same paragraph four times, because across the room Calder's got some disassembled thing spread on a drop cloth—a radio, an old one, tubes and wire—and he's bent over it with a look of total quiet focus, sleeves shoved up, and I keep not-reading so I can watch his hands.
I know what this is. That's the worst part. I'm not stupid; two days steadier and clear-headed and I understand exactly what my body is doing, this low constant tug I feel toward Calder and Vincent, the way a room feels warmer when one of them's in it, the way my eyes go to them and stay.
It isn't a crush. It's chemical and it's coming from underneath, from the thing I'm not supposed to be, surfacing a little more each day the suppressants stay out of my system. I know it's the danger sign. I know I should be afraid of it.
I watch his hands anyway.
And it isn't only the pull—that's the thing I can't explain to myself. Somewhere in the last few days I started actually wanting to know them.
Wanting to know why Calder fixes broken things and gives them second lives, why he apologized when nobody in this house has to apologize to me for anything.
Wanting to know where Killian went two days ago and why nobody will say, whether he's coming back, whether I want him to.
Wanting to know the man who decided, coldly and completely, that keeping me alive was now his job.
It's a stupid thing to want. You don't get curious about your captors. But Calder cracked something open in that kitchen and it won't close. I pretend to ignore it but that’s like ignoring a heart as it slowly gives out.
Eventually you’ll die.
Calder glances up. Catches me looking.
I drop my eyes to the book fast, face going hot, and he doesn't say anything. Out of the corner of my eye I see the corner of his mouth move, and he goes back to the radio. Neither of us mentions it.
We stay like that as the light goes long through the big windows, and it's almost peaceful. It’s strange finding peace in a house that’s supposed to be my prison.
Then the front door opens, and I feel Vincent before I hear him—maybe the pull runs both ways, maybe I've just learned the weight of him.
His keys hit the dish too hard. His footsteps stop in the living room doorway, and when I glance up he's still in his coat, looking at the two of us like for a second he's forgotten who we are.
Calder sets down his screwdriver. "Hey. How'd it go?"
Vincent doesn't answer that. "Calder. A word. Later." Clipped. Flat.
Calder straightens the rest of the way, and something passes between them I'm not part of—he reads whatever's on his father's face and goes careful with it. "Yeah. Course."
"Dinner first." Vincent's already turning away, working out of his coat. "Both of you. Ten minutes."
And that's how we end up at the table, the three of us, in a silence with teeth in it.
It's nothing like the kitchen with Calder. That was a quiet you could rest in; this is quiet stretched tight over something, and all three of us feel it.
Vincent eats but his mind is off in a thousand different places. He barely looks up from his food. Calder keeps glancing at his father, then at his plate, careful not to be the one who breaks the tension.
And I do what I do best—make myself small, eyes down, take up no room—because whatever's wrong in this house tonight, my whole body knows the smartest thing is not to be noticed while the storm decides to break.
Twice I catch Vincent looking at me. Not the sorting look. Something heavier, like I'm a piece of a problem he's turning over. Both times I look at my plate and wait for it to pass.
When the plates are mostly cleared he sets his fork down and looks at me, and his voice is stern. "It's been a long day. You should go up for the night." A beat. "Get some rest."
"I can do the dishes," I offer. He doesn’t seem like he’s in the mood for cleaning and I can be useful. "It's no—"
"Leave it." It comes out hard, harder than he means, maybe—his eyes cut to me and there's a warning in them that isn't really about the dishes at all. "Just go up. Now."
The weight of an alphas order slaps down on my shoulders and I can’t ignore it. "Uh, yeah. Okay." I walk out of the kitchen without looking at either of them.
Upstairs I run the shower hot and stand under it until the tightness in my shoulders lets go, until the tension of that table washes down the drain. I put on the soft clothes that Calder keeps stocked my dresser, dry my messy hair with a towel, and sit on the edge of the bed.
The house has gone quiet under me. My heart's steady. Time for bed.
Except I'm not tired.
I’ve been banished to my room at eight like a kid, wide awake, staring at the ceiling with a head too full to lie still in.
And the book's still downstairs—the paperback I left on the couch, half-read, not even that good. But it's something to keep myself busy besides slowly going crazy in this comfy bed. Something to fill the hours until sleep decides to show up.
So I get up. I ease my door open and slip out into the hall in my socks and start down the stairs.
The living room's dark and empty. The book's right where I left it, spine-up on the couch cushion. I grab it and tuck it against my chest, already turning back for the stairs—every second down here is a second I could be found where I shouldn't be, and my nerves are singing with it.
It's on the way back that I hear them.
Voices, low, from Vincent's office. I didn't catch them on the way down—too focused on the stairs—but the office sits between the living room and the foot of the stairs, and now I'm right beside it.
I stop dead in my tracks, one foot still lifted.
The door isn't shut all the way. A blade of light lies across the hall floor, and I'm standing at the edge of it.
Go back up. Every instinct in my body is screaming at me to keep moving. Go back up the stairs, tuck yourself in, and mind your own business. I've got the book. The stairs are right there. All I have to do is take them.
But I can’t.
I ease off the wall and inch closer to the cracked door instead, one slow step at a time. I get closer to the seam of light, close enough to hear, far enough back that the dark still covers me.
The book's clutched to my chest. My pulse is loud in my own ears.
I don't breathe any louder than I have to and I listen.
"—three towns over." Calder's voice, level, reporting. "The contact's solid. Saw her himself, twice. It's her."
A silence. Then Vincent, low: "You're certain."
"Certain enough. And she's not hiding, Dad—that's the thing. No safe house, no running. She rented a place under a name that's barely even changed. Signed a lease. Bought furniture." A short pause. "She's settled in. Like she's got no reason to think we'll come for her at all."
Another silence, longer, and I can feel it thicken even from the hall—the air going dense the way it does before bad weather.
"After what she took." Vincent's voice has dropped, and there's something under it now that I've never heard from him, not when they found me in the apartment, not in the office, not once.
"She empties my house. She takes—" he stops.
When he goes on it's quieter and worse. "She takes what she took, out of this house, and she doesn't even have the sense to be afraid. "
"I know."
"She's comfortable,” Vincent hisses.
Something happens then—a sound, sharp and short, the flat crack of a hand or a glass or a book coming down hard on the desk—and I flinch back against the wall, my heart slamming up into my throat, and through the gap I catch a slice of him: Vincent on his feet, both hands braced on the desk, head down, shoulders rigid, and everything controlled about him gone.
This isn't the cold man from the office. This is what the cold was holding down. His voice comes out shaking with the effort of staying quiet.
"I want to know everything. Where she sleeps. What she's spending. Who she talks to. All of it." A breath. "She doesn't get to be comfortable. Not with what she has of—" and his voice breaks. He doesn't finish it, and he doesn't have to, because I already know.
His first wife's things. Killian and Calder's mother. Starla took things that matter.
It was never about the money. I understood that in some dim way before, but I truly see it now, standing in the dark listening to a powerful man's voice come apart over a thing he can't say out loud—that this family isn't chasing a thief. They're chasing back a piece of someone they lost.
Starla didn't just rob him. She reached into the oldest wound this house has and took something that can't be replaced, and the idea that she’s not running to the ends of the earth to hide from Vincent is like a spit in his face.
And God help me, I don’t just feel fear for the amount of sheer fury radiating off of Vincent.
I feel… guilt.
Because she's my mother. Because whatever she is, I came from her, and I spent my whole life being her thing, her cover, her use—and here's proof, one more time, that everything she touches she wrecks and walks away from without a backward look.
I know exactly what it is to be something she took and never gave back. I know it in my body. And hearing Vincent's voice break over it, hearing the grief under the fury, I feel it as if I did it, as if her blood in me makes me just as guilty as her.
"We'll find it," Calder says, quiet. Steady. The one who stays level so his father doesn't have to. "We'll get it back. I'll handle it."
"See that you do."
I hear the shift of someone moving and I don't wait. I peel off the wall and sprint back up the stairs on silent socked feet, fast and careful, heart going like something hunted. I make it to my room and ease the door shut and stand there in the dark with my back against it, breathing hard.
I thought things would be simple. I’m their captive.
They hate me, I hate them. But… this family is something else entirely.
These three men are deeper and more broken than the money ever explained.
And I’m square in the middle of it—her blood, their leverage, drawn to all three of them by a thing I can't switch off, feeling responsible for a theft I didn't commit because being blamed is the only inheritance she ever left me.
I slide down the door and sit on the floor and try to sort it into piles I can live with.
Her. Them. Him. The grief in his voice. The pull in my chest that got worse just from being near the storm of him.
The fact that I'm starting to ache for the people who own me, which is the most dangerous thing my body has done yet, more dangerous than the scent, more dangerous than the heat I can feel gathering somewhere just out of reach.
How am I supposed to fit in all this?
Why do I already feel like I belong to a new family? Like Starla’s sins against these three men hurt me just the same?
When did everything inside me start to shift…
Start to care?