Chapter 29 #2
Rhys hasn't moved but the quality of his stillness has changed—that listening quality, the one where he's taking something in before he decides.
"Finn," Alex says from behind me.
Finn stands. He crosses to Rhys and puts a hand on his arm. "Come on," he says. "Upstairs."
Rhys looks at me.
"I'll be fine," I say. "I'll come find you after."
His face shifts. The war between his instinct and his trust in me, playing out in real time.
Trust wins.
He stands, and Finn leads him toward the stairs with the practiced ease of someone who has done this before—redirecting Rhys when his instincts are pulling him somewhere they shouldn't go.
Alex gives Rhys a look as he passes that means something between the two of them, a pack lead thing, a we've got it handled thing.
Rhys disappears up the stairs.
A little while later a car pulls up outside.
I meet Jasper on the porch. Eli nods as he goes inside, giving us space.
Malcolm is watching through the window, which I clocked immediately and chose to let go. He needs to see I'm okay. I can give him that much.
Jasper looks exactly how I expected—like a man who has been carrying a weight for a long time and hasn't yet figured out how to set it down. His hands are in his pockets and he looks at me with an expression that's complicated and raw and careful all at once.
"Hey," he says.
"Hey."
We stand on the porch.
"I don't know where to start," he says.
"Start wherever it's hardest," I say. "That's usually the right place."
He exhales. Looks at the middle distance.
"I'm sorry," he says. "For all of it. For not doing more. For watching you get smaller and quieter and sadder and telling myself the long game was worth it." He pauses. "It was worth it for Chase's case. But it wasn't worth it for you. Those aren't the same thing and I kept acting like they were."
I wait.
"I was afraid to get close to you," he says.
"Not because I didn't care. Because I could see how easy it would be to love you.
And I knew, I could feel it even then, that you were meant for Alex's pack, not mine.
I didn't want to put myself in a position of loving someone I'd have to let go.
" He looks at me directly. "I was trying to spare myself. And you paid for it."
I look at him.
He looks back.
"I know it's not enough," he says. "An apology isn't enough for what I left you in."
"No," I agree. "It's not." I pause. "But I'm not holding it against you."
He blinks.
"I'm not saying it was okay," I continue. "It wasn't. You could have done more, and you know it, and that's something you'll have to sit with. But I understand the fear of it. The fear of loving something you might lose." I don't look away. "I've been afraid of the same thing my whole life."
Jasper is quiet.
"I forgive you, Jasper," I say. "Not because you've earned it yet. But because carrying it is tiring and I'm done being tired. I'm ready to move on."
His expression cracks open, raw and unguarded, before he carefully rebuilds.
"Thank you," he says. The words come out rough.
"Let Arden help you," I say. "Whatever you're carrying about all of this—let him help you work through it. Or someone, if not him. But someone. You're a good person who made poor choices. That's fixable."
He nods.
I squeeze his arm once before I go back inside.
Eli is standing in the living room when I come back in. He looks better than Drake did when he arrived—no bond sickness, no fever, just that haunted look people get when they've crossed a line they can't uncross and haven't yet made peace with the new version of themselves on the other side.
Drake is still in his chair by the window. He looked up when Eli walked in and they've been existing in the same room without speaking, the weight of years and a broken bond and everything that happened between sitting between them like a weight neither of them is ready to touch yet.
Everyone else is gone, giving us space.
Eli looks at me.
"Can we sit?" I ask.
We sit on the couch, a cushion of space between us.
"I don't know how to say any of this," he starts.
"Just say it."
He's quiet, then it comes.
All of it. How he saw what was happening and chose the easier path.
The comfort ban he enforced without pushing back.
The nest he stood there and watched Ragon violate without saying the thing that needed to be said.
The heat—he says that part, voice barely above a whisper, like saying it louder would make it worse.
That he tried to leave. That Ragon barked him back.
That he should have tried harder, found another way, done something other than what he did.
"I have to live with that," he says. "For the rest of my life. I know that. I'm not asking you to make it easier."
"I know," I say.
"I just needed you to know that I know it. Every part of it. I see exactly what I did and didn't do."
I look at him. At the face I spent five years trusting—the careful eyes behind the glasses, the jaw I watched tighten a hundred times when he was trying not to say something he thought better of.
I think about the night about eight months into my time with the pack when I got a call that my grandmother had passed.
We weren’t close. We hadn't spoken in years.
But it still hit me sideways, like the death of someone complicated always does.
I didn't cry at dinner. I didn't tell anyone.
I just got quiet in a way I thought I'd successfully hidden.
Eli knocked on my door an hour later with a cup of chamomile tea and a book he'd pulled off the shelf.
A collection of short stories he said he'd read in college when things felt too heavy to manage.
He didn't ask what was wrong. He just sat in the chair by my window and read his own book while I drank the tea, and he stayed until I fell asleep and left the lamp on low so I wouldn't wake up in the dark.
I never told him how much that night meant.
I never got to.
The memory hits without warning and my eyes fill before I can stop them.
Eli sees it. His own eyes go bright immediately, like they always did when he was trying to hold back tears.
"The tea," I say. My voice comes out unsteady. "That night with the tea and the book. You always just—knew."
His brows furrow. "Yeah."
"That was real," I say. "I need you to know I know that was real. Who you were to me before all of this… that was real."
"It was," he says. His voice breaks on it. "God, Vee, it was. I'm so sorry I let that person get buried. I'm so sorry I let you down when it mattered most."
The tears come and I don't try to stop them. Eli isn't stopping his either, which I've only seen once before in five years, and seeing it now in this context—because of me, because of what he did and didn't do— breaks me open in a place that's still fragile.
We sit on the couch and cry a little, which is not what I expected from this conversation, but maybe it's exactly what it needed to be.
Eventually the wave passes.
I wipe my face. He does the same, the back of his hand pressed to his eyes in that precise, controlled way even grief has with him.
Then I say the thing I've never said to anyone.
"During my heat." I stay steady. I've had a long time to find the words. "I didn't just go to the porch. Before that—I came to the door."
Eli goes very still.
"I could hear you." I keep my voice even. "Through the door. You and Marie. I was—I was crawling. I was that far gone. I needed someone and you were the one I still believed in. You were the last one I thought might still be mine."
He doesn't make a sound.
"I heard what was happening in that room and I turned around.
" The words come out quieter now. "I went back down the hall To the porch.
Alone." I look at him. "That was the moment I knew.
Not that you'd failed me—you'd done that before and I'd survived it.
That moment was different. That was the moment I understood none of you were safe anymore.
Not even you. Especially not you, because you were the last one I had. "
Eli's face has gone white. He's looking at me with an expression I've never seen on him—it’s not grief or guilt. It’s rawer than either. The specific horror of understanding the full cost of what you already knew was bad.
"I didn't know," he says. Barely audible.
"I know you didn't."
"Vee—"
"I'm not telling you to make it worse," I say. "I'm telling you because you deserve to know the full shape of it. You're a person who needs the complete picture to understand what you're carrying."
He closes his eyes. One breath. Two.
When he opens them, they're wet again.
"I would have come out," he says. "If I'd heard you. If I'd known. I swear to you—"
"I know." I do know. That's the part that makes it hard. "That's what makes it what it is."
Silence.
I let him sit with it… the full weight of that hallway and that door and what was happening on both sides of it.
Then I take a breath.
"Eli." I wait until he's looking at me properly. "I forgive you."
He closes his eyes.
"You shouldn't," he says.
"Probably not. But I do anyway." I let that sink in. "It doesn't mean it was okay. It means I'm choosing to put it down. I need to put it down." I pause. "I hope you'll be able to do the same thing eventually. When you're ready, I hope you'll forgive yourself too."
He nods. His face has cleared now, underneath the sadness. Like a window that's been wiped clean but the view through it is still difficult.
There's movement from the window.
Drake gets up from his chair slowly, still healing but steadier than he was. He crosses the room and stands in front of Eli.
They look at each other.
"You stayed," Drake says. "After I left. You stayed and helped from the inside."
"Wasn't enough," Eli says.
"It was something." Drake's voice catches. "It mattered. He didn't find her." He pauses. "I'm sorry I left you in there alone."
"You did what you had to."
"So did you."
They look at each other, years of brotherhood and a broken pack and everything that lives in the space between who they were and who they're becoming.
I stand up.
"I'm sorry," I say to both of them. "That you lost your pack because of all of this."
Drake shakes his head immediately. "Not because of you."
"Not because of you," Eli echoes. "Because of our choices. Our failures. You were never the problem, Vee. You were never anything but exactly what you were supposed to be."
I breathe through that.
"I forgive you both," I say. "And I do hope that you both find your way to happy again someday." I look at them. "Just not with me. I can't give you that. I get to choose this time and I don't choose you. But you deserve something real when you're both ready for it."
Drake nods. His face is raw and resigned and peaceful all at once.
"That pack in there," he says. Tilting his head toward the rest of the house. "They deserve you. All of them." His voice break. "I hope you get to stay."
I don't trust my voice to answer that.
He steps forward and puts his arms around me and I let him, and it's a goodbye hug, the kind that knows what it is, and when he pulls back his eyes are wet.
Eli steps forward next and he holds on for a second longer. His hand on the back of my head, like he used to when I was sad and he wanted me to feel held. The old gesture, given one last time.
"Be happy, Vee," he says against my hair.
He lets me go.
Eli reaches out and put a hand on Drake's arm.
"Let's go home, brother," he says.
Drake looks at him. "Where's home?"
Eli squeezes once. "We'll find out. Together."
They walk out the door.
I stand in the middle of the living room and watch them go.
Chase and Arden come back from the kitchen gathering jackets. Arden goes upstairs briefly—I hear voices, low, Finn's and then something rougher—and comes back down. Jasper is still outside, waiting to leave with his pack. Arden holds the door for Chase and then looks back at me.
"Well done," he says. "All of it."
Then they're gone.
The door closes, and the house is quiet. I watch through the window as all three climb in the car and leave.
Malcolm comes out of the kitchen. Finn comes downstairs. Alex is already back in the room. His eyes find mine and hold them.
I feel it all at once—a storm of contradictions crashing through me. The feeling of putting it all down.
I'm sad and I'm emptied out. I'm also lighter than I've been in a long time.
Finn crosses to me and puts his arms around me from the side, his chin on my shoulder, quiet.
"You okay?" he asks.
"No," I say honestly. "Also yes."
He nods. Stays where he is.
Malcolm's hand finds my back, steady and warm.
"Rhys?" I ask.
"Upstairs," Alex says.
I go up.
My door is partly open. I push it and find him sitting on the edge of my bed, elbows on his knees, hands loosely clasped, staring at nothing. He looks up when I come in.
I don't say anything. I just go to him and step into him like I always do, my arms going as far around him as far as they can reach. His arms close around me immediately, squeezing.
His purr starts, tenor deep and everything I needed to hear.
We stay like that for a while.
Then I pull back and look up at him. "Can we—" I gesture at the bed. The blankets I've been slowly colonizing all week, the extra pillow that migrated from somewhere, the shape of a nest in progress.
He doesn't answer in words. He just shifts back onto the bed and makes room.
Alex comes up a while later.
He stands in the doorway taking in the situation—me half-nested in the middle of the bed, Rhys beside me taking up a considerable portion of the available mattress.
"There's not room," he says.
"There's room," I say.
There is not room. But he comes in anyway and the three of us manage it like you do when you want it bad enough. I end up tucked between them with Rhys's warmth on one side and Alex's careful steadiness on the other.
Alex doesn't touch me beyond what's unavoidable. The old restraint because of the flag. But his presence is close and real and the juniper of his scent comforts me alongside Rhys's burnt wood and ash.
Both of them. Mine.
Tomorrow is still a question mark. The registry, the flag, Chase's efforts, those sterile rooms—none of it certain. All the answers I'll need stay just beyond reach.
But today Drake left with Eli. The hearing went how it needed to go. I said the things that needed saying and let go of the things that needed letting go.
Today I am here.
I'm in this bed with these people. In this house that smells like my pack.
Rhys's purr moves through the mattress into my bones. Alex's chest rises and falls slowly beside me.
I close my eyes.
I fall asleep with what feels like hope.