Chapter 17
SEVENTEEN
Tuck
I woke up and knew.
Not the careful knowing I’d been doing for years, weighing it, talking myself out of it.
The body kind. My right arm was dead from the elbow down, pinned under Isobel’s shoulders, and I didn’t want it back.
Her hair was all over me. Her scent filled my whole chest on the next breath, chamomile and cream and warm honey, no spray on it, no suppressant under it, just her.
She was out cold. The good kind of out, the kind a body only does once it’s done crashing and somebody finally lets it rest.
I didn’t move.
Downstairs there were voices. Bram low, Cillian lower, both of them pitched so they wouldn’t carry.
I couldn’t make out words. I didn’t have to.
That was the sound of two men solving a problem.
Whatever those three seconds of broadcast had done to the world, it had shown up at the front door while I was unconscious.
I’d care about that later. I told myself that and almost believed it.
Right now there was just her body warm against mine and her breathing slowing my own down to something I hadn’t felt in years. The panic that had soaked the living room last night was gone out of her scent. What was left smelled like a place you’d stop running.
She stirred. Made a small sound, softer than the whines from the night before, the sound of somebody coming up out of deep water and finding the air okay.
I turned my head and put my nose in her hair because I could now. Because she’d said yes to all three of us. Because she’d said yes to me.
“Hey,” I said, barely loud enough to count.
She didn’t open her eyes. But her hand came up and pressed flat to my chest, fingers spread. Not pushing me off. Holding on. Checking I was actually there.
Something happened in my chest then, low, not a growl. A rumble I’d never made in my life and knew the meaning of straight away, I’m here.
The voices downstairs changed. Bram’s went clipped, the way a man sounds on a call he doesn’t want to be on. Cillian’s stayed flat, just facts going down a line.
Millions of people had listened to an Omega get outed on a live broadcast last night, and the fallout was happening right now, out there past the walls. Networks. Press. Whatever machine of consequence had cranked up while we slept.
I should go down. I should be in it.
I didn’t move.
Bram was making breakfast.
I figured that out when the smell of eggs and coffee got up to the bedroom, sitting weird against the peppercorn and old-books underneath it.
By the time I’d dragged my dead arm out from under Isobel without waking her, pulled on yesterday’s trousers, and made it down the narrow stairs, he was at the kitchen island with his sleeves rolled and a pan in his hand.
He looked off.
I couldn’t have told you how, exactly. Off the way a photo’s off when the exposure’s wrong, everything’s there, everything works, but the light’s hitting at an angle that shows you stuff the man didn’t mean to show.
His hair was a mess. First time I’d ever seen that on him.
The gray in it wasn’t where he usually put it, it was just sticking up, like he’d been dragging his hands through it.
No waistcoat. Just the white shirt, creased at the back, untucked on one side.
The kind of thing Bram would’ve fixed the second he noticed it.
His scent was held tight. The peppercorn dialled right down, clamped, no give in it. He had his own biology on a short leash and I could smell the effort.
“Morning,” I said.
He looked up, quick. His eyes were clear, no blown pupils, nothing left of last night’s overload. Just the careful, working attention he put on everything, all back together. All running. All behind glass.
“Coffee’s on the counter. Eggs in two minutes.”
“You don’t have to—”
“I’m already doing it.” He turned back to the pan. Spare little movements. He’d worked out exactly what the job was and was doing it and nothing else.
Cillian was at the small kitchen table with his tablet, two phones face-down by his elbow that weren’t his, Bram’s and mine, dug out of wherever he’d stashed them last night, and a mug of something dark in front of him. His eyes came up, took the read off me, went back to the screen.
“How is she?” he asked.
“Asleep. Deep. The crash seems—”
“Burned off.” He didn’t look up. “Her breathing changed before dawn. Temperature settled after that. She’ll most likely sleep a while more and wake up starving.” He tipped the tablet at me, some graph I couldn’t read. “She’s rebuilding. She’s going to be fine.”
He knew that from sound. From whatever he’d been pulling out of the air through the walls all night. My stomach did something complicated, somewhere between grateful and dizzy.
“The phones?” I nodded at the table.
“Ninety-three missed on Bram’s. Forty-seven on yours. I’ve sorted them. Crew, network, press, personal. Nothing needs you right now.”
Bram slid a plate of eggs at me across the counter, didn’t say anything. Didn’t slow down either. He was already doing a second plate, smaller, lined up too neat, a glass of water beside it.
“For Isobel,” he said. “When she wakes.”
“You could take it up to her.”
Something went across his face and was gone before it got anywhere.
“I’ve got calls.” He set the plate down, covered it with a clean cloth, picked up his phone the way you pick up a wrench, not a hand reaching out for help. “Network legal left three voicemails. Cillian’s drafted what we say back, but they’ll want my voice on it.”
He was already moving. Already pointed at the door, at the work waiting, real work, work somebody had to do while the world made up its mind about last night.
But I knew the move.
He couldn’t sit still with whatever he was feeling, so he was pouring it into the nearest thing that had a clear edge.
I’d watched him do it for years. In the booth, in meetings, every time something landed that didn’t fit his frameworks, he’d just build a new framework fast enough that you never saw the gap.
He stopped in the doorway. Half-turned. His eyes went to the plate he’d made for her, then up to me. I couldn’t read his face, he had that nailed shut. But his scent, tight as he held it, let one thing through.
He was scared.
Not of her. Not of the bond or the match or whatever his body had confirmed last night, loud and clear. Of himself. The man had lived inside being exact for so long that feeling something this big and this shapeless made him wonder if the whole thing he was built out of could take it.
“Eat,” he said. “I’ll be in the sitting room.”
He left.
I ate the eggs. They were perfect, of course they were, Bram didn’t half-do anything, and the coffee beat anything I’d have made, and the light coming through Isobel’s kitchen window turned the whole room gold.
Cillian’s fingers kept moving on the tablet. A crisis getting handled with the same steady hand he gave audio levels.
“He’ll come back,” Cillian said, not looking up. No judgement in it. No worry. Just a man stating what he’d seen Bram do a hundred times.
“I know.” I put my fork down. “That’s not the part that worries me.”
His eyes came up. Met mine. The silver in his ears caught the light.
“What worries you?”
“That he’ll come back with a framework.” I looked at the empty doorway. “He’ll think his way through it and show up with a plan and a structure and a list of how it’s all going to run, and none of it’ll leave room for the part that isn’t rational.”
Cillian sat with that a second. His thumbs went still on the screen.
“He’s not wrong to need time,” he said. “His system’s not yours. You felt the bond years ago and spent the whole time fighting it. He felt it yesterday and hasn’t slept.”
Fair. That was fair.
From the sitting room came Bram’s voice on the phone, controlled, in charge, the work voice fully out. Managing. Protecting. Doing the thing he knew how to do, while the thing he didn’t know how to do slept upstairs smelling like honey.
I finished the coffee. Rinsed my plate. Standing at a sink in Isobel’s kitchen washing one plate felt insane against the size of it, millions of people waiting for answers as to what happened, the hashtags, legal, a thing that was going to either end or remake all our careers.
And here I was watching soap bubbles catch the light.
“I’m going back up,” I said, grabbing the plate of eggs and the glass of water for Iz.
Cillian nodded. Already back on the tablet, fingers going again. Keeping the world off the people he loved, quietly, all the time, a thankless job that I needed to remember to thank him for later, when this was all over.
I dried my hands. Went up the stairs. Stood outside the bedroom door.
I was supposed to be guarding it.
That was the deal we’d made in the small hours, nobody said it out loud, the pack just sorted itself. Cillian ran comms. Bram ran strategy. I stood between Isobel and anything that might get to her before she was ready.
Guard the door. Simple.
Through it I heard her move. The mattress creaked. A small sound, not distress, not last night’s whines, something half-made. Somebody reaching for the warmth that had been next to her and not finding it.
I balanced the glass of water as my hand went to the handle before I’d finished thinking.
I opened the door.
She was half-awake, curled on her side, the covers shoved down to her waist. Bram’s coat still over her shoulders, she’d slept in it, the silk lining on her skin, his scent wrapped round her like a stand-in for the man.
Her hair was a disaster. Her glasses still sat on the nightstand, and without them her face was smaller, softer, all its fine lines bare in the morning light.
Her eyes found me. Half open. Green as deep water.
She didn’t say anything. Her voice was still shot, would be for hours, maybe days. She didn’t need it.
She reached for me.
One hand out of the covers and the coat, fingers spread. Not grabbing. Asking. Years of refusing to ask anybody for anything, and she was choosing to ask now, eyes open, all the way awake to it.