Chapter 5
FIVE
Daniel
The heavy oak door didn’t just resist; it refused.
It was a slab of solid timber reinforced with steel, locked tight against the storm and the world, a physical manifestation of the paranoia that T.L.
Rose had woven into every contract clause and non-disclosure agreement I’d ever seen.
It was a barrier designed to keep the universe out, and right now, we were the universe trying to break in.
"Move," Simon snarled, the command tearing out of his throat as he shoved past Anders.
Rain lashed against the back of my neck, freezing and relentless.
It soaked through the heavy cotton of my flannel shirt in seconds, plastering the fabric to my skin like a cold, wet second skin.
We were huddled on the concrete stoop, the deafening roar of the waves crashing against the cliffs below us mixing with the violent crack of thunder overhead.
The air was electric, thick with the metallic tang of ozone and the sharp, acrid spike of Simon’s scent spiking with a panic that tasted bitter on the back of my tongue.
Simon didn’t bother with the digital keypad. To a man like him, lean, wiry, and currently fueled by a terrifying adrenaline, technology was too slow. He drove the heel of his heavy combat boot into the lock plate.
Thud.
The wood groaned, but held.
"Open the damn door!" Anders shouted over the wind, his usually pristine charcoal suit dark with rain, his golden hair plastered to his skull. He looked less like a high-powered business man and more like a man watching his empire crumble.
Simon didn't answer. He kicked again. Once. Twice.
On the third kick, the wood splintered with a sickening crack that sounded too much like a bone snapping, a wet, fibrous tear that made my stomach turn. The door swung inward, caught by a gust of wind, and slammed violently against the interior wall.
"T.L. Rose!" Anders shouted, abandoning all professional protocol as he rushed into the dark gorge of the hallway. "T.L. Rose! Can you hear me? We have a medical alert from the suppression monitor!"
I followed them inside, the orange trauma kit heavy in my hand, my heart hammering a frantic, erratic rhythm against my ribs.
The transition from the chaotic violence of the storm to the interior was jarring.
The wind died instantly, replaced by a suffocating, pressurized silence that felt heavy enough to crush lungs.
It was the kind of silence you find in a recording booth before the mic goes live, absolute, dead, and waiting for a sound that might never come.
The house was dark, save for the terrifying, rhythmic pulse of red light coming from somewhere deep in the open-concept living space.
It washed over the sleek, minimalist furniture, shadow, red, shadow, red, like a heartbeat in a horror movie, revealing sharp angles and cold surfaces that looked entirely devoid of comfort.
"Jesus," Simon breathed, stopping dead in his tracks, his boots skidding slightly on the floor. "The smell."
It hit me a second later. My nose has always been sensitive, a side effect of my dynamic, perhaps, or just the fact that I experience the world through senses other than sight first. It wasn't just the stale, chemical tang of fear. It was thick, biological, and overwhelmingly heavy.
It smelled like a fruit cellar that had been flooded by the ocean, rotting blackberries, dusty old parchment dissolving in water, and a sharp, brine-soaked finish that made the hair on my arms stand up.
It was the scent of an Omega in deep, profound distress, souring the air, fermenting into something desperate. It smelled like isolation.
"Kitchen," Anders barked, his voice tight, lacking its usual cool command. He pointed a trembling hand toward the massive marble island where the strobe light originated. "The beacon is tracking to the kitchen."
We moved as a unit, drawn toward the glow like moths to a bug zapper. My boots squeaked on the polished floor, a sound that seemed irreverently loud in the tomb-like quiet. I gripped the handle of the trauma kit tighter, my knuckles aching.
We rounded the massive marble island and froze.
The floor was a disaster zone. A bottle of pills had been shattered, white chalky tablets scattered across the grey stone like jagged stars in a dark sky.
I recognized the shape of them. Stabilizers.
Strong ones. But beyond them, huddled in the corner where the floor-to-ceiling glass walls met the concrete, was a nest.
It wasn't a nest of soft blankets, plush pillows, or clothing scented with packmates. It was paper.
Thousands of strips of white paper, shredded by hand, crinkled and torn, piled into a chaotic, rustling mound.
In the flash of the red strobe light, I saw ink on the shreds.
I recognized the typesetting. She had destroyed her own manuscript, months, maybe years of work, to build a sanctuary out of the very words that had isolated her.
Buried in the center of the paper nest was a figure.
She was curled into a ball so tight she looked impossibly small, her knees pulled to her chest, her face hidden in her arms. She was wearing an oversized beige sweater that hung off her trembling frame, and leggings that caught against sharp edges of the paper.
"Ms. Rose?" Anders stepped forward, his leather shoes crunching loudly on the pill fragments. He held his hands up, palms out. He sounded official, terrified, and utterly out of his depth. "I'm Anders Svinton. Your agent. We received a distress signal from your wrist unit."
The figure didn't move. She didn't uncurl. But a sound escaped her.
It was a low, fractured whimper. A vibration in the throat that started high and broke into a jagged sob before being swallowed back down, wet and thick.
My blood ran cold. The trauma kit slipped from my fingers, hitting the floor with a heavy thud that vibrated through the soles of my feet.
Time didn't just stop; it rewound. The sleek, modern house dissolved. The smell of the ocean and rotting blackberries vanished, replaced by the ghost scent of aggressive floor wax and stale gymnasium air.
I was eighteen again. I was standing on the plastic choir main-riser in the back row, my hands sweating in the pockets of my polyester robe. I was watching a girl in a cheap blue graduation gown grip a podium, white-knuckled and shaking.
I knew that sound.
I had replayed that specific sound in my nightmares for a decade.
It was the specific, terrifying cadence of a voice failing, of a throat constricting around a plea for help that never came.
It was the sound of a girl realizing she was entirely, utterly alone in a room full of people who were supposed to protect her.
"No," I whispered, the word scraping out of my chest, raspy and horrified.
As if hearing me, the woman in the nest lifted her head.
The red emergency light on her wrist flashed, illuminating her face in a harsh, crimson wash.
Her glasses were gone, likely lost somewhere in the nest. Her ink-black hair was a matted disaster, sticking to her sweat-slicked forehead in wet tendrils.
Her eyes were wide, glassy, and unfocused, burning with a chemical fever that looked lethal.
But I knew those eyes. Grey, intelligent, and currently filled with a terror so pure it made my knees weak.
I looked at Anders. He was frozen, his mouth slightly open, his icy blue eyes staring down at the woman he had been emailing for three years.
The woman he had threatened with a lawsuit for breach of contract less than an hour ago.
The woman he had sat directly behind on a stage ten years ago, watching the back of her neck turn red as she fell apart.
"Tessa," Anders breathed, the name falling out of him like a confession of sin.
Simon made a noise in the back of his throat, a sharp, wounded intake of breath.
He took a stumbling step back, his ink-stained hand coming up to cover his mouth, his dark eyes darting frantically from her face to the sketchbook sticking out of his messenger bag, filled with drawings of a woman he thought was a stranger.
She flinched at the movement. A violent, full-body jerk that sent a spray of shredded paper flutter-kicking into the air. She scrambled backward, digging her heels into the floor, pressing her spine against the freezing glass wall as if she could push right through it and fall into the ocean.
"Don't look," she rasped, her voice a ruin of what it used to be, cracked, dry, and raw. She threw her hands up to cover her face, trying to vanish. "Please, don't look at me. I'm sorry. I'm sorry I ruined the ceremony. Just let me leave."
She was hallucinating. She didn't see three men in a storm-ravaged house. She saw the crowd. She saw the bleachers. She saw the security guards coming to drag her off the stage while the student body laughed.
Anders looked like he was going to be sick. He swayed, his face leaching of color until it matched his white dress shirt. "She... It's T.L. Rose. It’s her. It's Tessa."
"She's burning up, Anders," Simon choked out, his voice thick with horror, but he didn't move. He stood there, paralyzed by the sudden collision of his art and his guilt. "Look at her skin. She's dark red. She’s going into shock."
We were useless. The shock had severed our ability to function. The guilt was a physical weight, pinning us to the floorboards, trapping us in our own selfish realizations.
I looked at Tessa, at the girl I had been too shy, too scared, too cowardly to help when it mattered.
I saw the way her chest was heaving, the desperate, shallow gasps that weren't pulling in enough oxygen.
I smelled the acrid spike of her distress, sharper now, turning from fear to life-threatening panic.
If we didn't calm her down, her heart was going to give out. The stress combined with the terror of the hallucination was going to kill her right in front of us, and this time, there would be no graduation ceremony to interrupt.
I couldn't be the shy boy in the back row anymore. I couldn't be the gentle giant who faded into the background.
I closed my eyes for a fraction of a second, exhaling the tension, centering myself in my diaphragm.
I found the floor of my register, the place where my voice resonated deep in the chest cavity, the voice I used for audiobooks, for guided meditations, for talking listeners down from the ledge of a hard day.
The voice that made me famous because it sounded like safety.
"Hey there," I said.
The sound rolled through the room, warm and heavy. It wasn't a shout. It was a rumble, low and steady, designed to vibrate through the floorboards and anchor the air. It challenged the storm outside and won.
Anders flinched, looking at me as if he’d forgotten I was there, but I ignored him.
I ignored Simon’s panicked breathing. I took a slow, deliberate step forward, sinking to my knees on the cold concrete.
I made myself small, hunching my broad shoulders, bowing my head slightly to telegraph submission.
I wanted to be a mountain she could lean on, not a wall blocking her path.
"Tessa," I said, pitching my voice to be the auditory equivalent of a weighted blanket, slow, rhythmic, soothing. I let the consonants round out, soft and devoid of sharp edges. "You're okay. We aren't looking at the stage, sweetheart. The ceremony is over."
She paused, her hands trembling violently where they covered her face. One grey eye peered out from between her fingers, wild, frightened, and agonizingly familiar.
"Daniel?" she whispered, the name confused, tangled in the wires of her fevered memory. Had she recognized my voice from the audiobooks?
"Yeah. It's Daniel." I kept the tone steady, pouring calm into the space between us like warm honey.
I kept my posture non-threatening, telegraphing that I was not an Alpha here to take, but a safe harbor here to receive.
"And Simon. And Anders. We aren't here to watch, Tessa.
No one is watching. We're just here to help you get off the floor. "
I reached for the medical kit, sliding it slowly across the concrete without breaking eye contact, moving with the sluggish predictability of a glacier.
"Get the cooling pads," I murmured to the others, pitching my voice low enough that it wouldn't startle her, but firm enough to snap them out of their stupor. I didn't look away from her. "Do not move fast. Do not crowd her. If you spike her heart rate again, she strokes out."
The scent of blackberry, old parchment, and sea salt washed over me, intoxicating and terrifyingly fragile.
It burned my nose, but I inhaled it deeply.
I relaxed, letting go of the tight hold I had on my alpha and letting my scent flow, warm spiced chai, sandalwood, and fresh bread.
I tried to project safety, trying to build a wall of comfort around her with nothing but pheromones and baritone frequencies.
She was right on the edge of the cliff. I could feel the vibration of her terror in the air. And this time, I wasn't going to let her fall.