16. The Elephant In The Road
The Elephant In The Road
~SAWYER~
The whole art of my profession is looking like a man with nothing to hide while you are, in point of fact, hiding everything.
A collapsed cake. A groom being sick in the parking lot. A father-in-law two drinks from a scene.
My entire career is standing dead center in a small controlled disaster with my hands in my pockets, wearing the untroubled face of a man who just wandered over for the shrimp.
I'm very good at it.
I have never needed the skill more than I need it right now — on a dark shoulder of the harbor road, with a crying Omega folded under my steering wheel and a truck full of her furious ex-pack skidding to a stop six inches off my door.
"Where did she go?"
Cade's got the wheel of the other truck. That alone tells me plenty. They put the panicker behind the wheel. Beckett rides shotgun with his jaw set like a man braced to lift something heavy. August is a pale shape in the back seat, quiet in the specific way that always comes right before weather.
I take my time.
I reach back one-handed, haul my work bag off the seat behind me, and drop it into the passenger footwell like a man clearing space for a conversation he didn't ask for.
The plaid shirt I'd knotted at my waist during the run comes loose in the same motion.
It pools across my lap, over the wheel, into the dark pocket where Amber is tucked so tight against my shins I feel her stop breathing.
From their headlights, I'm one man alone in a cab, mildly inconvenienced. Nothing under the wheel but a dropped shirt and shadow.
Not a muscle, Blooming Apricot. Let me work.
Her scent is the real problem, and I solve it the only way there is. I keep my window cracked two inches, no wider. I let my own roll up thick through the cab — magnolia and cracked black pepper and bourbon, turned up on purpose, until it's the loudest thing in the sealed space.
It helps that the three of them are throwing off enough of their own to fog a greenhouse. Cedar and cold rain. Cut sage. Scorched caramel. Three agitated Alphas cannot parse a thread of bruised apricot under a stranger's dominant musk in a closed truck.
They're drowning too loudly in themselves to try.
"Where did she go?" I repeat, unhurried, tasting the words.
"You're asking me. As if I didn't leave that room a solid five minutes ahead of the three of you.
" One brow climbs. "Unless you held a little debrief after she walked out.
Sat in a circle. Workshopped your feelings, while your Omega vanished into the dark.
Because, say it with me now, you're cowards who can't move fast enough to fight for the woman you claim to love. "
"We can fight." Cade's voice cracks off the word. "We can absolutely fight you, city boy."
"How thrilling for us both." I don't move an inch. "But I'm the wrong address for it. You want to burn something down, aim it at the men who just proved, twice in five years, that the woman they love isn't the priority."
"She is the priority." Beckett. Low, flat, immovable as a foundation stone.
"Is she?" I let it hang. "Then why did you let me leave first? Why did it take you this long to come tearing down your own back roads after her?"
"We were—" Beckett starts.
"I don't care what you were." I lean an elbow on my door, easy, and watch it land.
"She's on foot, Shaw. Alone. In the dark.
The three of you were still sealed in a room deciding how to feel about it.
What if she's being watched right now? Her name is one leaked memo from an undisclosed celebrity wedding.
What if somebody lifted her off this road ten minutes ago while you three were finding your shoes?
What would you have done about it? Filed a report? Held a vote?"
The fear flickers across all three faces at once. Real, instant, useless.
Ten minutes too late to be worth a thing.
I roll my eyes where they can watch me do it.
"You honestly believe the whole world is fine and dandy with an Omega who built her own empire.
Alone, unbonded, wildly successful, and is now the single loudest name in the county?
" I shake my head slowly. "You think there's nobody out there itching to take a woman like that down a peg?
Either the three of you are the worst Alphas I've had the displeasure of scenting, or nobody ever taught you the first thing about protecting a woman you love. My money's split evenly."
"As if you'd know," Cade snaps.
"I know." My voice drops. The drop is the truth, and I feel Amber go stone-still against my shin.
"I know it well enough that I don't have a pack anymore.
I chose getting it right over keeping what was comfortable.
It cost me everything I owned. So run that sentence at me one more time, and this time aim it at a man who paid full price for the lesson you three keep skipping. "
Beckett's frown deepens. His nostrils flare — once, twice — and his head tips a degree toward my cracked window, and every muscle down my right side goes to iron, because if any of them is going to catch her, it's this one.
He knows her scent the way he knows load-bearing walls.
"Something wrong, Shaw?" I ask, pleasant, and I let a fresh roll of magnolia and pepper crest off me and fill the gap. "You look like a man who smelled a decision he doesn't like."
He blinks.
Whatever thread he'd caught drowns under mine, and his own storm-scent surges to cover his confusion.
"No," he says, rough. "Nothing."
Close. Too close.
I keep my face lazy and my pulse to myself.
"And what's it to you, anyway?" Cade throws it like a man grabbing the nearest weapon in a dark kitchen. "You met her Tuesday. You've got no stake here. Why are you parked on a black road at night playing bodyguard for a woman who isn't even yours?"
It's a fair question. I decline to give it a fair answer.
"Because somebody has to. The three men whose actual job that was are currently interviewing the stranger they were hoping would beat them to it. A shame because clearly, your woman isn’t here and this conversation isn’t helping find her, now is it?"
Beckett's eyes narrow — not jealous now, just weighing.
"You keep saying it cost you everything," he says slowly. "A pack doesn't just evaporate. What did you do?"
The question walks straight up to the door I keep bolted and raps on it.
I don't open it.
"Ask me again when she's safe," I say, "and I might tell you. Right now she's on a road in the dark, and the only useful thing you own is time, which you are spending on me."
Then August breaks.
"Okay." He says it quietly first, from the back. Then it isn't quiet at all. ‘We're screwing this up. We keep screwing this up!"
Cade actually flinches.
"Are— are you yelling?"
"Yes, I'm yelling!" August's voice fills the other cab and cracks the whole night open, and I watch two Alphas who have plainly never once heard this man raise his voice go rigid where they sit.
"I'm yelling because I am sick to death of the three of us making the exact same mistake and calling it a plan.
She walked out, Cade. Again. Because of us. Again."
"August—" Cade tries.
"No. For once in your life, shut up and just drive the truck when we finally leave.
Instead of turning every hard minute into a fight where your feelings are the only ones allowed in the room.
" August doesn't give him the half-second to recover.
His sea-glass eyes are blazing, and the pear-and-sage coming off him has gone sharp enough to sting from here.
"You've been the loudest man in every room since we were nineteen.
It has always been the sound you make when you're scared. "
Cade shuts his mouth.
I did not believe that was physically possible.
When he speaks again, the swagger has drained clean out of it.
"I know what I sound like," he says, low, to the windshield.
"You think I can't hear it? I've listened to myself do it for five years.
" His hands flex on the wheel. "I made the whole car laugh, driving out of that parking lot.
Anybody ever tell you that? I cracked jokes the entire way to the highway, so not one of us had to sit in what we'd just done to her.
" A rough breath. "So. Loud when I'm scared. Believe me, I'm the world expert."
Beckett shifts, reaching for the only role he's ever known.
"We shouldn't be turning on each other. This is what the man wants. Us, cracking down the—"
"There it is." August rounds on him. "You want to lead the second there's a disagreement to settle.
Give you a wall to brace or a beam to run the numbers on, you're the finest man on this coast. But leading us back toward the woman we adored and loved and bedded and abandoned, twice, Beckett.
We are one bad sunrise from twice, and you've got nothing printed on the page.
You're a beautiful quiet manual with no instructions in it.
You can hold up any house here. You cannot lead us to her. "
Beckett's mouth opens.
Nothing comes out.
August looks between the two of them. His voice comes back down, and the quiet of it is somehow worse than the shout.
"If we cannot figure this out and fix it…properly, all the way, no more careful little half-measures, then I'm out. I mean that. I'm finished being a coward in good company."
"Wait." Cade. "What?"
"What?" Beckett, half a beat behind, the two of them landing it in the same stunned breath.
I can't help myself.
I never can.
"You're going to leave your pack and become what, exactly?" I ask, mild as milk. "Some feral little concoction like me?"
August turns his head and looks at me.
It's different.
I don't have a cleaner word for it. He looks at me the way you catch the eye of the one other person in a loud room who got the joke. Something old and long-buried in me turns over, stretches, and has the sheer nerve to flutter — right under my sternum, unmistakable, deeply unwelcome.