19. Show Me #3
"Some men," he says, low, "cannot see the worth of the thing they're holding until it starts sliding right through their fingers.
My four were precisely that stupid — and precisely that lucky.
They happened to wake up in time." He lifts a single finger, and there's cold steel threaded under all that warmth now.
"But hear me, because this matters more than anything else I'll say tonight.
Waking up in time does not mean a man is owed the second chance.
Let me be as clear as I know how to be, since you're a woman who's had cheap forgiveness sold to her by the pound.
If a pack was ever cruel — if there was real harm done, if they made an Omega small on purpose, put hands or fear on her, ground her down to keep her — then no.
There is no guidance for that, and no second chance, and no wine-soaked story that redeems it.
You run, and you do not look back once, and I will personally help you load the car. "
His eyes hold mine, steady and dark.
"But my four were never cruel. They were ignorant.
Nobody ever once sat them down and taught them how.
There's a whole canyon of difference between a man who hurts you and a man who simply never learned any better — and sometimes, only sometimes, that second kind can be led to the water and taught how to drink.
That's not weakness in you for allowing it.
That's just the difference between broken and mean.
" He pauses. "The first one, you can sometimes mend. The second one you flee."
He keeps looking at me while he says all of it. Like it was never once a story about his sister at all.
He's quiet for a long moment. When he speaks again his voice has dropped, and the ache laid bare in it is so plain that I have to drop my own eyes to my hands.
"I went back once," he says. "Year or so on.
Didn't tell a soul I was coming — just drove by and parked halfway down the block like a ghost casing his own funeral.
Watched them out in the front yard through the fence slats.
" His throat works. "My sister had all four of them wrapped around her little finger like ribbon on a gift.
She was laughing at something Cass said.
Threw a dish towel clean at Ezra's head.
And Silas — Silas, who never in his life learned how to lead a pack — was just standing off to the side watching her like she'd personally hung the whole sky up that morning for his benefit. "
He turns the glass on the nightstand a careful quarter-inch, only to have something to do with his hand.
"They bickered," he says. "Easy. Playful.
That competitive back-and-forth where four grown men trip clean over each other for the honor of being the one who makes her laugh next.
All of them fighting — gently, endlessly — over the sweet privilege of cherishing the one woman standing in the middle of their orbit. "
His eyes come back up to mine, and they're wet at the rims, and he doesn't bother hiding it.
"That," he says. "That right there. That is the only thing I ever truly wanted, my whole life.
To bicker with my pack. To be fought over a little.
To fit without having to file down my own edges to do it.
" A small, accepting smile that hurts far worse than tears would.
"And I finally had to sit alone in my parked truck and admit out loud that I never once had it with them.
Not because a single one of them was a villain.
Because I was the odd piece in the box, and some things simply are what they are.
It happens. You accept it. You let it go. "
He meets my eyes.
"That was five years ago now. I've been letting it go every day since."
"So it wasn't—" I search for the shape of it. "It wasn't ugly. The leaving. It wasn't slammed doors and thrown plates and things you can't unsay. You didn't leave on bad grounds at all."
"Not one door slammed." He shakes his head.
"I make it sound grim because the second anybody hears the words 'I left my pack,' they reach straight for the sad violin — the estranged man, the tragic loner, the fellow eating supper alone over his sink.
" One shoulder lifts. "But I don't hold it that way inside.
The leaving pushed me out into the wide open.
Made me quit standing around waiting on a switch that was never once going to flip inside that house, and go out looking for the one that might.
Out there. When I'm not braced for it. When I least expect it to. "
He looks at me then. Really looks, in that unhurried Charleston way that makes my whole bedroom feel two sizes smaller than it was, and his voice drops to almost nothing at all.
"Though," he murmurs. "I'll admit the process might be moving a touch fast to say for certain."
Oh, no you don't. My traitor heart does something entirely undignified against the cage of my ribs. I hate it. I feel the heat come crawling up my throat before I can slam any door on it.
I grab for the lifeline of suspicion, because it's so much easier to hold than whatever's gone warm and dangerous in my chest. "Okay.
Hold on. Time out." I narrow my eyes at him over the demilitarized zone.
"Is that what all this is? The whole—" I flap a hand at him, at the pasta, the rescue, the story, the wet eyes, every impossible piece of the night "—gallant fourth-man routine.
Are you making yourself into a love interest on purpose?
Playing the shiny new pack in my rearview mirror, so my three finally get their heads on straight and realize I'm the one that got away? "
"Could be," he says, entirely unbothered, and the plain honesty of it knocks the wind clean out of my accusation.
"Could — you can't just admit that—"
"Why on earth not? You asked me plain. I answered you plain.
I find it saves everybody time." He shifts.
The mattress dips. The distance across my sacred demilitarized zone quietly shrinks by an inch he does not apologize for.
"But let me hand you one question right back, since we're being so plain with each other tonight.
" His voice stays soft, so careful, a man setting a fragile thing down on a table with both hands.
"If there were room in that guarded heart of yours for a fourth Alpha — a real one.
Not a prop. Not a lever to pull against the other three.
An actual fourth." He pauses. "Would that be up your alley? Even a little?"
The question just sits there in the lamplight between us, patient, taking up all the air.
I think about it. I genuinely think about it, the way I turn over the hard vendor contracts, hunting every line for the hidden clause, the trap in the fine print, the cost buried under the courtesy — except there's no clause here.
There's just a man on the far side of my grandmother's quilt who ran a full mile in ruined dress shoes to reach me tonight and hasn't asked me for a single thing since.