Chapter 36 Mattaniah
Mattaniah
The bond woke me three times during the night.
They weren't spikes or cramps or the biological urgency that drove the heat.
These were emotional surges bleeding through the marks on my neck from two Alphas on the other side of a locked door.
Dominic's guilt hit me at one in the morning, a sharp flare that jerked me out of a shallow sleep.
Amos' grief rolled in at two thirty, settling into my chest and staying there.
At four something shifted in both of them simultaneously.
I pressed my face into the pillow and cried until my throat was raw.
The spare room smells like me and only me. The absence of their scent in the sheets and pillows is a physical discomfort I can't ignore. My bond marks ache with a throb that hasn't let up since I closed the door.
I sit on the edge of the bed and stare at the locked door for ten minutes before I stand up and unlock it.
Dominic is sitting on the floor in the hallway with his back against the wall opposite my door.
His legs are stretched across the narrow corridor, his head tipped back against the wall.
He's still wearing the clothes he had on last night.
His jaw is shadowed with stubble, the circles under his eyes deep.
He opens his eyes when the lock clicks.
"You didn't have to..." I trail off. He did have to.
"Yes." His voice is rough. "I did."
Amos appears at the end of the hallway carrying two cups of coffee and a plate of toast. His glasses are crooked and his shirt is wrinkled. He looks as wrecked as Dominic.
He holds out a coffee without speaking. I take it. The warmth of the mug against my palms grounds me enough that the ache in my bond marks drops from unbearable to merely awful.
The three of us end up in the kitchen. Dominic sits at the table. Amos leans against the counter. I stand in the doorway because the table feels too much like forgiveness.
They wait for me to speak. Neither of them pushes or fills the silence with explanations.
"I'm still mad." The words come out too loud for the quiet kitchen. "I'm so fucking angry I can barely look at you."
"We know." Dominic says it without flinching.
"I would have left." I grip the coffee mug hard enough that the heat bites my palms. "If I couldn't feel how broken up you are through the bond, I would have walked out last night and never come back."
Through the bond Dominic's guilt flares and Amos' grief deepens. Neither of them argues or tells me I'm overreacting.
"But I can feel it." I stare into the coffee. "I can feel what you're feeling and I know it's real. The guilt, the fear, the... whatever this is that's been pulsing through the bond all night. I can't pretend I don't feel it."
"Niah..." Amos starts.
"I'm not finished." He stops. "I'm not leaving. But I'm not forgiving you either. Those are two separate decisions and right now I've only made one of them."
The kitchen is quiet except for the refrigerator humming. Dominic's hands are flat on the table in front of him, his fingers spread. He looks smaller sitting at this kitchen table than I've ever seen him look.
"What do you need from us?" His voice carries a crack I've never heard from him before. "How do I... how do we make you see that it's real now?"
I look at him across the kitchen. I mean really look.
"You prove it. You don't say it's real, you prove it. Every day until I believe you."
"How?"
"I don't know." I take a sip of coffee. "Figure it out. You're supposed to be smart."
The corner of Amos' mouth twitches before he kills it.
Despite everything there's still work to do on the board presentation and the forensic data. The world didn't stop spinning because my Alphas lied to me.
Amos sets up his laptop at the kitchen table and pulls up the presentation deck. I sit across from him with the Southeast division files.
Dominic makes lunch without being asked. He sets a sandwich beside my laptop at noon and stands over me until I pick it up.
"I'm not hungry."
"Eat it anyway." He doesn't move.
"You can't fix this with sandwiches, Dominic."
"I'm not trying to fix anything. I'm trying to make sure you eat." His hand hovers near my shoulder and then drops to his side without making contact. "You haven't eaten since the toast this morning and your hands are shaking."
I comply, taking a bite of the sandwich because he's right and because my bond marks ache less when he's standing close to me, which is infuriating.
My contribution to the deck is the Meridian Holdings analysis from the Southeast accounts. The anger is still there. It sits in my gut like something I swallowed that won't digest. But working alongside them I can see the competence is real even if the origin was strategic.
A spike of anxiety hits me at three thirty, not a heat spike but a stress response that tightens my chest and makes my jaw clench. I don't notice it happening until Dominic's voice cuts through the haze from across the table.
"You're clenching your jaw." His eyes are on me, steady. "What do you need?"
"I'm fine."
"That's not what I asked."
My jaw unclenches. Through the bond his attention is focused entirely on me.
"I don't know what I need." The honest answer escapes my lips. "I'm angry and I'm scared and I'm working on a presentation that's going to destroy your father. I don't know what I need right now."
"Do you want me to stay?" He sets his phone down. "I'll sit in the chair. I won't touch you unless you ask."
"Stay." The word scrapes my throat. "Just... stay where I can see you."
He stays. He sits in the chair and doesn't touch me and doesn't push. His scent fills the room and the bond marks respond whether I want them to or not.
Amos brings me water at four without commentary and refills my coffee at five. At six he orders food, sets a plate in front of me, and returns to his laptop.
"You're both doing it." I say it around a mouthful of pad thai. "The proving thing. You're already doing it."
"We said we would." Amos doesn't look up from his screen.
"I said figure it out and you figured it out in less than twelve hours."
"We figured out the easy part." Dominic's voice comes from the chair where he hasn't moved in three hours. "The hard part is doing it long enough that you stop keeping score."
"I'm going to keep score for a very long time."
"Good." He meets my eyes across the room. "I'd rather you keep score than pretend it's fine."