Chapter 16 The Weed
Rowan
The elevator opens onto the twenty-second floor and I see him before the doors have fully parted.
Callum is on the floor outside my apartment. His jacket is ruined, his hair is matted with the exhaustion of someone who hasn't slept and has been in contact with a wall at some point during the night.
The door behind him is visibly wrong, the frame bent, the lock mechanism hanging loose.
I walk out of the elevator and cross to where he's sitting and nudge his leg with my foot.
He surfaces slowly.
His eyes open and they are not the eyes he shows rooms full of people — bloodshot, stripped of the careful presentation he maintains like a second job. He looks up at me and says my name like he's been rehearsing it all night.
Then his gaze moves. It finds Lachlan's hand, resting just at the curve of my back, light and entirely natural.
Callum's face does something complicated and then stops doing anything at all.
He gets up slowly. I watch it happen — the way he unfolds from the floor, the way the movement gathers speed as something consolidates behind his eyes.
I don't have time to do anything except step forward.
His fist is already moving when I get between them. The air moves past my ear. Then everything stops.
Lachlan's hand came off my back at the same moment I moved. Callum's fist is a breath away from my chest, held there completely, enclosed in a grip that Callum is not going to pull free of without assistance.
Lachlan hasn't changed his expression.
Callum looks at me across the stopped distance. His voice has broken open somewhere and what comes out of it is not the measured thing he usually controls. "Why are you protecting him? Why are you — you should be—"
"Go home," I say. "If you need to lose your mind, do it in your own house."
He drops his arm. Steps back. The laugh that comes out of him is not a good sound.
"You were drugged." His voice cracks on the second word. "You were drugged and you went with him and you didn't — why didn't you call me? I was here all night, I was right here—"
"Not everyone is as filthy as the two of you." I hear how flat my voice is and I don't adjust it.
Lachlan reaches into his jacket.
He takes out a folded piece of paper and he drops it. Not handed over. Dropped, from chest height, the way you drop something that doesn't deserve to be handed. It opens as it falls and lands with the medical header facing up.
"There's a hospital," Lachlan says, "roughly four kilometers from here. When someone is drugged, you can take them there. They have doctors. The doctors can administer a pharmaceutical counteragent. It takes about two hours and it works."
He looks at Callum with the patience of someone explaining something to a person they have very little patience for. "You don't have to rut it out like an animal. That's apparently not obvious to everyone, so."
Callum picks up the paper.
He reads it. He reads it again. The IV administration record, the attending physician's sign-off, the timestamps that account for every hour of last night with the impersonal precision of a medical document.
He stands there for a long time.
Whatever he'd been imagining, the version of last night that kept him on this floor until morning, is on the paper in front of him, replaced line by line with something that has no space for him in it at all.
"Get out of my apartment," I say. "And pay for my door."
He doesn't move immediately.
"I've already filed a report with the Elder Council," I continue. "Isabella's compound, the dosage, the circumstances. It's on record." I watch his face. "I'm not withdrawing it. Not for family optics, not for any other reason."
***
I wait outside the apartment.
My father arrives two hours later. He pulls up outside the building in the car he uses for pack business, which tells me before he opens his mouth what register this conversation is going to be in.
I'm on the front steps. I was already planning to go back upstairs. I stay.
"Drop it." He doesn't lead with anything softer than that. "You want to drag this family through an Elder Council proceeding? You want this to be what Silverpine is known for?"
I look at him.
"Dad," I say. "Actually — I've been thinking I should call you Alpha Douglas. I've genuinely wondered, more than once, whether I'm biologically yours."
He stops.
I look at the strip of grass pushing up through the crack at the edge of the step. Thin, persistent, the kind of plant that grows where it isn't expected to.
"The report says I am, though."
The silence he produces is the loud kind.
"You had a test done." Not a question.
"I did. I tested you and me. I tested you and Isabella — I thought there was a possibility she was your illegitimate daughter, which would have explained the pattern." I look up at him.
"She's not. That result was genuinely confusing to me for a while. I couldn't work out why you would be so consistently indifferent to your biological child and so consistent in your attention to someone else's."
He is not a man who gets caught without something to say. He doesn't have anything to say.
A weed. That's what I'm looking at, I find it easier to look at than his face right now.
"It doesn't matter at this point," I say. "I'm not withdrawing the report."
I stand up. I don't offer him anything on my way past. The door to the building closes behind me.
By the time I reach mine, my breathing has evened out, and the morning, which has been eventful, is finally quiet.