Chapter 21
Twenty-One
LIANA
The squeal of tires outside comes before I’ve even lowered the phone from my ear. Tires brake hard, then the sound of a car door slams violently. The bell over the door rings loudly, and Cole is through it before the sound finishes.
He rounds the counter in two strides, boots loud on the old wood floor, and then he’s on the ground in front of me, gathering me against his chest in one motion.
“I shouldn’t have left,” he mutters, folding himself around me, his cheek pressed to the top of my head, one hand spread wide between my shoulder blades, holding me together like I might come apart otherwise.
Still shaking, I bury my face in his shirt and inhale his scent. “It’s okay.”
He holds me like that for a long minute.
His hand moves in slow circles on my back until my breathing starts to even out, until the shaking in my shoulders slows to something smaller. Only then does he pull back enough to look at my face. His thumb brushes a strand of hair off my cheek.
“What happened?” he asks.
I can’t make my mouth form the words. I just point towards it.
He sees the sprig of dried white pine lying there, needles gone brittle and pale, tied off with its thin black ribbon. His face doesn’t change. Not really. But his jaw tightens, trying to figure out what I was telling him.
“That smell,” I whisper, voice thin. “That’s them. That’s my old pack’s scent. That’s what filled the house upstate every single day for three years. Silus. Magnus. That’s what they smelled like.”
Cole nods. He doesn’t ask me anything else.
He gets an arm under mine and helps me up off the floor, walks me the two steps to the stool behind the counter, and sits me down like I’m made of glass.
Then he reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out a pair of nitrile gloves. Of course he has gloves in his jacket pocket.
He snaps them on, one hand at a time, and pulls a small clear evidence bag from the same pocket. He picks up the sprig carefully, by the ribbon only, and seals it inside without letting his skin touch the needles before carefully tucking the baggie into his pocket.
Then he turns back to me. He puts one hand on my knee, light, steady, grounding.
“This is a threat,” he says. “That’s all it is right now. He is not getting near you. Not while I’m breathing.” His eyes hold mine, flat and certain. “I promise you that.”
I want to believe him. My heart is still hammering too hard against my ribs, but I watch his eyes, and something in me settles half an inch.
The bell over the door rings again.
Julian comes through first, moving fast, and he’s across the shop in four strides before the door has even swung shut behind him.
He wraps me in a tight one-armed hug from the side, his cheek pressed against my temple, and I feel him breathing hard, like he ran the whole way here instead of driving.
“Fuck, are you okay, Lia?” he asks frantically against my hair.
“Yes,” I whisper.
August comes in right behind him, pale, his glasses slightly crooked like he put them on in the elevator. He hugs me hard, both arms around my shoulders, and asks what happened in a voice gone thin with worry, and I manage a few broken words before Ezra walks through the door.
Ezra’s face is serious. Controlled. His pale gray eyes sweep over me once, assessing, and something in his jaw is tight in a way that makes my stomach drop.
He’s looking at me like I’m a total stranger who wants nothing to do with him anymore. I don’t like this feeling at all, like a knife stabbing through my heart.
“Are you okay?” he asks. Flat. Serious.
“I’m okay,” I say, meek, my voice barely above a whisper. “It’s probably not a big deal.”
“It’s a big deal,” Cole says sharply, already moving toward the back door. “We need security to check the perimeter. Now.”
Ezra is looking at me like I’m a problem to be managed rather than the omega he was holding not too long ago. My eyes burn. I can’t stand it.
“I’m sorry I left like that,” I say quietly, as I look into Ezra’s eyes, trying to be strong.
“I literally panicked about everything, and I had doubts that I probably only let you all knot me because I was desperately in heat. It was the most overwhelming thing that’s ever happened to my body, and I just needed to think, I needed… ”
Ezra crosses to me before I can finish. His hand comes up, cupping my jaw, his thumb sweeping slowly along my cheekbone.
“You don’t owe us an apology,” he says, quiet, looking only at me. “You had every right to need air. But the only thing we’re asking now is to let us keep you safe.”
I nod.
My arms go around his waist, and I feel him exhale like he’s been holding that breath since yesterday.
His arms come around me, solid, and his mouth presses to my forehead and stays there.
Julian’s hand runs slowly up and down my back from my other side.
August steps in front of me and picks up my hand, laces our fingers together without a word.
“I need to sit down,” I whisper, my heart feeling full and finally lighter.
Julian simply scoops me up and carries me back into the workshop, past the zinc worktable, to the two old leather chairs by the small window.
He drops into the larger one and pulls me down onto his lap before I can protest, settling me sideways across his thighs, my head tucked against his shoulder, his hand stroking slowly through my hair.
“Relax now Lia. We got you,” Julian murmurs in my ear. Behind us, I can hear Cole and Ezra discussing cameras and other security measures. I close my eyes against Julian’s shoulder and let the shaking finally, slowly, begin to subside.
My body has gone loose and heavy against Julian’s chest, and for the first time since I opened that envelope, something in me starts to unclench.
That’s when the bell over the front door goes off like a gunshot. My heart stops when I look up.
I look up and see Mira shoving through like a furious storm.
She must have seen Ezra and his pack walking into my shop and never leaving.
Her jeans are covered in flour, and her apron is tied crookedly around her waist. She has a baseball bat gripped in one fist, held up and ready like she’s about to go to war with somebody.
She marches three steps into the shop and stops dead in the doorway to the back room.
Her eyes land on me first.
I’m curled sideways across Julian’s lap, his hand still tangled in my hair. She notices Ezra leaning against the edge of the zinc worktable, all coiled tension in a charcoal suit. Then her gaze turns to Cole, who’s filling the doorframe. Then to August, still holding my knee.
Mira’s mouth falls open. Her eyebrows climb somewhere near her hairline.
My face goes scarlet so fast it actually stings. I jump off Julian’s lap, nearly tripping over the chair leg, and I cross the back room in three steps and grab Mira’s free arm and start towing her toward the front of the shop before she can fully process what she just walked in on.
“Nope,” I say. “Nope. Out. Come on.”
Mira lets herself be towed, mostly. She’s still gawking back over her shoulder the entire way, the bat dangling forgotten at her side.
“Isn’t your heat over by now?” she asks.
“Yes,” I tell her when we reach the front door. “They’re just here to look into my ex.”
Her lips twitch.
“Whatever’s happening back there,” she says, her lips twitching. “Try not to have too much fun and get accidentally marked forever by them.”
A laugh startles out of me as I shove her gently toward the door.
I stand there and watch her cross the sidewalk back toward the bakery, bat still hanging from her hand like she forgot it’s there.
I turn back toward the back of my shop. “What happens now? What if Silus really does come back?”
“You don’t have to be brave right now,” August says, taking my hands in his. “You could come back with us tonight. To the penthouse. You don’t have to stay here.”
“I need to be here,” I say, shaking my head. “I want to spend more time here and get caught up. I’m not ready to live there yet.”
Nobody argues right away. Ezra’s jaw works, a muscle ticking there. Cole doesn’t move from the doorframe, but his hands flex once at his sides. August nods, squeezes my hands once more, and steps back.
“One of us should stay with her tonight,” Julian says. “I’m volunteering.”
I open my mouth to refuse. I close it again. I think about my empty apartment upstairs, about the sprig of pine sitting sealed in Cole’s jacket pocket, and I don’t want to be alone tonight. I really don’t.
“Fine,” I say, sharper than I mean it, before my own resolve can go soft on me. “But no funny business. You sleep on the couch. This is a security arrangement. That’s all.”
Julian raises both hands, palms out, the picture of innocence. “You have my word,” he says. “All the space you need. Perfect gentleman.” I can see him fighting a grin the whole time he says it.
I can also see, in the way the other three go very still around me, that each of them had been quietly hoping I’d allow him to stay.
“Julian will be on his very best behavior, I’m sure,” says Ezra almost sarcastically.
Julian, completely unbothered, just grins wider. “Relax, Ezra.”
After a beat, Cole pushes off the doorframe. He looks at me—slow, steady, like he’s taking inventory of every piece of me. “If you need anything tonight. Anything at all. Call me.”
I nod. He leaves, the bell ringing once behind him.
Ezra and August follow a few minutes later.
Ezra kisses my forehead at the door, his hand lingering against my jaw for one long second before he lets go. August hugs me hard enough to lift me half an inch off the floor.
“Bye,” I say softly, sad they were leaving but also secretly relieved that Julian is staying with me.