Chapter 26
Elowen’s Apartment
Adam
Elowen's apartment ends up being only forty minutes away.
Perrin spends most of the drive telling the story of how we all met, his whole body turned to where she's wedged between us in the back seat.
He starts from the beginning. How Cliff and Raff were casual for a year or two before things got serious.
How I met Raff at a bar one night, went home with him, and fell in love with both alphas almost instantly.
Then Perrin shared how he visited me one summer and the next thing we knew we were a proper pack.
Elowen is sweet the whole time.
Leaning in, asking questions, and laughing at exactly the right moment. She looks at Perrin like she’s genuinely curious about us, and I find that harder to stay guarded against than I anticipated.
Soon enough, the GPS on Cliff’s phone tells him to turn right, and we pull into a parking lot, before he kills the engine.
I look up through the windshield and go still.
The building in front of us looks less like an apartment complex and more like a condemned motel.
There are two stories of weathered beige stucco with exterior walkways and metal railings that are slightly orange with rust. There’s a vending machine near what I assume is the office with one flickering light.
“Okay,” Raff’s voice is tight, telling me he’s as surprised as I am. “I'll put down the third row of seats to make room.” He glances back at Elowen. “I also brought some ties in case we need to strap anything to the roof.”
"I really don't have much," she says for the tenth time. In fact, she insisted she had so little, she tried to keep all of us from coming, but Cliff wasn’t having it.
“We’ll see,” Raff says with a smile, then he opens his door.
We all climb out and follow Elowen up the exterior staircase to the second floor, our footsteps loud on the metal grating. She stops at a door with a tarnished number seven screwed slightly crooked into the wood and completely freezes.
"Shit.” Her eyes go wide, realizing something.
“What’s wrong?” Perrin asks.
"My purse.” She drops her face into her hands. "I left it at the Morder. I don’t have a key.” She looks at my brother, and shakes her head. “I’ll have to go talk to Ed at the main office.” She grimaces like that’s the last thing she wants to do. “I’ll be right back.”
But before she can move an inch, Cliff steps forward, lines his shoulder up with the door, and hits it once. The lock gives with a soft, splintering pop, and the door swings open like it was never locked at all.
Elowen stares at the open doorway for a moment. “Oh.” She blinks a few times, then laughs a little too loudly. "Thank you.”
"Of course." Cliff steps back and gestures for her to go in first.
She ducks her head as she passes him, and we all follow her in single file. I follow behind Raff, then I stop right inside the threshold, and freeze, making Perrin walk smack into my back.
"Sorry," he says automatically, then looks past me and goes quiet.
We stand there together for a moment, taking it in.
The omega wasn't kidding.
There's nothing here.
The living room is empty except for a folding chair against the wall and a floor lamp with a crooked shade. The beige carpet is stained with a thin worn path from the door to the bedroom.
There's a tiny kitchen table pushed against the wall. It has a ridiculously tall barstool next to it, the kind that belongs at a kitchen island, not a regular table. I stare at it for a second, imagining trying to sit there to eat a meal.
She’d have to eat completely hunched over with her knees near her chin and elbows at eye level.
I glance at Perrin, who immediately meets my eyes.
Neither of us says anything, because what the hell is there to say?
"Everything I need is in the bedroom," Elowen says, already moving. Her voice is a little tight, making me wonder if she’s embarrassed.
I know I would be.
Raff peels off into the kitchen without a word. I watch him open the first cabinet. Then the second. Both are completely empty. His jaw shifts as he opens the third one, then he gives up.
“There’s nothing,” he mouths the words to me, and I nod.
“Come on.” I jerk my head toward the only door, following Cliff and Perrin into the bedroom.
Elowen is sitting in front of the only piece of furniture in the place. It’s an enormous dark wood thing, completely out of proportion with the small room. She pulls open the bottom drawer and my eyes go wide.
The thing is filled with medication.
Rows of orange and white pharmacy bottles, labels all facing the same way.
I see cooling packs, syringes, and scent patches arranged by dosage.
In the back, there are two brands of scent-neutralizing spray, one nearly empty.
One I recognize, but the other must be prescription grade because I've never seen the label before.
I look up and find Cliff standing in the middle of the room, arms crossed, watching Elowen pack a large duffle bag. The pack alpha is very still in the way he gets when he's trying very hard not to say something out loud.
His eyes move over her slowly, tracking every bottle she pulls out, every careful stack she makes.
Then his gaze shifts.
It slides past me, over my shoulder, and his brows lift.
I turn around, and I see the saddest bed that's ever existed.
It's a cot mattress on the floor. Three inches thick at most, the foam so compressed it's barely there, the worn fabric stained at one corner.
Two blankets on top. One so threadbare I can see light through it.
The other lumpy, the stuffing inside shifted into hard little knots from years of washing.
And there's not a single pillow.
Just looking at it makes my joints hurt.
The pity hits me so fast and so hard I have to look away.
"I forgot the boxes in the car." Raff's voice comes from behind me. "Perrin, you want to grab them with me?"
"Yeah." My brother’s already moving. "Sure."
Their voices drop to something low and private as they move through the living room. I can hear the murmur of it but can't make out the words. The front door opens and closes.
And then it's the three of us.
Cliff hasn't moved from the middle of the room. Elowen is bent over the duffel, rearranging the medication bottles, her hands moving with focused precision. But I can see the flush that's crept up the back of her neck, visible even above the collar of her shirt.
She stares into the bag.
"It looks sad, doesn't it," she says to no one in particular. Her voice is light, almost breezy, and she lets out a small laugh that doesn't quite land. "I mean, I know it looks sad." Her laugh dies in the quiet room.
I can practically feel the discomfort pouring off her.
It lands somewhere in my sternum and stays there, a dull, pressing weight that sends a restless energy through my hands that has nowhere to go.
I've always been like this.
Other people's unease gets under my skin like a splinter and sits there, impossible to ignore, until I do something about it.
"Minimalism is very on trend," I say, desperately needing to cut the tension. “In fact, I read a whole article on how celebrities spend thousands on decorators to get this exact vibe.” I smile, hoping the joke lands.
Elowen laughs. It's soft and a little surprised, like she wasn't expecting it, and her whole face opens up with it. The embarrassment doesn't vanish completely, but it loses its grip on her, and when she looks at me, there's something in her eyes that tells me she’s thankful.
“So.” I cross to the dresser before I've fully decided to, and pull open the top drawer. "What goes with us?" I ask. “Is there anything you want to purge?”
“Um, yeah. I don’t know.” She lets out another nervous laugh as she stands. “I guess everything comes with us.”
We work through the drawers together. There isn't much. Two drawers worth, maybe three. She hands things to me and I fold them properly and stack them in the single box Raff and Perrin brought back from the car.
We don't talk about the nest on the floor, the broken lamp in the living room, or the barstool in the kitchen.
We just pack.
When the last drawer is empty, Cliff looks around the room. "Anything else?"
Elowen is quiet for a second. “One more thing.” She crouches down and pulls the bottom dresser drawer all the way out, setting it on the floor. Then she reaches into the empty space where it sat and presses down along the base.
A false bottom lifts free.
She reaches in and pulls out a notebook.
It's seen better days. The cover is warped and soft at the corners, the spine cracked in two places. Scraps of paper jut out from between the pages at every angle. I can see a few receipts, a torn envelope, and what looks like a napkin with handwriting on it.
Half the pages are dog-eared, and a rubber band holds the whole thing together, stretched thin and slightly tacky with age.
She holds it to her chest, hugging it tight. And it’s suddenly clear that this is the only thing in this room that actually matters.
Cliff’s dark eyes narrow at it, before looking up at Elowen's face, but she’s too busy staring at her feet. “Anything else, omega?” he asks softly.
She quickly shakes her head, then whispers, “No. That's it.”
“Okay, then.” Perrin claps his hands together, and the sound is way too loud, making both me and Elowen flinch. He grimaces, and mouths “sorry” before moving toward the box. “I’m gonna put this in the car.”
Raff grabs the duffel off the floor, slinging it over one shoulder, as Cliff moves to Elowen's side. His hand slides down her back, slow and deliberate, and she leans into him, tucking herself under his arm.
I watch him holding her for a second, waiting for the familiar twist of jealousy in my chest.
It doesn't come.
Instead, I feel bad for her.
This small woman who slept on a cot mattress on the floor for god knows how long, ate alone at a table with the wrong size barstool, and kept her most important possession hidden in a false bottom drawer because she didn't trust anything or anyone enough to keep it anywhere else.
I push my hands into my pockets and follow them out.
The living room is as depressing on the way out as it was on the way in, with it’s sad carpet and broken lamp.
"I think the door might be broke,” Perrin says as he stops in the open doorway. “I mean, I closed it on my way in, but it's wide open."
"That would be because Cliff broke it," Raff says, nodding at the cracked door frame.
The wood around the lock is visibly splintered, the strike plate hanging loose from a single screw.
Raff turns back toward the room, a smile already pulling at the corner of his mouth like he's about to say something to Cliff about it. “You could have—”
The alpha freezes and his smile falls.
Raff’s whole body changes in the span of a single second.
The easy looseness drains out of him, and something hard and alert takes its place. His chin drops, his weight shifting forward onto the balls of his feet. His eyes are fixed on the kitchen doorway.
"I knew you'd eventually come home." An unknown voice carries from the kitchen behind me.
The cold moves through the room so fast it's almost physical. I feel Elowen go rigid beside me without looking at her. Cliff is already moving, stepping forward, his arm coming back to press both me and Elle behind him.
I don't breathe.
I can’t.