Chapter Thirty-Five
Aubrey
Last night happened in fragments.
Calls that went straight to voicemail. Kev's voice getting quieter every time he left another message. Lex sitting at the kitchen table with his phone face-up beside him, pretending not to stare at it. Ezra making coffee nobody drank.
Levi answered on the second ring. Silverpine already had people out looking for her. He said he'd call the moment he heard anything.
Sit tight.
We still are.
At some point the dark outside the windows went gray and then pale and I was still on the couch with Espie curled against me, and the calls had stopped because there was nobody left to call.
Espie breathes softly against my collarbone as dawn creeps in. I tighten my hold around her before I’m fully awake.
Sera’s pillow remains beside us. I turn toward it and inhale deeply, chasing the fading trace of her scent.
Basil first. Always basil. Then blood orange underneath, and the cedar at the base that means steady, means here, means mine.
Except she's not.
Her scent is quieter than yesterday. Quieter than the day before that. I know what a dead bond feels like. That particular silence, the place in your chest where someone was and then just — isn't. This isn't that. Sera is still there, still a pulse in the bond, faint but present.
Faint is not the same as fine.
Espie twitches in her sleep. A soft whimper. I bring her nose to my neck and kiss her temple until she stills. My heat is building. Hers is too. She curls into me, gardenia thickening the air around us. Wrong timing. Everything about this is wrong timing.
She wakes the way she always does — a sharp breath, a second of checking where she is. Then her eyes clear and she settles back against my shoulder.
“She's not back.” Not sad. Flat in the way Espie goes when she won't let herself reach the sad part yet.
“I know a dead bond.” I press my mouth to her hair. “Sera's not gone. Just far.”
She lifts her head. “How do you know?”
“Because I've felt what gone is.” I hold her gaze. “This isn't it.”
She searches my face. Whatever she finds there is enough. “I don't like her not being here with us.”
“Neither do I.” I purr for her and tuck her head under my chin.
We lie there. I stare at the ceiling and think about Sera out in Silverpine alone. Whether she's cold. Whether she's eaten. Whether she's in some car somewhere convincing herself this is the right call, that leaving was protecting us, that we're better off not knowing where she is.
She's wrong. She's so wrong and she's not here to hear it.
Eventually Espie shifts against me, ready to get up. The hallway is quiet when we leave our bedroom, the house holding its breath the same as we are, and we trudge the two floors down to the kitchen.
Kev's scent reaches us in the stairwell on the last landing. Oakwood without the whiskey. Bitter at the base. The missing eighteen hours have carved into his face and he looks older than he did yesterday and yesterday he already looked too old.
He's out of his chair as we enter the kitchen. Both hands cup my face first, his thumbs under my jaw. He checks me — eyes, scent, whatever he's reading — then pulls Espie in. His mouth presses to her hair. Her arms come around him. His oakwood shifts, just slightly, when he breathes out.
Kev's grip on Espie is tight. The muscle in his jaw keeps jumping.
“She hasn’t answered any of my calls,” he says. “But Levi confirmed she checked in with him at midnight.”
His voice goes flatter after that.
“So she's choosing not to answer.”
The words hit like bruises.
Kev scrubs a hand over his face. “And I keep trying to tell myself there’s a good reason for that, but I can’t come up with one.”
Ezra comes from the stove with toast, sets the plate on the bench, and opens his arms. Espie goes first. I follow. He pulls us both in, one arm each, his purr starting low in his chest. It moves through me, into my ribs, and my shoulders drop.
“You're both eating,” he says. “Whether you want to or not. I need something to do with my hands.”
Espie huffs but sits at the bench and picks up a slice of apple. I sit next to Espie and nurse a cup of coffee Ezra hands to me. Kev picks up his phone. Sets it down again. Looks through the living room to the closed front door.
“There's a nursery on Ferris Road,” Lex says, filling the space.
He's looking at the enclosed patio, the terracotta pots still empty along the wall.
“Those pots aren't going to fill themselves, and staring at that door won't make her walk through it any faster.” A beat.
“I'd rather give you both something real to do than watch us all go quietly mad in here.”
Espie's fingers slide through mine. She looks at the pots.
I can feel the same restless edge under her skin — the same pull I've had in the days before every heat I've ever had.
Everything needs to be right. Everything needs to be in its place.
She doesn't have words for what her body's already counting down toward, but I do.
“Kev keeps his phone with him,” I say. “If she reaches out, we'll come straight back.”
“I’ll set the house cameras too,” Ezra says quietly. “We’ll know the second she comes home.”
Espie keeps looking at the pots for another second before she nods. “If she comes back while we're gone, nothing else matters. We come straight home.”
Nobody argues.
Kev grabs his keys from the counter so fast they jangle against the tile. “Come on. Sitting here isn’t helping anybody.”
Kev keeps both hands on the wheel the whole time. His eyes flick to the phone in the cup holder every few seconds, then back to the road.
Ezra rests his forearm across the back of Espie and me when Kev takes a corner. Usually there’s music on low. Usually he checks mirrors twice and eases around turns like he’s carrying something fragile.
The car rolls to a stop a little too hard at the lights. Kev checks his phone again.
“She’ll answer,” Espie says softly.
Kev nods like he believes her, but we still sit in silence when the light changes to green and Kev accelerates.
The city blurs past outside the window. Silverpine is two hours north. I keep circling that number in my head. Two hours and she’s been out there alone for eighteen of them.
The bond still exists. I can feel it if I reach for it, thin and distant and wrong. But her scent has gone quieter since this morning and every time I notice it panic crawls higher up my throat.
I know what silence feels like. A collar around my neck. A gun pressed to my head. Waiting for a bond that never answered because the people on the other side of it were already dead.
My stomach twists hard enough to hurt. She’s not dead. I would know if she was dead. But people can disappear long before that.
We stop at a set of lights beside a playground. Bright climbing frames. Children shrieking across the bark chips while a woman pushes a stroller along the path beside them, coffee cup balanced in one hand, moving slow and unhurried like none of this could ever break.
I press my fingers against the window. “When did that playground go up?”
“Three years ago,” Lex says from the front seat. He's turned, watching me. “They redid the whole park. There's a new library two blocks over as well.”
Three years ago I was on a leash.
“It's good,” I say, mouth turning to sawdust. “It's a good thing.”
Ezra slides his hand into my hair, his grip drawing tuat just enough to ground me. His purr vibrates through the back seat, and Espie melts more fully against my side.
I unclench my fists and thread my fingers through Espie's. Cedar and chamomile, my own scent going sour at the edges. I pull in a breath and push the sourness out with it.
The further we get from the house, the bigger the world gets. There are buildings I don't recognize, a street corner with a cafe that's new. The world kept building itself while I was gone.
I used to like this. Getting out, moving through the world.
I had favorite streets, a market I went to on Saturdays with Thomas, a park where Liam and I used to run in the mornings and argue about nothing.
I fit in the world once. Now I want the house.
The not-nest beside the bed, our chair on the patio, the small exact radius of safety we've carved out of the last six months.
Axel did that. Him and Mick and Kylie. They took the big world and turned it into something to be afraid of.
I’m not letting him keep this too. He took enough already. He doesn’t get the ordinary pleasure of going somewhere, choosing something, spending an afternoon outside these four walls with people who actually want me there.
This version of me, flinching at open spaces and counting exits, is not forever. It’s not fair to Espie. It’s not fair to them.
My mates.
The word settles and I press my hand flat against my sternum. My mates. All four of them here in this car. A fifth somewhere in Silverpine, and the pull leans toward something just out of reach.
The nursery sits at the end of Ferris Road with a hand-painted sign above the gate and terracotta stacked three deep along the front wall.
Midday light sits flat across the car park, pale and cool.
A wheelbarrow full of pansies waits beside the entrance.
Someone's propped the door open with a brick.
Kev pulls into a space near the entrance and kills the engine.
For a second nobody moves. Then Ezra opens his door.
We get out into the cold, Espie taking my hand immediately, and the alphas arrange themselves around us.
Kev and Lex falling into place on either side of us, Ezra close at Espie's back and we cross the car park.