Chapter Thirty-Six
Espie
Ihaven't slept. A hundred fucking years would be too soon if I ever saw one of them again.
I pull Kev's flannel off the back of a kitchen chair and press it to my face.
The fabric is soft, cold, holds nothing but oakwood and dry whiskey, muted like he's been wrung out. I grip it tight and keep walking.
“Grab Lex's scarf,” I call to Aubrey. “The one by the door.”
Aubrey holds it to his chest as though it holds the answer to everything. “I've got it. What about Ezra's sweater?”
I indicate the heap of crumpled navy. Clothing won't bring back our missing alpha. I know this, but it doesn't make any difference. “It's on the couch.”
We move through the living room, gathering. Needing. Acting on a crazy impulse embedded in my genes, Aubrey at my side unable to deny the same ridiculous urges.
Our arms are full when I stop outside Sera's bedroom. Aubrey stops beside me. Her scent comes beneath the door. I push the door open. Her scent hits me, concentrated and full. Aubrey makes a low sound beside me.
Her room is neat. A duffel sits in the corner. The bed is barely disturbed, and her sweatshirt is draped over the chair by the window. Grey. Oversized. She wore it the morning she made breakfast and pretended she wasn't watching us eat.
I cross the room, lift it off the chair and push my face into it.
Basil and blood orange and cedar, concentrated, nothing between me and her scent now, just her, just Sera, right there in the fabric.
The breath that comes out of me shakes all the way up from somewhere I can't name.
I press the sweatshirt harder against my face and stand there in the middle of her room with my arms full and my eyes burning and something sits in my throat that won't go down.
I don't cry. I won't cry. I press my eyes shut and breathe her in instead.
Aubrey wraps around me from behind, his chin dropping to my shoulder, his own breath gone ragged.
“I'm angry at her for leaving.” The words scrape out, raw at the edges. “She didn't tell us what she was thinking. Feeling. She just left and—”
“I texted her to put her big girl panties on and she still left.” Aubrey's voice is quiet against my hair. “I'm furious at her.”
The tears come then, the ones I'd been holding since Kev walked into the greenhouse yesterday with that look on his face. Aubrey holds me tighter, and we stand in the middle of Sera's room and fall to pieces together.
I wipe my face with the back of my hand. Take a breath. Take another. The shaking doesn't stop but it gets smaller, manageable.
“She was wrong, Aubrey. About not being enough. She was wrong.”
“When we find her, I'm going to put her in the middle of the nest and sit on her until she understands.” The certainty in his voice is absolute.
“If we find her,” I whisper.
“She'll come back.” Aubrey rubs my back, his grip unsteady. “She will.”
He's trying to convince both of us. Neither of us has a crystal ball.
It took the rest of the night, all three alphas bundling us between them, Lex's chin on Aubrey's head, Kev's arms tight enough to hurt in the best way, Ezra's purr working through the stack of us in our chair until exhaustion finally won, before either of us could semi-function again.
I don't know if that counts as okay. It's the closest thing to it we have.
Aubrey links our fingers. “Come on. Let’s take all of this to our nest.”
He tugs me out. I keep the sweatshirt folded against my chest, her scent as close as I can get it. We leave her door open behind us.
“Is there any word?” I pause in the kitchen doorway.
Kev sits at the table, phone flat on the wood in front of him, screen dark. He plows his fingers through his hair. “Nothing yet.”
“Levi said they had a location. That’s where she was?” Aubrey says.
“They've searched it several times.” Lex turns from the window. “There’s no trace of activity. No sign that anyone was there.”
“Then where?” My voice cracks. “Where would she go?”
Ezra comes to us before I finish the sentence.
He pulls in Aubrey, then wraps his other arm around me, drawing us both against his chest. I still have Kev's flannel folded over one arm, Lex's scarf, Ezra's sweatshirt, all of it pressed between us as he holds on.
I press my face to him and breathe. Fresh linen, woodsmoke.
There's a burnt edge underneath that catches in my nose, acrid and wrong, the scent of a man running on no sleep and too much fear for too long.
“Have Wallace's alphas been seen again?” Aubrey asks, his voice muffled against Ezra's shoulder. “The ones who were at the nursery.”
Kev's phone hits the table harder than it needed to. He doesn't answer.
They found us. Then they disappeared again.
I start shaking, hands first, spreading up through my arms, old fear rising through muscle memory. “How did they find us? How did they know where we'd be?”
Kev shakes his head. “We don't know yet.”
“Levi and Pack Hawthorn are working on it,” Lex says. His voice is level but his Earl Grey has gone sharp at the edges. “There are a few possibilities. None of them are good.”
“Then tell me the possibilities.” I look at him straight. “Don't manage me.”
Lex meets my gaze. A beat passes before he nods. “There could have been a leak somewhere in the search network. A tail we didn't pick up early enough. Or they've been tracking the house and waited for us to move.” He pauses. “We don't know which. Until we do, we have to stay here where it's safe.”
“What if they got to Sera first?” Aubrey's voice cracks on the last word.
“Sera is highly capable. We have every resource at Silverpine looking for her. She is trained, armed, and she knows what she's doing.” Kev keeps his hands at my face and makes one slow pass along my cheekbones. “We will find her.”
The words are true. The fear underneath them is also true. The dread doesn't leave. It just settles beside Kev’s steadiness and refuses to move. I take Aubrey's hand and take him to the patio. To our chair. Nothing about it is right. I swallow frustration that has nowhere to go.
Aubrey’s discord presses against mine, and beneath it the same wordless insistence that this needs fixing right now.
I pull the top blanket off and drop it on the patio stones. Then the next. Then the shirts, the pillows, the clothing we had there, all of it, stripped back to nothing heaped with the collection we’d scavenged.
Aubrey starts sorting. I start layering.
I already know what goes where, cedar next to linen next to oakwood, the scents building in an order that makes something in my hindbrain go quiet and focused.
Time slips sideways. The kitchen sounds recede.
The cold air on the patio doesn't register.
There is only the nest and getting it right.
It has to be perfect. Nothing else is good enough.
Aubrey smooths down a wrinkle. I tug Kev’s flannel into a better position, thicker fabric shielding the outer edge. Together we build the nest; arranging, tucking, pressing everything into shape.
Finally, Aubrey lays Sera’s gray sweatshirt at the centre, exactly where we’ll sleep wrapped around it. The deep, restless tension inside me finally goes quiet when we finally crawl over the lip of our creation and curl in the pillowed middle.
The blankets settle around us. I pull Sera’s sweatshirt against my face and breathe her in while Aubrey curls into my side.
Then I notice the alphas. They’ve stopped at the edge of the patio instead of coming closer.
Kev stands to the left, shoulders jammed straight. Lex holds himself still with his hands in his pockets, eyes fixed on us like he’s waiting for permission to breathe. Ezra stands nearest the door with his arms folded low across his stomach, his scent edged with fear and exhausted relief.
None of them move toward the nest.
They’re waiting for us to decide if they belong in it.
Mine. Not a decision. Just truth. Mine. These three men who have not once, not in any moment I can name, taken anything I did not offer. Who built a greenhouse and bought heritage tomatoes and held me while I cried and said needing is allowed here.
Mine. Ours. The knowing is absolute. It is the deepest thing in me, sitting below fear, below conditioning. It is simply there, immovable, the same as my own heartbeat.
Aubrey tenses around me, his knowing pressing against mine. The two of us are certain together. I reach out from the nest and open my hand.
“Alpha,” I say. “Please.”
Aubrey lifts his head from my hair. He studies Kev across the nest, and his want is in the air between them, clear as anything he could have spoken.
Kev crosses the patio in four steps, all that careful restraint disappearing at once. Lex is already coming from the other side, and Ezra has dropped his arms and is moving with the same unhurried speed, all three of them converging.
Kev settles on Aubrey's side, drawing Aubrey in against his chest in one motion, his big arms wrapping full around him, dropping his chin to Aubrey's head.
His oakwood opens, the whiskey note warming, and Aubrey makes a relieved sound against his collarbone.
Lex slides one arm around my shoulders, his sandalwood and Earl Grey settling around us both.
He brings his other hand up and presses it to the back of my head, and the pressure unlocks the tension between my shoulder blades.
“Omega,” he murmurs against my hair. Ezra comes in behind me, curling around my back, his purr starting low in his chest before he's even fully settled.
“We've got you. Both of you. Right here,” Kev says.
The purr moves through the nest and into my bones. Lex’s chest vibrates against mine and Kev’s deeper rumble joins it a second later, filling the patio with sound until my whole body starts to unclench.
Ezra holds me steady from behind. Lex is warm against my front, heartbeat slow under my hand. Kev stretches across the blankets beside Aubrey, broad and solid and real.
The nest smells like pack. Like cedar and sandalwood and linen and oakwood and Aubrey's chamomile and my gardenia and underneath it all, wound through the very center, blood orange and crushed basil and warm cedar. Sera, still here, held in the fabric we built around her.
“She should be here,” Aubrey says. Quiet. Not asking for an answer.
“She will be.” Ezra's voice, steady at my back. “There’s no option where she isn’t.”
I tip toward the sound of their purring and the heat of their bodies. My thoughts don't disappear. They just soften enough to breathe through. The panic loosens its grip inch by inch.
Heat moves low under my skin, making everything feel sharper and too close to the surface. Aubrey’s scent deepens beside me, cedar richening into something warmer, and I feel the same slow ache building in him too.
Kev's phone buzzes. He reaches for the phone without letting go of Aubrey. One arm stays wrapped around him while the other stretches for the screen.
The second Kev looks down, something in his face gives.
Not all the way.
Enough.
Lex goes still beside me. Ezra's purr catches once before starting again.
Kev lifts his head and finds my eyes first.
“That was Ronan.”
His voice has gone completely flat.
“Sera’s car has been found.”
He stops.
“It was abandoned.”