23. Calliope
Calliope
The rain hits my face before I understand I have stepped outside.
One second, Dash is beside me in the doorway, solid and warm and careful, his arm near mine without closing around me.
The next, the porch boards are cold under my bare feet and Theo is in front of me, shaking so hard the oversized coat around his shoulders keeps slipping down one side.
He's thinner than he was when I left. His warm brown skin is drawn tight with exhaustion, his cheekbones sharper, his dark hair damp from the rain and plastered to his temples.
One of my old gray cardigans is crushed against his chest beneath the coat, the sleeves twisted in his fists like he has been holding on to it for all three months.
He makes a sound.
It isn't a word. It is a broken, high-pitched hitch of breath that bypasses every careful place in me and goes straight to my marrow.
My body moves before fear can stop it, before memory can remind me of police lights and recorded voices and the awful, sterile language of being removed.
I reach for him because Theo is standing in the rain with my sweater in his hands, and every version of myself that tried to survive without him tears open at once.
Dash’s hand touches my shoulder, steady and warm. He does not pull me back. He does not close his fingers. He only leans close enough for his voice to reach me through the rain and says, “Callie, I need to know you’re choosing this.”
I can't find my voice. I nod so hard my throat hurts, and Dash steps with me instead of in front of me. The door stays open behind us, light spilling across the porch, and I feel him remain close enough to catch me if my knees fail while leaving the space in front of me.
Theo does not wait after that.
He crashes into me with enough force to knock the breath out of my chest. I stumble back against Dash’s arm, and then I am full of Theo’s shaking body, Theo’s wet face, Theo’s hands fisting in my robe as if cloth and skin are the only laws left in the world.
He sobs into my shoulder, great, racking sounds that make his whole frame jerk, and the scent of him hits me through the rain: cardamom gone sharp and peach blossom crushed thin by grief, with the underlying warmth of a heat survived and still unsettled.
“Callie,” he cries against my neck, and my name breaks apart in his mouth. His lips find my cheek, my jaw, the corner of my mouth in frantic, apologetic little presses that feel less like kisses than proof he's real. “Callie, Callie, Callie, I wanted you.”
My arms lock around him.
For three months, the worst lie was not the police report or the money or the voice that sounded like Sloane telling me to stay away.
The worst lie was Theo. The softest part of the pack.
The one who had reached for my hair and curled into my side and looked at me like my presence made the room less loud.
I believed he had finally gotten what an Omega needed and realized I was something extra once the nest had what it really needed.
“I wanted you,” he chokes out, the words wet and stumbling. “Callie, I wanted you. I tried to ask. I tried to say your name, but it wouldn’t come. I never wanted you to go. Please. Please believe me.”
His shoulder presses against my mouth as he buries closer.
The oversized coat has slipped down one side during the collision, dragging the collar of his shirt with it, and beneath the damp wool I catch black tea and rain along the exposed edge of his shoulder.
My fingers move there carefully, brushing the skin beside the bite before I look at him for permission.
Theo trembles before he nods, like he knows what I am asking without me finding words for it.
“Idris,” he whispers. “Temporary. It was supposed to fade weeks ago.” His fingers twist harder in my robe, desperate to keep the closeness now that he has it. “I hated it when it started going quiet. I hated losing him too. So he bites me again at night. Just enough. Not forever yet.”
Something inside me cracks open at the same time something settles.
Theo was holding himself together with temporary marks and stolen sweaters and the same impossible ache I carried alone.
Fear threads through the way he clings to me, but fear is only one part of it.
He presses closer because he wants me, because some part of him still recognizes my arms as the place he chooses when the world goes quiet too.
“I believe you,” I whisper into his wet hair, and the words come out torn but whole. “Theo, I believe you.”
His knees buckle.
Dash moves with me before I hit the porch.
His arm braces my back, and I sink down with Theo because there is no separating from him now, no polite distance that makes sense with his hands knotted in my robe and his sobs breaking hot against my throat.
The rain soaks through the hem of my nightgown.
The porch boards bite cold into my knees.
I don't care. I need the weight of him. I need the pain of his fingers digging into my ribs because it tells me he's here, that the lie didn't swallow him completely.
Then Sloane says my name.
“Calliope.”
It is ruined, stripped of every loud, easy certainty that used to fill rooms before he entered them.
It should not be enough to hurt me. It is only my name, spoken softly from a few feet away, with the rain blurring the edges of it.
My body does not know that. My body hears his voice and remembers the officer at the door, the warning, the recorded words, the messages that made my hand shake so hard I dropped my phone on motel carpet.
I flinch so violently Theo feels it.
His sobbing cuts off. A low growl vibrates against my chest, small and wounded and real, aimed toward the porch steps where Sloane stands.
It isn't strong enough to frighten anyone, but it changes the air.
Theo is shaking apart in my arms, and still some broken, loyal part of him wants to put himself between me and the Alpha he loves.
I force myself to look up.
Sloane is standing at the edge of the porch, rain dripping from his hair and jaw, his hands open at his sides with the palms facing me.
He looks older. The deep lines around his eyes didn't exist before, and the dark circles beneath them are bruised into his skin.
His face is wet from rain and tears, and he looks like a man who walked through fire only to discover that burning was not the end of it.
He stops the second he sees what his voice did to me.
His hand twitches toward me, then pulls back so fast his fingers curl into his own coat instead. He just stands there with his chest heaving while Theo growls at him from my arms, and the raw hope in his eyes makes my lungs feel too heavy to use.
“I didn't do it, sweetheart,” he says, and the old endearment breaks at the edge. “I never called them. I never told you to leave. I have been looking for you since the second I felt you go silent. I thought you had shut the bond because you didn't want me anymore.”
I look from him to Idris. Idris stands behind Sloane with both hands visible, rain darkening the shoulders of his coat, his jaw locked so tightly it changes the shape of his face. A cold, clinical horror begins to take root under my ribs.
Sloane could be lying. Garrett taught me how easy it is for voices to become weapons, how official paper can turn a life into evidence against itself. But either Sloane is the most accomplished actor I have ever seen, or we have both been bleeding on opposite sides of the same locked door.
“The police,” I manage, and the words feel like glass in my throat. Theo’s fingers tighten in my robe. “The officer said you called. He said you wanted me removed for trespassing.”
Sloane’s face loses what little color it has left. His mouth opens, but the first breath gives him nothing. Dash shifts beside me, close enough that I feel his attention sharpen, and Sloane seems to remember every warning my house has placed between us.
“I was in the nest,” Sloane says, voice rough enough to scrape.
“I was with Theo. His heat had crashed, and everything in the house was wrong.
I didn't know you came back. I didn't know anyone met you at the door.
I didn't know there was a report until later, and by then Garrett had already built another wall around it.”
His hand lifts a fraction, then drops. His restraint ruins me more than a reach would have.
“Garrett made it look like you had chosen silence,” Sloane says, and his voice cracks around the name.
“He kept telling us you needed space, that pushing would make it worse, that every attempt to reach you would only prove we cared more about our panic than your choice.” His hands stay open at his sides, empty and shaking.
“I hated it. I hated every second of it. But the bond was dark, your number went nowhere, and every path we tried had Garrett standing in front of it with another reason we could not use it yet.”
Theo makes a small, broken sound against me, and Sloane’s face folds around it.
“I thought you had shut me out because I had failed you,” Sloane says. “I thought you hated me enough to survive leaving. I never thought you were alone somewhere believing I was the one who sent you away.”
Theo pulls back just enough to look at me.
His eyes are red and swollen, his lashes clumped with rain and tears.
“He told me you didn't love me anymore,” he says, and the words come out careful, like each one has to be carried with both hands.
“He said you were happier without the noise. He said if I kept asking, I would make everything worse for the Alphas.”
My breath disappears. “No,” I whisper, and the sound barely exists.