24. Sloane
Sloane
My knees hit Dash’s hardwood with a hollow thud I barely feel.
Callie crosses the threshold with Theo wrapped around her, and I stay where she left me.
Dash closes the door against the rain while Idris steps inside behind me, but I can't make my body move farther into the room. Callie’s robe is soaked at the hem.
Theo is shaking against her, his face buried in her shoulder, and her bare feet leave wet marks across Dash’s hardwood as she takes three careful steps toward the living room.
She keeps looking at me. Every glance lands and disappears before I can understand what she's asking for. Her hand moves over Theo’s back, trying to soothe him, but her own breathing has begun to fracture. She reaches the edge of the sofa and stops as though the room has tilted beneath her.
“Callie,” I say, then force myself to stay where I am when her shoulders jerk at the sound.
Her eyes find mine again. The fear is still there, tangled with grief and a hunger so familiar that the bond gives one weak, wounded pull beneath my ribs.
I stay on my knees where I dropped, keeping my hands open on my thighs while she stops at the edge of the sofa. I don’t move toward her or make her close the distance before she’s ready.
“I’m here,” I tell her. “You don’t have to come any closer. I only need you to know I’m here.”
Callie makes a small, broken sound. Theo clings tighter when she shifts, but she keeps one arm around him and reaches toward me with the other.
Her fingers touch my shoulder first. I still don’t move. I wait until her hand slides into the front of my shirt and closes there, until she gives one devastated pull that brings her body toward mine.
Then I slowly gather her and Theo down with me, easing Callie across my thighs while Theo remains locked against her side. My arms come around her slowly enough that she can change her mind, and I feel the exact second her body gives up the distance and folds into my chest.
She’s warm. That is the first thing that gets through.
Callie is warm in my arms, her weight real across my lap, her breath damp through my shirt, and her fingers twisted so tightly in the fabric that I hear a seam give near my ribs.
Every part of me wants to lock down and hold, but wanting has done enough damage for one lifetime, so I make my body ask even after hers has already answered.
“I’ve got you,” I say into her hair, and my voice breaks hard enough to hurt. “I’m here, sweetheart. I’m right here, and I’m going to keep asking before I touch you.”
Theo does not let go of either of us. He's tucked against her side in a jagged knot of limbs and grief, one hand fisted in her robe and the other locked around my sleeve like he's furious and relieved in equal measure. He keeps making a low, wounded sound that vibrates through Callie’s ribs and into mine.
Every few breaths, he looks at me as if he's afraid blinking will make one of us disappear, and I press my wrist against his hand because I can't bear for him to think he has to choose which broken piece of this pack to hold.
Idris lowers himself onto the floor beside us with the kind of care that makes the room feel less likely to shatter.
He does not crowd her. He sits close enough that his warmth reaches her back, close enough that if she leans, she will find him, while keeping his hands open on his thighs until Callie’s shoulder brushes him by accident.
Only then does he lift one hand, slow and visible, and rest it at the nape of her neck. His jaw works like he's chewing through glass, but he keeps every ounce of dominance leashed because the wrong edge in any Alpha voice tonight could send her out of her body.
Calliope’s breath hitches, ragged and wet, and the sound tears straight through the center of me.
She isn't crying the way I thought she would when I imagined finding her.
She's vibrating with three months of things she has had to hold alone, and the first pieces come out so thin I have to bend my head closer to hear them.
“The letter,” she whispers against my chest. “Sloane, there was a letter. It had the pack seal. It said I was a liability. It said the hierarchy was shifting and there was not a place for a Beta anymore.”
The growl starts before I can catch it.
It rolls up from somewhere deep and animal, and Callie flinches so sharply my whole body goes cold. I smother the sound at once, pressing my mouth into her hair and forcing my hands to loosen where they have gone tense across her back.
“He lied, Callie,” I say, and I keep my voice low enough to be a promise instead of a command. “Every word of it was a lie. I never signed a letter. I never saw a seal. I would have torn the house apart before I let anyone write that about you and call it truth.”
She does not look up. Her fingers trace the buttons of my shirt as if she's trying to confirm each one belongs to something solid. “There was a call. I heard your voice. You told me Theo’s heat changed everything. You said you could not look at me without feeling guilty for what I was taking from him. You sounded so sure.”
The air leaves my lungs in a sharp, ugly burst. Kade told us what Garrett used.
I read the words voice synthesis in a report and thought I understood the violation.
I didn't understand. Not until Callie says it from my lap, not until I hear that my voice, the one I used to love her with, the one I used to murmur against her neck in the dark, became the blade that cut her out of her own home.
My hand lifts toward her face, then stops before I touch her.
“Sweetheart, I need you to hear me, but you don't have to look at me to do it.” When she stays tucked against me, I press my cheek to her hair and give her the truth where she can take it or leave it.
“I didn't make that call. I never said those things. I was in that house screaming for you in every way I knew how, and when the bond went dark, I thought something had happened to you. Then Garrett put a different story in front of us, and I lost time trying to find the seam in it.”
“The key didn’t work,” she says, and now the nightmare has opened enough that she can't stop the pieces from falling out.
“I went back. I ran to the door, and the key would not turn. Then the officer came. He said you called. He said you wanted me arrested for trespassing because I was a danger to the Omega.”
Theo makes a sound against her shoulder.
It is small and brutal, and his hand tightens on my sleeve until his nails bite through the fabric.
Idris closes his eyes for one second, only one, and when he opens them again, his scent sharpens.
He still doesn’t move closer. He keeps his hand steady at Callie’s neck, a careful weight instead of a claim.
“I didn't know you were outside,” I say, and the words taste like blood.
“I didn't know the key failed. I didn't know anyone used my name with the police until after you were already gone. Garrett waited until Theo’s heat had crashed and the house was full of panic, and he used all of it to keep us looking in the wrong direction.
That isn't an excuse. It is the shape of the trap I failed to see.”
Callie’s eyes finally fill. Two heavy tears slide down her cheeks, but her voice stays eerily flat, the way it gets when something inside her has gone too far away to reach safely.
“There was money in my account. Five thousand dollars. Like a payoff. Like a clean break. Then a message from your number said we would talk about the bond removal after the heat. It said it would be kinder to do it legally.”
The bond removal. The procedure. The permanent damage Garrett knew would terrify her because he understood exactly how to turn biology into a threat.
Cutting the bite out of her wouldn’t just remove my mark.
It would injure the way she feels our pack, ruin the parts of her body that learned to answer mine, and leave her with a silence so complete that even standing in front of her might never reach the places I once touched.
My forehead lowers to hers because I need one point of contact that does not take more than she gives. “I love you,” I whisper, and the words come because nothing else is simple enough to survive this much damage. “I love you, Callie. I love you. I love you.”
I keep saying it, into every pause because she spent ninety days believing those words had been emptied out and handed back to her as legal waste.
When her breathing catches, I give the words again.
When Theo shakes against her side, I give them to him too, because Garrett made my love sound conditional and I need the first repair to be the simplest truth I own.
“I don't know what to believe,” she sobs, tears streaming down her cheeks, her hands fisting in my jacket while her body folds around the hurt.
“I believed the lie for so long, Sloane. I woke up every morning and reminded myself that I was extra. I was useful until I was not useful. I made myself believe it so it would hurt less, but it never hurt less. It never stopped.”
I pull her closer because she presses closer first, and my arms overlap with Theo’s around her.
We are a mess on Dash’s floor, all damp clothes and shaking hands and grief that has nowhere clean to go.
The bond is there, flickering like a candle in a draft, weak and jagged but alive enough that I can feel the faint pulse of her through the scarred place in my chest.
“You were never extra, Calliope,” I say. “You were never the part we could cut away and keep breathing. Garrett used my name to make you believe you were disposable, and I will spend the rest of my life correcting that without making my love another thing you have to carry.”