Busted Seams
Lyra
My heart slams against my ribs the whole way to my father’s office.
I keep my chin level and my steps even, one foot in front of the other, past the portraits of dead alphas who never had to look at me.
We pass a tall mirror in a gilt frame, and I catch myself in it without meaning to. The woman looking back is composed. Calm. Her face is smooth and pleasant, her shoulders back in a scandalous dress. A picture of a lady on her way to have a civil conversation.
I want to scream at her. I want to grab her by the shoulders and shake her until the mask cracks, because inside I am coming apart at every seam, but none of it reaches the surface.
My mother trained me well to hide every real emotion I feel. And it never fails. Even now, when I want nothing more than to scream my lungs out, it holds, and I don’t know how to stop it.
Father opens the heavy door to his office and gestures us inside like a host.
I step through, and my eyes go straight to the couch.
That fucking navy velvet couch, against the far wall. A phantom pain pinches between my legs, my body remembering that horrific night.
I stop breathing.
My father is talking. His mouth is moving and words are coming out of it, low and clipped, but I can't hear a single one. There's only the couch, and the ache, and the sound of my own blood roaring in my ears.
I can't look away from it.
I'm nailed to the spot, my whole body gone rigid, every muscle locked down tight.
Then Adrian steps in front of me, blocking out the rest of the room.
His broad chest fills my whole view, and all I can see is his dark blue shirt stretching across those big muscles. The couch is gone. Just gone. There's nothing in front of me now but him.
I drag my eyes up to his face, to those steady blue-gray eyes already searching mine, and the world rushes back in all at once.
I'm okay. I'm safe. Adrian is here, and no one is ever going to hurt me again.
And then I feel Nico.
My pack alpha is close. Somewhere just outside these walls, and he's found the thread that runs between us and he's pouring himself down it. Warmth floods into me, steady and strong and certain, calm pressing into every cold, screaming place inside me until my lungs finally remember how to work.
I pull in a breath, and it goes all the way down.
"Are you even listening to me?" Father’s voice cuts through my thoughts, and my head snaps in his direction.
My spine wants to fold. My head wants to drop. Every instinct I have is already reaching for the words that make it stop, yes Father, I'm sorry Father, of course Father.
But Adrian speaks for me. "I’m going to ask you to watch your tone," he says, his voice never rising "I won’t let you speak to my mate like that."
Aldric snarls, an ugly sound low in his throat, and something absurd rises up in me.
The urge to laugh.
It climbs my chest fast and wild, because I have waited my whole life to see someone tell my father to watch his tone, and I never once believed it would happen.
Nico feels my slip of happiness, and our bond sparks bright. He pushes another wave of good feeling into me, warm and steadying, holding me up from the inside.
Aldric makes another displeased sound before collecting himself. He straightens his cuffs, and when he looks at Adrian again his face has smoothed into something businesslike.
"Let's speak plainly, then." He moves behind his desk, planting both hands on the polished wood. "I'm a practical man. Whatever it is you think you have here," he glances between Adrian and me, "I'm prepared to make it worth your while to walk away." He names a number.
It's obscene. It's more money than most people see in ten lifetimes, thrown across a desk to buy me back. Adrian would be a fool to turn it down.
I feel about as human as a dusty painting in one of the sitting rooms.
"No," Adrian says firmly. "You can’t pay me off. I’m not going anywhere."
And just like that, my heart soars, but my father’s jaw tightens.
"I'll be clear, since you seem confused about your position," Father growls. "You’re thirty days outside any rights to demand any kind of dowry." He smiles like he’s won some invisible game. "You won't see a single cent of the Van Houten estate."
"I don't want a goddamn thing from you," Adrian bites back.
He shifts, squaring up to my father, but his voice stays level.
"Now, let me be clear about why we're here, Aldric. Lyra wanted to say goodbye. That's the whole of it. She asked to see her family one last time, and I brought her because she asked, and because I'll give my mate just about anything she wants."
Warmth pushes up through the center of my chest, and my mouth wants to curve. I press my lips together to keep the smile down, trying like hell not to melt.
"This was a courtesy." Adrian jabs a finger at the floor, his intense eyes holding my father's without so much as a flicker. "Not a negotiation. There's nothing here for you to buy, or threaten, or win. She’s leaving with me."
I’m halfway into rubbing myself against the sexiest alpha on earth, when the office door bangs open.
I startle and spin toward the sound just as my mother sweeps in. Her gown is a column of pale ice-blue silk, cut sharp and simple.
Her platinum hair is immaculate, pale green eyes already hunting, and my whole body goes small on instinct. She crosses straight to me, and before I can pull back her cold fingers close on my jaw and wrench my head to the side, baring my throat.
"Let go of her." Adrian's arm comes around me and pulls me back against him. A growl rolls out of his chest, and my mother's hand tears away.
Her eyes go wide, but she isn't looking at Adrian. She's looking at Nico's teeth printed into my neck, and her face has gone white with fury.
"I can't believe you let this person mark you." Her lip curls around the word like it's beneath her to say it.
Then I hear the distinct clack of dress shoes on marble, out in the hall. Slow. Measured. A sound I know in my teeth, in the soles of my feet, in the phantom ache that hasn't fully left me since I looked at that couch.
My whole body goes rigid.
The hair on my arms lift. A cold prickle races up the back of my neck and down both wrists, and I could swear the air has gone thick with clove and dark musk, that heavy scent crawling into the back of my throat.
But I don't know if it's real.
I don't know if he's actually here or if my body has conjured him out of pure terror, dragging the smell of him up from that awful night to torment me.
The footsteps stop at the door.
Then Crispin walks in.
And every drop of blood in my body turns to ice.
The alpha fills the doorway, thick through the neck and shoulders, that dark clove and musk reaching across the room and closing around my throat. His gray eyes find the mark on my neck, and he goes still.
I feel the sharp pinch between my legs flare again, my body remembering his weight, remembering his mouth on me, remembering all of it at once.
I can't breathe.
My skin goes cold and clammy, my hands go numb. My knees try to buckle under me, but I can’t move. Somewhere far off my own pulse is slamming so hard it hurts. Every part of me is screaming to run, but not a single muscle will move.
Adrian must scent my fear, because he shifts, sweeping me behind him, putting his whole body between me and Crispin. I fist both hands in the back of his shirt and hold on like it's the only solid thing left in the world.
Then the whole room comes apart.
"So you’re the animal who snatched my daughter off the street?" My mother rounds on Adrian, her voice climbing. "You will pay for what you’ve done to my daughter."
"I am calling the police." Father has a phone in his hand. "You have thirty seconds to explain why I shouldn't have you arrested for kidnapping."
"Go ahead." Adrian doesn't give them an inch. "Call them. You can explain to the police how your mated, adult daughter left home and chose to stay with her mate. There's no case here, and you both know it." His jaw is tight, his voice climbing to match theirs now.
"How dare you!" Lavinia growls.
"You can threaten me all night." Adrian meets her rage. "You can wave that phone around and talk about lawyers. It doesn't change a single thing. She's mine, she's mated, and she's not going anywhere with either of you." He points a finger between the two of them. "So both of you can go to hell."
My father yells something back, but I can’t hear him. All I can see is Crispin inching a little bit closer. When he speaks his voice is low and steady, aimed straight past Adrian at me, like no one else is in the room.
"Lyra. Look at me, omega." His voice is soft, almost tender, and it makes my stomach heave. "I understand what happened. You were taken, and you were forced, and none of it was your fault."
Adrian doesn't move. He stands there, a wall between us, his hand reaching back to press flat and warm against my hip as my father threatens him again.
"I forgive you," Crispin goes on, and I feel sick.
"Do you hear me? I forgive you. It shames me to think of it, some filthy laborer putting his hands on you, rutting you like an animal, but I don't hold it against you.
" His voice hardens. "I have the best lawyers in the country.
We can have this mating annulled, the claim thrown out, all of it undone.
You can be clean again. You can still be mine. "
"You need to back the fuck up," Adrian says, finally seeing Crispin. Every word comes out slow and deliberate, and I can feel the effort it's costing him to keep his voice level. "All of you. Right now."
"She deserves better than filth." My mother's lip curls as she looks Adrian up and down, taking in his simple dress shirt, his boots, and his callused hands.
"My daughter is a Van Houten. She was never meant to spend her life with a man who comes home with dirt under his nails.
Look at her!" Her voice turns shrill. "She looks like a common whore in that dress! "
And something in me finally gives.
A sob breaks loose from my throat, before I can swallow it back down, and Adrian snaps.
"Enough!"
The roar tears out of him and fills the whole room, rattling something on the desk, and everyone goes silent at once. Even Crispin. Even my mother.
"I have tried to be polite." His voice has dropped into something low and lethal, scraped raw at the bottom.
"I have stood here and let all of you say your piece.
" His chest heaves against my hands. "But I promise you, the next alpha who so much as looks at my mate again, I will put in the ground.
I don't give a damn whose house this is. "
Then the office door swings open once again.
Nico steps in, and his face is filled with alarm. Breathless and urgent.
"Mr. Van Houten." He looks straight at my father. "There's a problem. Someone knocked a candle into the drapes near the east terrace, the whole thing caught, and your guests are starting to panic. The staff can't find you anywhere."
Aldric goes rigid. A fire, at his event, in front of a few hundred of the most important people he knows.
"Christ." My father curses, then he moves.
But my mother hesitates. Her pale eyes cut to me, and for one second, she just stands there.
She looks at me the way she'd look at a stain on the carpet. At the mark on my throat, the borrowed dress, and the alpha shielding me with his body.
“I always knew you would end up like this," she says quietly.
"A century of this family’s powerful legacy, and it comes down to you, rutted by some commoner in a cheap dress.
" Her lips barely move. "I spent a fortune making you presentable, and this is what you chose.
" She shakes her head. "What a waste. What an absolute waste of a name.
"The words should gut me. And some small, young part of me, the eleven-year-old who still lives somewhere under my ribs, does flinch.
But Nico's warmth is still pouring down our bond, and Adrian is a wall at my side, and I've heard some version of this speech my whole life. So it doesn't really phase me this time.
"Mrs. Van Houten." Nico's voice sharpens. "The Hensleys are out there. Half the board is watching your house burn while the staff runs in circles. If you want them to remember anything but this, you need to be out there now."
That does it.
Something shifts behind her eyes, cold calculation winning out over everything else, and then she's gone, sweeping out of the room in a rush of expensive fabric.
And I realize, as the door swings shut behind her, that I feel nothing at all. That's the last thing my mother will ever say to me, and it doesn't even hurt.
"Sir," Nico moves to Crispin, but he doesn't move.
Crispin stays exactly where he is, his gray eyes still fixed on me over Adrian's shoulder, like a fire is beneath his notice.
Nico crosses to him. "Sir. You'll want to clear the room." His voice is calm, reasonable. "This way."
Crispin doesn't so much as glance at him. "Lyra—"
Nico's hand closes around the back of Crispin's neck.
And then my pack alpha is dragging him, hauling all that dead weight toward the door while Crispin stumbles and grabs at nothing, too surprised to fight it.
Adrian turns and pulls me in against his chest. He angles us both away, one big hand cradling the back of my head, tucking my face into his shoulder so I don't have to watch.
I hear the scuffle. I hear Crispin's snarl, cut short. Then a door slams, hard enough to shake the wall, and a lock clicks in place.
For a second, the only sound is my own ragged breathing.
"I'm sorry." Adrian's voice is rough above me, aimed at Nico. "I lost it. I should have handled that better, I shouldn't have let it get that far—"
"Stop." Nico's hand settles on the back of Adrian's head, fingers threading into his hair. "You did the right thing. You kept yourself between her and all of them the entire time. You were perfect."
Then Nico turns to me.
And I fall into him.
I let go of Adrian's shirt and reach for Nico, wrapping my arms tight around his middle. The pack alpha catches me, folding me in, and then the two of them close around me from both sides. Adrian at my back, Nico at my front, my face pressed into the warm curve of my pack alpha’s pecs where his amber and leather scent is thickest.
Crispin is pounding on the door behind us. I can hear it, the heavy thud of his fists, muffled through the wood.
Then Nico starts to purr.
Adrian joins him a second later, the two sounds layering low and deep and steady, rumbling through both their chests and into mine. It swallows the pounding whole.
It swallows everything.
The fear that's had its claws in me since the second Crispin walked through that door finally loosens its grip, draining out of me one breath at a time, until all that's left is the two of them holding me up and the sound of them keeping me safe.