Chapter 4
Calder doesn't say a word the whole way back across the yard. He keeps his fist in the back of my shirt and steers, and I let him.
Inside, the warmth of the house hits me like a wall and my body nearly quits right there, grateful for it.
He walks me into the kitchen—pale stone, cold light, a room bigger than my whole apartment—and they're both there.
Vincent at the island with a laptop and a glass of something amber he isn't drinking.
Killian half-sitting on the counter, one boot on a stool, eating cereal out of a bowl he's holding under his chin.
They both look up when Calder brings me in filthy and shaking with leaves in my hair.
"He ran," Calder says.
Killian's spoon stops halfway to his mouth. Then the grin starts—slow, spreading, pure delight, like I've handed him a present he's been waiting all week for.
"He ran." He sets the bowl down and slides off the counter, all that size landing loose and easy.
"I knew it. First time I got a hand on him I could feel it—that itch under the skin, the wanting-to-be-gone.
Dad's giving him the benefit of the doubt, Cal's off somewhere chewing on his little timeline, and the second nobody's got a grip on him, he's halfway to the trees.
" He turns the grin on me, warm as anything, which is the worst way he's looked at me yet.
"Nobody runs from a debt they don't owe. I could kiss you. You just settled it."
"He got fifty feet." Calder lets go of my shirt.
I stay up. Barely. "Face-down in the leaves before I cleared the shed.
I hauled him off the lip of the north ravine—another two steps and he'd have gone down onto the rocks.
" He says it flat, and there's a thing underneath it that doesn't match Killian's glee.
"For a guy making a break for it, there wasn't much break in him. "
"So he's got no legs on him." Killian's circling now, slow, and the heat comes off him in a wave as he passes behind me—copper and smoke and something scorched—and my whole body wants to turn and keep him in sight, track the predator, but I make myself hold still.
"That's the part you're stuck on? Whether he could've made it?
I don't care if he'd have hit the road or dropped dead in the grass, Cal.
Soft doesn't mean innocent. Just means he's bad at the one thing his mother's actually good at.
" He stops close at my shoulder, close enough that the heat of him prickles along the side of my neck, and tips his head to look at the side of my face. "You still ran, though. Didn't you?"
I don't answer. There's nothing to say that helps.
Through all of it Vincent hasn't moved. He sits back with one hand loose around the glass he isn't drinking, watching me with that expression I'm learning to dread—a man running a sum that won't come out even. When he finally speaks, it's quiet, and the quiet is worse than any of Killian's noise.
"Where were you going?"
"I—" There wasn't a where. There was a slim chance and a turned back and my body moved on sheer instinct. "Nowhere. I wasn't—there wasn't a plan."
"No." He turns the glass a quarter-turn on the wood, watching me over it. "I don't think there was."
For one second it sounds almost like being believed, and I make the mistake of looking up, and his eyes are already on mine, steady and pale and unreadable. I drop mine again fast because I can't hold his intense gaze.
"Here's what happens now." He sets the glass down and stands, unhurried, and even that lands on me—the economy of it, no wasted motion, a big man who's never once had to hurry in his life.
"He isn't left alone again. Not in the cellar, not the yard, not a locked room, not for ten minutes. One of us has eyes on him at all times, starting now.” He looks at his sons.
"Because the next time it's a road and not a ravine, and then she's got no reason to come back at all, and everything we've spent is gone. "
"I'll take him." Killian says it fast, warm, and I don't like the shape of it at all.
"You'll take tonight." He pushes off the island and moves toward the far counter. "I've got him now. Calder takes him when I leave." A beat. "Go clean up, both of you. He's not going anywhere in the state he's in."
So he does see me.
Killian doesn't move at first—there's something he wants to say, I can see it sitting in his jaw—but his father just looks at him, and that's the end of it.
He grabs his bowl off the counter and goes, knocking his shoulder into the door frame on the way out because he can't pass through a space without touching it.
Calder follows, but at the door he glances back at me, his brows knitted.
And then it's just me and Vincent.
"Sit." He nods at a stool across the island from him.
I sit. My body does it before I've decided to—drops onto the stool the second he says it—and I hate how easily his voice moves me around. It's worse in here than the office. The kitchen is full of him, cold wood and ice, and something low in me wants to fold down small and be good for him.
He doesn't look at me for a while. He takes bread from a box, a knife from a block, cold things from the fridge, and starts making a sandwich, unhurried, and I sit there shaking and can't make it stop.
"You can't keep still," he says, not turning around.
"I'm… cold."
"You're a lot of things." He lays slices out, cuts, moves, and I can't stop tracking his hands—the flex of his forearm, the sureness of a man who's never fumbled anything.
I drag my eyes to the counter. "You bolted the first chance you got, you can't sit still, you flinch when Killian breathes, and you won't look at me for more than a second at a stretch.
" He sets the knife down. "I've been trying to work out what all of that adds up to. "
"Fear," I say, to the counter. "It adds up to fear."
"Maybe." He comes around the island.
Every muscle I have locks. But he doesn't grab me—he takes my chin between two fingers and tips my face up into the light, turning it to look at the split lip, the scrape on my cheekbone. His hand is warm and dry and steady. I almost can’t help but lean into the warmth.
It's been so long since anyone touched me like that my whole body betrays me at once—goes loose, goes pliant, yearns for more.
I catch it half a second too late. He's already felt it. Something shifts behind his eyes—not surprise, more like a question getting more interesting—and his thumb stays against my jaw a beat longer than it needs to. My heart's going so hard I'm sure he can feel it under his fingers.
"You don't give much away," he says finally, quiet, almost to himself.
And it's true—I barely read as anything to alphas like him, the suppressants see to that, a blank little nothing easy to take for a beta.
That's what he decided I was back in the apartment.
I can see him revising it now, because a beta doesn't go soft under an alpha's hand the way I just did—and he felt me do it. He doesn't say so.
He slides the plate across the wood. A sandwich, halved. "Eat."
My stomach's a fist and the pill from this morning is still a bad memory in it and the thought of food turns me over—but underneath the sick there's a hollow, roaring emptiness, because I haven't put anything in my body in more than a day and it knows.
"I'm okay," I say. Reflex.
"That wasn't a question." He leans back against the counter behind him and folds his arms, his voice drops into something low and bottomless and certain. "Eat. All of it. I am not going to let the one card I'm holding drop dead of stubbornness on my kitchen floor."
Fine.
I eat. The first bite is slow—my stomach's not sure it wants it—but by the third the hunger takes over. He watches the whole time. Not gloating. Just confirming something he already guessed: that under all the flinching there's a body that's been running on empty and lying about it.
When I finish, he clears the plate without a word and goes back to his laptop across the island. For a while it's just the small sounds of him working—keys, the click of the trackpad, a low note in his throat at something he doesn't like.
I stay where I was told to. The food sits warm and heavy in a stomach that forgot what full feels like. The heat of the kitchen drags at my eyes, and I fight to keep them open. I won't sleep, not here, not with an alpha in the room—my body wouldn't let me even if I tried.
Neither of us says anything, and it's almost bearable.
Then his phone buzzes. He glances at it and his face shuts back into business. "Vincent," he says, turning half away, and his voice goes clipped and cold—someone on the far end getting the version of him I got in the office earlier.
He watches me on and off through the whole call, the cold money-voice never once slipping. I sit still and pretend not to feel his attention on me.
When he hangs up he's already reaching for his coat over the back of the chair. "I have to go." To the room. Then, lifting his voice, not by much: "Calder."
Feet on the stairs, and Calder comes down a few minutes later in a worn t-shirt, forearms streaked grey with tile dust, like I've pulled him off a job he means to get back to. He takes in the empty plate, me on the stool, and lifts an eyebrow at his father.
"He ate," Vincent says, shrugging into the coat, settling it across his shoulders. "He's shaky. Keep him sitting, keep him in front of you. He does not leave your sight." Vincent pulls his cuffs straight. At the door he stops and looks back at me one more time.
Something inside me warms up under the attention.
And then he’s gone.
"Come on." Calder’s jaw grinds. "I'm not spending four hours watching you sit on a stool. You can watch me work."