Chapter 4 #2
Watching him work means the upstairs bathroom, torn half to pieces.
He must be renovating it himself because one wall is down to the studs, there are tile boxes stacked up waist high, buckets, a wet saw, and dust everywhere.
The sharp clean bite of mortar assaults my nose under his cut-grass scent.
He points me at the shower stall, dry, stripped to bare concrete, farthest from the door.
"There. Out of the way. Don't touch the saw, don't touch the tile, don't touch anything. "
I ease across the debris and then fold down into the corner of the empty stall and pull my knees up. It's the closest thing to safe I've felt since they broke my front door open—a hard little box with two walls at my back where nobody can get behind me.
"You can put your head down if you want." He crouches by the boxes, slicing one open with a utility knife, not looking at me. "You look like hell. I'm not going anywhere for a while."
"I'm fine."
"Sure." He doesn't push it.
He gets to work, and for a while I let myself drift.
The lethargy's dragged me down past the shaking into something heavy and slow, my limbs full of wet sand, and the small sounds of him working turn into a kind of weather—trowel, tile, the scrape of the level.
I don't sleep. I couldn't, not knowing he’s right there.
But I go somewhere adjacent to it, somewhere quiet, and it's almost a mercy.
I come back to the present when he strips his shirt off.
He does it without any ceremony—it's hot in the small room, sweat's gone dark at his collar. He drops the shirt over a bucket and crouches back to the wall.
I look away.
Then I don't.
I don't mean to. I tell myself I'm just tracking the biggest thing in the room. That's a lie.
He's built like his brother but wears it quieter—broad through the shoulders, muscle earned off work instead of a mirror, a back that moves in long smooth planes when he reaches for the top row. Sweat slides down the groove of his spine and suddenly my mouth is watering.
I watch him scoop mortar, comb it onto the wall in three flat passes, butter the back of a tile and press it home with a small twist, then tap it level with the heel of his hand—every motion economical, certain, like his hands don't need him for any of it.
The cords of his forearms stand out when he drags off the excess.
He sits back on his heels, tips his head, nudges one tile a hair to the left until the line satisfies him.
Then he drags his wrist across his forehead, leaves a smear of grey at his hairline, pushes his dark hair back with a dusty hand—and something in my chest goes tight and stupid, and I make myself look at the drain between my feet.
It's his scent. That's what I tell myself.
His is the one that doesn't trip the alarm—cool, green, clean, the one my body reads as safe—and safe is the most dangerous thing in this house, because safe makes me want to move closer, and closer to any of them is how I end up hurt.
I press my spine into the concrete. I last maybe a minute before I'm looking again.
"You can quit staring holes in my back," he says, not turning around. "I can feel it from here."
Heat climbs my neck. "I'm not—"
"You are. It's fine." He thumbs a spacer between two tiles, checks the line with his little level, adjusts. "Not much else to look at in here."
I pull my knees tighter and fix on the drain and lose the fight again inside thirty seconds. He works in silence a while, and it's almost bearable, the small wet sounds of the mortar and the scrape of the trowel, until he says, with no lead-up at all:
"Why'd you run?"
This again? "I don't know."
"Bad answer." He sets a tile, taps it home with the heel of his hand. "Try the real one."
"It’s the real one." My voice comes out rough and low.
"There wasn't a reason. You turned around and my body just—went.
" It's more than I mean to give him, and I don't know why I'm being honest, except that his back is turned and something about not being looked at makes it easier.
"I knew I wouldn't make the tree line. I went anyway. "
His hands go still on the wall.
Calder doesn't turn around, but when he speaks again it's slower, careful—the almost-something from the ravine back in his voice. "People don't run like that from places that don't scare them."
"No," I say, to the drain. "They don't."
He's quiet a long moment. Then he picks up the next tile and goes back to work.
After a while he pulls a stack of tiles from the box and sets them on the concrete by my feet.
"Make yourself useful." He nods at them.
"They come out of the box all mixed—some pale, some darker.
Sort them into two piles by shade so I can space the dark ones out even.
Otherwise you end up with a blotch of dark in one corner and it looks like hell. "
I look at the tiles, then at him, waiting for the catch. There isn't one. It's just a job—small and dull and easy, something I can do sitting down.
"Okay," I say, and I start.
And it helps. It's stupid, but it does. My hands have something to do that eases up the tension.
I turn each tile to the light, find the ones with more grey in them, the ones that run warm, and build my two piles, and something in me eases a notch. He takes them from me by the handful as he works, and doesn't once tell me I've got it wrong.
We work like that a while, the water and the trowel and the scrape of the level. It's almost peaceful.
It's the almost-peace that makes me brave enough to ask.
"What happens," I say, low, not looking up from the tiles, "when the twenty-four hours are up? And she hasn't called."
The muscles across his back draw tight, and for a second he doesn't move. "I don't know. That's my father's call. Not mine."
"But you know him." I keep sorting, because if I stop I'll have to feel my stomach churning. "What does he do with something that stops being useful?"
When I glance up he's looking at me—no cruelty in it, but no comfort either, just that careful weighing attention.
"Don't give him a reason to find out," he says.
It isn't an answer. But the way he says it, low and even and without any heat, is almost a warning—like he'd rather I didn't find out either.
∞∞∞
Killian comes for me after dark.
"Time's up. Dad’s orders." He fills the bathroom doorway, arms crossed, and takes in the half-tiled wall, then me folded in the dry shower stall with my two neat piles. "What is this, arts and crafts? You've got the thief sorting your tile?"
"He got more done in an hour than you would've all week." Calder doesn't look up from the last row. "He's no trouble."
"He's a flight risk who nearly went into the ravine headfirst this morning. But sure. No trouble." Killian pushes off the frame. "You've gone soft, Cal. One woodpile and a sad little face and you're handing him crafts."
"I'm being practical. Look at him—he's dead on his feet." Calder glances at me, brief, unreadable, then back at the wall. "Let him sleep tonight. He's no use to anyone if you run him into the ground."
"Oh, he'll sleep great." The grin's got nothing warm in it. "C'mon, runner. You're with me."
Calder wipes the mortar off his hands with a rag and doesn't quite look at me as he lets me go. That's how I know that whatever cracked open a little in that room isn't coming downstairs with me.
Killian walks me down. Not to a room in the house—down. Back through the low door, the bolt, the sixteen stone steps into the cold cellar. I guess I don’t know what I was expecting.
But then he doesn't leave. That's the new part.
He drops onto the cot, springs creaking under all that weight, and pats the thin mattress beside him. "Sit."
I don't want to. My body does it anyway—folds down next to him because an alpha said the word—and I go rigid the second I land. He's too close. All that heat and copper and smoke pressed the length of my side, close enough that I can feel the warmth off his arm without us touching.
My heart kicks. Fear, first. That part makes sense.
It's the other thing I can't stand. The pull. Even him. Even now, with the lip he split still throbbing, some traitor piece of me leans a fraction toward all that heat and wants the big angry alpha to stop being angry at me. Wants to be good. Wants to fix it.
I dig my nails into my palm until it quits.
It's worse than this morning. That's what I can't stop noticing.
A whole day of it—passed hand to hand between the three of them, no space, no gap, never once alone—and it's built and built into this low constant hum under my skin, this wanting-to-please that has nothing to do with me and everything to do with what they are and what I am.
It scares me worse than Killian does. And behind it, always, the count sits like a stone: fourteen little white tablets in the bag under this cot, the one thing between me and finding out what my biology becomes when there's nothing left to dull it.
The bag. It's right where I left it, half under the cot in the dark. I ease my foot over, slow, and nudge it further back, deeper into the shadow under the cot, out of the light where he might notice the shape of it and think to look inside.
"What's that?" Killian's eyes track down.
"M–my stuff. Clothes, from home." I try to keep my voice flat. "That's all."
He grunts, loses interest in the bag, and leans back on his hands so his shoulder drags warm along mine and stays there.
"So here's the thing," he says, comfortable, settling in.
"Dad still hasn't decided if you're guilty or not.
Calder's been weird about you all day, God knows why.
" He rolls his head toward me, and even in the bad light the grin's there, close, all teeth.
"But me, I've got you read cover to cover. And lucky for you—I don't sleep much."
I keep my eyes on the far wall and say nothing.