Chapter Eleven #2
I loved Declan. I loved the way his mind worked, precise and relentless, and the way he softened when we were alone, the armor coming off piece by piece until there was just a man who was afraid of losing things and dealt with it by controlling everything he could.
I loved the nights when he let go, when the control slipped and he was just Dec, desperate and tender and mine.
I loved Rhys. I loved his quiet and his guitar and the way he held me like I was the only thing keeping him tethered to the ground. I loved that he trusted me enough to be fragile, which was the hardest thing Rhys Callahan could give anyone, and I carried that trust like a living thing.
And I loved Nora. I was falling in love with Nora, with her steady hands and her dry humor and her brown eyes that saw everything and expected nothing, and I was not going to choose between the people I loved. I refused.
But I could feel the choice being built around me, brick by brick, and I didn’t know how to stop it.
· · ·
Sadie Lowe appeared in my office on a Thursday afternoon with a coffee and an agenda.
I’d interacted with her a handful of times since the acquisition.
She was sharp, direct, and visibly protective of Nora in a way that I respected even when it was aimed at me.
She’d accepted the La Marzocca with grudging appreciation and had, according to Nora, upgraded me from “suspicious” to “probationary.”
Today, apparently, was the evaluation.
“Got a minute?” she asked, in the tone of someone who was taking the minute regardless of the answer.
“Of course. Sit down.”
She sat. She set her coffee on my desk. She looked at me with the focused appraisal of a woman who was deciding whether to let me live.
“You have lunch with Nora twice a week,” she said.
“I do.”
“Your alpha kissed her in his office.”
I blinked. “How do you...”
“Nora tells me everything. Eventually. Usually after I extract it through strategic questioning and emotional leverage.” She took a sip of her coffee. “So. Where do you fit into this?”
The directness was refreshing. In my experience, most people approached pack dynamics with a mixture of fascination and awkwardness, tiptoeing around the reality of multiple relationships like it was a minefield. Sadie was walking straight through it with steel-toed boots.
“I care about her,” I said. Simply. Because Sadie didn’t seem like someone who appreciated embellishment.
“As what? A pack prospect? An addition to the roster?”
“As Nora.”
She studied me. I held her gaze and let her look, because I had nothing to hide and because Sadie Lowe was exactly the kind of friend Nora deserved, the kind who showed up at a near-stranger’s office to vet his intentions, and I was going to give her every honest answer she wanted.
“She’s my best friend,” Sadie said. “She’s been treated like wallpaper for three years.
She’s smart and kind and she’s never, not once, been valued the way she deserves.
And now you people are showing up with your coffees and your pens and your chemistry and she’s starting to believe she might be worth something, and if you take that away from her, I will end you.
All four of you. I don’t care how many alphas are in the pack. ”
I looked at this woman. This fierce, sharp, protective woman who was sitting in my office with her legs crossed and her eyes blazing, threatening an entire alpha pack because her friend was happy and she was terrified it would be taken away.
“Sadie,” I said. “I am going to tell you something, and I need you to hear it.”
She waited.
“She’s not a prospect. She’s not an addition.
She’s not a project or a charity case or a box we’re checking.
I sit across from her twice a week and she tells me about her life and every time, every single time, I leave that table thinking, ‘How has the world let this woman believe she’s ordinary?
’ She is the least ordinary person I’ve ever met.
And I will not take that away from her. I will light myself on fire before I let anyone take that away from her. Including the members of my own pack.”
The office was quiet. Sadie’s expression had shifted during my speech, the aggressive edge softening into something more complicated. Not trust, exactly. Not yet. But the beginning of it.
“Hm,” she said. Which was, I suspected, the Sadie Lowe equivalent of a standing ovation.
“Would you like more coffee?” I asked.
“I would, actually.” She paused. “The La Marzocca was a good move, by the way. Strategic.”
“It wasn’t strategic. The coffee situation on the second floor was a crime against human dignity.”
Something shifted in her expression again. A crack in the skepticism. Almost, if I was reading it right, the beginning of a smile.
“Okay,” she said. “Probationary status extended. Don’t make me regret it.”
She took her coffee and left. I sat in my office and thought about the fact that Nora Whitfield had a friend who would walk into an alpha pack’s HR office and threaten all four of them without flinching, and I loved her more for it. Not Sadie, although Sadie was growing on me at an alarming rate.
Nora. For being the kind of person who inspired that level of devotion.
· · ·
Friday night. The penthouse. Pack night that wasn’t.
Declan was at the dining table with his laptop and a glass of wine, working on something he’d been working on since seven and showing no signs of stopping.
Rhys had come home, eaten dinner in near-silence, and disappeared into his room.
His guitar started twenty minutes later.
Something slow and repetitive, the kind of thing he played when he was circling.
Kieran was on the couch beside me, but his energy was restless.
He kept checking his phone. I didn’t have to ask who he was thinking about.
His scent, which had been threaded with Nora’s since the night he’d kissed her, was sharper tonight.
More present. Like his body was broadcasting what his mouth wasn’t saying.
I looked at the empty spaces on the couch. I looked at Declan, backlit by his laptop, his face set in the controlled blankness that meant he was feeling too much. I listened to Rhys’s guitar through the wall, the same three chords, over and over.
The pack bond hummed between us. Strained but intact. Stretched but not broken. A rubber band pulled taut, waiting for someone to either release the tension or snap it.
I thought about Nora in her quiet apartment. I thought about the way she’d said the word reliable like touching a bruise. I thought about the way she’d looked at me in the elevator when I’d brushed her hand, the surprise in her eyes, like she couldn’t quite believe someone was reaching for her.
I thought about what Kieran had said. Tell her. Don’t wait.
I thought about what Sadie had said. If you take that away from her, I will end you.
I thought about Declan at his laptop, protecting the pack from a threat that wasn’t a threat. I thought about Rhys and his three chords and the walls he’d built so high he couldn’t see over them anymore.
And I made a decision.
I was going to tell Nora how I felt. Not as Kieran’s omega extending the pack’s reach.
Not as a bridge or a diplomat or the steady center holding fractured pieces together.
As Jonah. Just Jonah, who sat across from a woman twice a week and fell for her a little more each time and was done pretending that was something he needed permission for.
Declan and Rhys would either come around or they wouldn’t.
The pack would hold or it wouldn’t. I couldn’t control any of that.
The only thing I could control was whether I was honest with the people I loved, and I’d spent too many years watching the world tell omegas and betas what they were allowed to feel.
I was done performing someone else’s script.
I was writing my own.
And in my script, I told the truth. Even when it was terrifying. Even when the ending wasn’t guaranteed.
I picked up my phone and texted Nora.
Lunch Tuesday? I want to talk to you about something.
Her reply came in under a minute.
Of course. Everything okay?
I looked at the text. I looked at my pack, scattered and strained and holding on by the threads of a bond that had survived four years and was about to be tested by a woman who didn’t even know what she was to us yet.
I typed my reply.
Better than okay. See you Tuesday.
I put down my phone. Across the room, Declan closed his laptop and rubbed his eyes. Through the wall, Rhys’s guitar shifted into something new. Not the circling three chords. Something with a melody. Something that sounded, if I was being fanciful, like the beginning of a question.
Beside me, Kieran reached over and took my hand in the dark. I laced my fingers through his and held on.
Tuesday.
I could wait until Tuesday.
But not a day longer.