Chapter Nineteen #2
The sting of that was worse than his coldness.
Worse than overhearing him dismiss me. Because coldness could be explained by indifference.
This couldn’t. This was proof that Rhys Callahan could love with extraordinary tenderness, and the reason he withheld it from me was not that he couldn’t feel it but that he was choosing not to.
Or that he was afraid to.
I backed away before either of them could see me. I went to the kitchen and opened a bottle of wine and stood at the counter with my hands flat on the cold marble and breathed until the ache subsided enough to function.
Jonah found me there ten minutes later, warm and rumpled from the couch, smelling like Rhys’s cedar. He took one look at my face and understood.
“You saw us,” he said. Not a question.
“I didn’t mean to intrude.”
“You didn’t intrude.” He came around the counter and put his arms around me, and I let him, because Jonah’s arms were one of the few places where the ache couldn’t reach me.
“He’s gentle, Nora. I know you can’t see it yet.
But he’s the gentlest one of all of them, and the gentleness is exactly why he’s so afraid. ”
I pressed my face into his shoulder and didn’t answer, because the answer was I know, and I know was the most painful thing I could say about a man who was gentle with everyone except me.
· · ·
After dinner, which was excellent and during which Rhys did not appear, Jonah took my hand.
“Come with me,” he said. “I want to show you something.”
He led me down the hallway, past the shared bedroom, past Kieran’s room, to a door at the end of the corridor that I’d never seen opened. He paused with his hand on the knob.
“This is my nest,” he said. His voice was quiet. Careful. The voice of a man offering something that cost him. “No one comes in here except me. Not even the alphas, usually. It’s where I go when the pack bond is too loud or my body needs to regulate or I just need to be... mine.”
He was asking me something. Not with words. With the hand on the doorknob and the careful voice and the way he was watching my face, searching for the right kind of response to something he’d never offered anyone outside the pack.
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“I’m sure.”
He opened the door.
The room was small. The smallest in the penthouse, I thought.
And every surface was soft. Blankets layered on blankets, pillows of different sizes and textures, a mattress on the floor covered in linen that smelled overwhelmingly of Jonah.
Warm. Sweet. Concentrated. The scent hit me like a wave and I felt my whole body relax without my permission, some response I didn’t have a name for, something deeper than chemistry.
Fairy lights strung along the ceiling gave the room a warm, amber glow. There were no sharp edges. No hard surfaces. Everything was curved and soft and intentionally, deliberately safe.
It was the most intimate space I’d ever been invited into.
“It’s beautiful,” I whispered.
Jonah’s whole face softened. He pulled me gently inside and closed the door and we lay down together in his nest, in the center of all that softness, and I understood immediately why this was sacred to him.
The world disappeared. The pack, the office, the ache of Rhys’s distance and Declan’s careful respect and the impossible math of wanting five to be one.
All of it fell away. There was only warmth and softness and Jonah’s body next to mine and the amber light making everything glow.
We didn’t have sex. We didn’t even kiss. We just lay together, face to face, and talked.
He told me about the first time he’d nested.
Fourteen, confused, building a fort out of every blanket in his mother’s house and not understanding why he needed it.
How his mother had found him and, without a word, brought him hot chocolate and a pillow and sat outside the fort reading a book until he fell asleep.
How that was the moment he’d known he was an omega, and that it was okay.
I told him about the first time I’d understood what beta meant. Nine years old. Career day at school. A firefighter, an alpha, asked the class who wanted to be brave when they grew up, and every hand went up except mine, because I’d already learned that brave was not a word that applied to me.
His hand found mine in the blankets. His fingers laced through mine and held tight.
“You’re the bravest person I know,” he said. “You walked into a building full of alphas and made it yours. You kissed a man who could break you in half. You let yourself fall for an omega who didn’t know how to want you yet. That’s not the absence of bravery, Nora. That’s the definition.”
I closed my eyes. His hand in mine. The nest holding us both. The amber light warm on my eyelids.
I fell asleep. In Jonah Maren’s nest, which no one entered, which was the safest place in his world, I closed my eyes and fell asleep like it was the most natural thing in the universe.
When I woke, he was asleep too. His face inches from mine, his breath warm and even, his hand still holding mine. I watched him sleep for a long time and thought, this is what it feels like to be home somewhere.
· · ·
Tuesday. Late. Raining.
I’d stayed past eight finishing the Whitaker-Grant compliance audit, which was the kind of task I usually found meditative and tonight found exhausting, because the rain against the windows was relentless and my body was tired in a way that went deeper than hours worked.
The parking garage was half-flooded. My car was in the far corner. I ran for it, coat over my head, and arrived soaked and breathless and turned the key and got nothing.
Not a click. Not a churn. Nothing. The engine was dead in the particular, emphatic way that suggested the battery had given up entirely, possibly out of solidarity with the rest of my life.
I sat in the dead car in the flooded garage and pressed my forehead to the steering wheel and laughed, because the alternative was crying and I was so tired of crying.
I went back inside. Dripping. My coat was useless. My hair was plastered to my face. My shoes squelched on the lobby tile in a way that was deeply undignified.
The building was empty. Or should have been.
Rhys was in the lobby.
He was standing by the elevator, jacket on, clearly on his way out. He looked at me. I looked at him. Water dripped from my hair onto the marble floor. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead.
He did not ask what happened. He did not offer sympathy or small talk or any of the social padding that normal people used to navigate unexpected encounters.
He reached into his jacket pocket. Pulled out a set of keys. Held them out to me.
“Take mine,” he said. “I’ll get yours fixed.”
I stared at the keys. Then at him. His face was its usual careful blank, the controlled mask that gave away nothing, except that his eyes, for one brief, unguarded second, dropped to my soaked coat and my dripping hair and something flickered in them.
Something quick and fierce and immediately suppressed.
“Rhys...”
He set the keys on the lobby desk. Turned. Walked toward the stairs.
“How will you get home?” I called after him.
He didn’t answer. He didn’t look back. He disappeared into the stairwell and the door clicked shut behind him and I stood in the empty lobby, dripping, holding car keys that were still warm from his pocket.
I drove home in Rhys Callahan’s car.
It was a black sedan, understated and well-maintained, which tracked.
The seats were leather. The mirrors were adjusted for someone taller than me.
And the car smelled like him. Cedar and something warm and clean, an evergreen quality that made me think of forests and open air and the kind of quiet that existed in places far from people.
I drove with both hands on the wheel and his scent filling my lungs and I hated how much I noticed.
I hated that I could distinguish the layers of it, the top note of cedar and the undercurrent of warmth and the something else that I couldn’t identify, something that made my chest ache and my hands tighten on his steering wheel.
He had seen me soaked and stranded and he had given me his car and walked away without a word. Just like the parking garage, weeks ago. No explanation. No warmth. No connection. Just the keys and the turned back and the stairwell door closing.
Except this time, I’d seen the flicker. That one unguarded second when his eyes had moved over me and something had broken through the mask, quick and fierce and real.
He had noticed I was wet. He had cared that I was stranded. He had given me his keys without hesitation, which meant he’d been carrying the solution before I’d even asked for help.
He had been aware of me. This whole time, behind the blank face and the silence and the walls, Rhys Callahan had been aware of me.
I parked his car in my building’s lot. I sat in the driver’s seat and breathed his scent and pressed my hand to my chest where the hum was doing something new. Not louder. Not warmer. Something else. A third thread, barely there, so faint I might have been imagining it.
Cedar and quiet and the ghost of a flicker in gray eyes.
I wasn’t imagining it.