Chapter Twenty-Four #2
“So,” she said finally. “You’re in love with two of them. A third one is coming around. And the fourth one acts like you’re a ghost.”
“That about sums it up.”
“Cool.” She picked up her coffee. “This is totally normal and fine.”
I laughed. Really laughed, the kind that bent me over my desk, because the absurdity of my life, the sheer, improbable, unprecedented absurdity of a beta woman in love with an alpha pack, was either the most ridiculous thing that had ever happened or the most extraordinary, and either way, laughter was the only appropriate response.
Sadie grinned. A real grin, wide and warm, the one she reserved for moments when she was genuinely happy for me and couldn’t maintain her usual defensive sharpness.
“For the record,” she said, “Jonah has been upgraded from probationary to approved. The alpha who called you at six in the morning gets provisional status. The ice prince who made you an omelet gets a hearing. The ghost gets nothing until he uses his words like a grown adult.”
“That’s very generous of you.”
“I’m a generous person.” She paused. “Also, while you were living your unprecedented romantic saga, a new alpha started on the third floor. Acquisition integration. His name is Garrett Knox, he has the personality of a golden retriever who went to business school, and he will not stop talking to me.”
I looked at her. Something about the way she’d said his name, the deliberate casualness of it, the slight extra emphasis on will not stop, pinged a frequency I recognized.
“Is he cute?” I asked.
“Completely irrelevant.”
“Sadie.”
“He’s objectively attractive in the most irritating way possible and I would like to discuss literally anything else.”
I filed this information away carefully. I did not push. But I noticed, because noticing was what I did, and the way Sadie’s jaw had tightened on the word attractive was a tell I intended to revisit at a later date.
“Back to your situation,” Sadie said firmly. “The ghost. What’s the plan?”
“There’s no plan. Rhys is going to do what Rhys is going to do. I can’t force him and I won’t try.”
“But you want him.”
I thought about gray eyes in a hallway, full of pain and hope and the desperate refusal to feel either one. I thought about clean towels appearing outside the nest door and a guitar playing through walls and car keys offered without a word.
“Yeah,” I said quietly. “I want him.”
Sadie studied me. Then she reached across and squeezed my hand, quick and fierce, the Sadie Lowe version of a hug.
“You deserve the whole pack, Nora. All five threads. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”
Five threads. She’d been listening. She knew about the hum. I squeezed back and didn’t trust myself to speak.
· · ·
I went home Thursday night.
My apartment. My small, clean, quiet apartment with the full-size bed and the bookshelves organized by color and the pen on the nightstand and the sticky note in the wallet. My space. My life. The one I’d built to fit exactly one person, because one person was all I’d ever expected to be.
I stood in the doorway and listened to the silence.
It was a different silence now. Not the familiar, comfortable quiet of a space that had always been enough.
This silence was an absence. A subtraction.
The negative image of five days filled with warmth and noise and bodies and breathing and Jonah’s laughter and Kieran’s low voice and the distant sound of a guitar and the quiet, deliberate movements of a man who organized spice racks to process his feelings.
The apartment smelled like nothing. Like me, which was nothing, which had been fine before and was now the loneliest scent in the world.
I sat on my bed. I looked at the pen. I looked at the ceiling. I listened to the silence that used to be comfort and was now a cavity.
I had gotten used to the pack. The warmth of it.
The noise of it. The particular, complex, beautiful chaos of five days inside a life built by four people who loved each other.
I had slept in a nest with fairy lights and woken to a man’s heartbeat against my cheek and eaten omelets cooked in a kitchen that smelled like everyone and I had, without meaning to, without planning it, gotten used to being home.
And now I was here. In the place that used to be home. And it felt like a waiting room.
That was terrifying. Because getting used to something meant needing it, and needing something meant it could be taken away, and I had spent twenty-seven years calibrating my expectations to avoid exactly this.
Wanting less. Expecting less. Building a life small enough that losing things from it wouldn’t hurt.
The hum pulsed in my chest. Four threads now. Kieran, dark and warm. Jonah, bright and golden. Declan, new and tentative, a careful blue. And the faintest trace of something that might have been cedar and might have been hope and might have been nothing at all.
Four threads. Pulling me away from the silence.
I lay back on my bed. I pressed my hand to my sternum. I let the hum do what it had been doing since the first day, which was remind me that the world was bigger than this apartment and my heart was bigger than the box I’d built for it.
I was terrified.
Good.
Terrified meant there was something to lose. And having something to lose meant I finally had something worth keeping.