Chapter Twenty-Eight
Nora
I had spent my entire life waiting for people to see me.
Waiting for the guidance counselor to notice I was capable of more than administrative work.
Waiting for the supervisors to realize I was the one holding the office together.
Waiting for my parents to understand that loving me didn’t mean teaching me to want less.
Waiting, quietly, patiently, with the steady, invisible endurance of a woman who had been trained to believe that her presence was never urgent enough to demand attention.
I was done waiting.
Sunday evening. The penthouse was warm with the residual energy of a weekend spent together.
Kieran and Jonah were playing cards at the dining table, a game that involved rules neither of them seemed to follow and an escalating volume of accusations.
Declan was at his laptop, but his chair was pulled close to the table, within the orbit of the pack, and occasionally he corrected one of Jonah’s moves without looking up from his screen.
Rhys was not in the room.
He was on the roof.
The penthouse had a roof terrace, accessible through a door off the hallway. I’d never been up there. It was Rhys’s space the way the nest was Jonah’s: private, personal, the place he went when the inside was too much and he needed sky.
I stood at the hallway door and looked at Kieran. He looked back at me. Something passed between us, wordless, and he gave me the smallest nod. Go.
Jonah’s hand found mine as I passed the table. He squeezed once. Brief. Fierce. The permission and the blessing of an omega who loved his alpha and loved the woman who was about to reach for him.
Declan’s eyes met mine over his laptop. He closed it. Slowly. Deliberately. A Declan gesture that meant I see what you’re doing and I support it.
Three men. Three threads of the hum, blazing warm in my chest. And the fourth, faint and aching, pulling me upward.
I opened the door and climbed the stairs.
· · ·
The roof was open sky and city lights.
A low wall around the perimeter. Potted plants that someone, probably Jonah, had placed in the corners. Two weathered chairs. And Rhys, sitting on the concrete ledge with his guitar in his lap, silhouetted against the darkening city.
He was playing. The melody I’d heard through walls for weeks.
The slow, aching one that wound through the penthouse like a hand reaching for something it couldn’t touch.
Up here, without walls to muffle it, the sound was clear and raw and devastating.
Every note was a sentence in a language he couldn’t speak, and the song was not about nothing. The song was about me.
I stood at the top of the stairs and listened. He didn’t stop playing, which meant he either hadn’t heard me or had chosen not to acknowledge me, and with Rhys, both were equally possible.
I walked across the roof. I sat down beside him on the ledge. Not touching. But close. Within the radius of intention.
The guitar slowed. Stopped. The last note hung in the air between us and faded.
Silence. The city below. The wind. Two people sitting on a rooftop, one with a guitar and one with a heart full of the words she’d spent a lifetime not saying.
“Tell me why,” I said.
He didn’t look at me. His hands rested on the guitar, fingers still on the strings, and his profile was sharp against the city lights. Jaw tight. Eyes forward. The mask in place.
“Nora.” My name. A warning. A boundary.
“No.” I said it gently. Without anger. Without the bravery that was really fear.
With something quieter and harder: the refusal to leave.
“I’m not going to yell at you. I’m not going to beg.
I’m going to sit here and ask you to tell me why, and you’re going to tell me, because I am done waiting and you are done hiding. ”
His jaw clenched. His fingers pressed into the guitar strings hard enough that I could see the indentations forming in his fingertips.
“There’s nothing to tell.”
“Rhys.”
“You should go back inside.”
“I’m not going back inside.”
He stood. A fast, abrupt motion, the guitar placed on the ledge with more care than the movement warranted, and he took two steps toward the stairwell door.
Flight. The instinct he defaulted to when the walls were under pressure.
Walk away. Close the door. Return to the sealed room where feeling couldn’t reach him.
“I know about your first pack,” I said.
He stopped.
His back was to me. His shoulders went rigid, every muscle drawing tight, and the stillness that followed was not the controlled stillness I was used to. This was the stillness of an animal caught in the open, frozen between running and fighting, every nerve alight.
“Jonah told me,” I said. Softly. “Marc and Lena. The bond breaking. What it did to you.”
He didn’t move. He didn’t speak. But I could see his breathing, the rapid, shallow expansion of his ribs, and I knew I was standing at the edge of something fragile and massive and I had to be very, very careful.
I stood. I walked to him. Not in front of him, because facing him would feel like confrontation. Beside him. Shoulder to shoulder, both of us looking at the city, the lights and the noise and the vast indifferent world that kept spinning regardless of what happened on this rooftop.
“You’re afraid that if you let me in and it falls apart, the bond breaking will kill you,” I said. “Not metaphorically. You believe it will actually destroy you.”
His breath shuddered. Once. The sound of a wall taking a hit it hadn’t been reinforced against.
“I’m not going to tell you that won’t happen,” I continued. “I’m not going to promise I won’t break your heart. No one can promise that. Not Kieran. Not Declan. Not Jonah. Anyone who tells you love comes with a guarantee is lying, and you know that better than anyone alive.”
The wind moved his hair. His hands were clenched at his sides. His eyes were fixed on the skyline with an intensity that suggested he was holding himself together by focusing on the one thing that wasn’t moving.
“But I can promise you this.” I turned to face him.
He didn’t turn. Not yet. “I will never stop trying to be worth the risk. Every day. For as long as you let me. I will show up and I will be here and I will not leave, and if you need proof, look at the people downstairs who have been proving it for four years. Look at Jonah, who never pushed you. Look at Kieran, who waited six months for you to say yes. Look at Declan, who built you a fortress because he knew you needed one.”
My voice was steady. My hands were not. I pressed them against my thighs and kept talking.
“I’m not asking you to stop being afraid.
I’m asking you to be afraid and let me in anyway.
The way you did with them. The way you’ve already been letting me in, Rhys, because you have.
The car keys. The towels. The water in the hallway.
The guitar that you play every night because you can’t say the words but the music says them for you.
You have been reaching for me since the beginning and I am standing right here telling you that you can stop reaching. I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.”
Silence.
The city hummed. The wind blew. The distance between us was six inches and it was the widest distance in the world.
He turned.
Slowly. The way a man turned when the act of facing someone cost him everything he had. His gray eyes met mine and they were not blank. They were not controlled. They were not the careful, guarded nothing that he’d shown the world for years.
They were full.
Full of want and fear and loneliness and a love so deep and so old and so terrified of itself that it had been hiding behind silence and guitar chords and car keys in the rain since the day I walked into his life.
The wall was gone. Not cracked. Not fractured.
Gone. And behind it was everything. Every feeling he’d buried, every word he hadn’t said, every night he’d played guitar for an empty room because the song was the only way he could say what his mouth refused to form.
He didn’t kiss me.
He stepped forward. He put his forehead against mine.
And he breathed.
Just breathed. His forehead warm against mine, his eyes closed, his hands at his sides, and the breath that came out of him was the longest exhale I had ever heard, a sound like a door being opened after years of being sealed, air rushing through a space that had been airless for so long it had forgotten what oxygen felt like.
We stood there. Forehead to forehead. Breathing the same air. And the cedar thread in my chest, the one that had been faint and aching and patient for weeks, bloomed.
Not gradually. Not in increments. It opened like a flower in time-lapse, unfurling from a whisper to a song, warm and green and alive, and the force of it made my breath catch, made my eyes burn, made my hands reach for him without permission.
He felt it too. I saw it in the way his face changed, the tightness dissolving, the tension draining from his jaw, his forehead, the set of his mouth. He felt the thread connect and his body responded the way Jonah’s had responded in the nest. Recognition. Relief. The lock turning.
“You fix everything,” he said.
His voice. I’d heard it so rarely that the sound of it, this close, spoken directly to me, was like hearing music for the first time. Low and rough and raw and stripped of every defense.
“The office. The pack. The schedules. The fires. The crises. Everybody. You fix everybody.” His hand came up.
Slowly. Like a man reaching through water.
And his fingers touched my jaw, so gently that I felt the tremor in them, the seismic effort of a man who had not willingly touched another person outside his pack in years.
“But nobody fixes anything for you.”
The tears came.