Chapter Twenty-Nine #2
“If you fight this for me, everyone will say I needed alphas to save me.” I looked around the room.
At each of them. Kieran’s fury. Declan’s ice.
Jonah’s pain. Rhys’s contained storm. “Richard Hale said I slept my way into this pack. That’s what people are whispering.
And if four alpha packmates swoop in and destroy him on my behalf, every person in that office will think he was right.
They will see a beta who couldn’t handle her own problems and needed her alphas to clean up the mess. ”
The silence was heavy. I could feel the resistance in the room, the alpha instinct straining against what I was asking, the biological imperative to protect warring with the respect they had for me.
“Let me prove them wrong,” I said. “Let me walk into that room and handle this myself. Not because I don’t need you. Because I need the world to see that a beta can stand in front of a room and hold her ground without an alpha holding her up.”
Kieran’s jaw was working. The effort of restraining himself was visible in every line of his body.
He looked at me the way he’d looked at me in the parking garage, and in the stairwell, and in the nest. Like I was the most important thing in his world and the thing his world was asking him to do was stand back.
“You’ll have legal support,” Declan said. Carefully. Precisely. The sound of a man channeling his need to protect into the form of support that I would accept. “Full documentation. Formal grounds for termination. Whatever resources you need, they’re yours.”
“I’ll take those,” I said.
“And Sadie,” Jonah added quietly. “Sadie at your back. She earned it.”
“Sadie is a given.”
Kieran hadn’t spoken. I looked at him. His dark eyes were burning with the effort of containment.
“Kieran,” I said softly. “Trust me.”
A long, terrible pause. The man who had broken Grant Holloway’s ribs in twelve seconds. The man who had told his pack that if they couldn’t see what was in front of them, that was their loss. The man who had spent his life being dangerous because it was the only language the world had taught him.
He looked at me. And the volcano went still.
“I trust you,” he said. The words cost him. I could see the price in his jaw, in his hands, in the rigid set of his shoulders. “But if he says one word to your face, Nora. One word. I will be in that room in three seconds and there will be nothing left of him.”
“Fair,” I said.
Rhys moved for the first time. He uncrossed his arms. He walked across the room to where I sat and he put his hand on the back of my neck.
Not restraining. Grounding. His palm warm and steady against my nape, his thumb tracing the vertebra, and the touch was so precisely the way Declan held Jonah during heat that my breath caught.
He didn’t speak. He didn’t need to. His hand on my neck said everything: I am here. I am not going anywhere. And when you walk into that room tomorrow, you will carry the weight of every person who loves you, even if they’re not standing beside you.
I reached up and covered his hand with mine. The cedar thread pulsed between us. Warm. Steady. New and growing stronger every day.
· · ·
Wednesday morning. 9 a.m. The senior conference room on the third floor.
Sadie had spent Tuesday compiling a dossier that would have been admissible in federal court.
Printed emails. Access logs. A timeline of information transfer that mapped perfectly to Meridian’s counter-proposal.
Evidence so thorough, so precisely documented, that Declan had looked at it with the expression of a man observing professional excellence and had said, “She should have been in legal.”
Sadie had said, “Legal doesn’t deserve me.”
The conference room was set. HR was present. Legal counsel was present. Richard Hale had been called to a meeting he believed was a routine project review.
I stood outside the glass doors and breathed.
Behind me, at the end of the hallway, the pack was there. Not inside the room. Not running the meeting. Not standing over my shoulder or speaking on my behalf or doing any of the things that the world expected alphas to do when their beta was threatened.
They were at my back. That was all. A wall of support so solid I could feel it in my body, the hum blazing warm in my chest, five threads singing in unison.
Kieran against the far wall, arms crossed, his dark eyes fixed on the conference room doors with the intensity of a predator watching the perimeter. Ready. Contained. Trusting me.
Declan beside him, laptop in hand, because even in crisis Declan had a laptop, and his blue eyes met mine through the glass with a nod that said the resources are yours and so am I.
Jonah on the other side, leaning against the wall with his arms around himself, his green eyes bright and fierce. My omega, believing in me with the full force of a heart that had always seen what I was.
And Rhys. Standing apart. Quiet. Still. His gray eyes on mine through the glass, and in them, no mask. No wall. Just the steady, unwavering presence of a man who had spent months taking care of me from a distance and was now, for the first time, letting me see him doing it.
Sadie appeared beside me. Her folder was in her hands. Her jaw was set. Her eyes had the cold, focused light of a woman about to deliver justice with surgical precision.
“Ready?” she asked.
I looked at the conference room. I looked at my pack. I looked at the woman who had been my ally since the day I walked into this building.
I straightened my shoulders. I unclenched my hands. I breathed.
“Ready.”
I opened the doors and walked in.