Chapter 8
Vee
Three days in and the shape of the place is settling around me.
It’s not home, but familiar enough that I'm not startled awake anymore when the floorboards creak or when I hear footsteps in the hallway outside my door.
Morning comes with Malcolm already in the kitchen.
He's at the table with a mug of coffee and a book, wearing glasses I didn't know he owned.
They're thin-framed, silver, and they make him look softer somehow.
Less like the broad-shouldered alpha who helped me through my heat and more like someone who spends Sunday mornings doing crossword puzzles, just.. . extra large.
When I walk in, his eyes flick up from the page, register the borrowed shirt still hanging from my shoulders, then return to his book with nothing but a slight nod of acknowledgment.
I pour myself coffee from the pot he's already made. The mug is warm in my hands. I sit across from him at the small wooden table and we don't speak.
His silence has no waiting in it. No expectation lurking underneath. No countdown ticking toward the moment I should be doing something else, saying something else, performing better.
Ragon's silence was always a countdown. Every quiet moment stretched thin with the weight of what I should be doing, what I should be saying, how I should be proving I deserved to be there.
Even when he wasn't speaking, I could feel his assessment.
His judgment. His disappointment in whatever I was failing to be.
Malcolm's silence costs me nothing.
I sip my coffee and watch him turn a page. The clock on the wall ticks. Outside, a bird sings from somewhere in the trees. I exhale and my chest loosens just a little.
It's such a small thing. Sitting in quiet with someone who doesn't need me to fill the air with proof of my worth. But it feels massive. Like learning to breathe differently.
Finn wakes loud and chaotic twenty minutes later.
I hear him before I see him, footsteps thundering down the stairs like he's being chased. A muttered curse. Something crashes in the hallway that sounds expensive.
"I'm fine!" he calls to no one in particular. "Nothing broke! Probably!"
Malcolm doesn't even look up from his book.
I hide my smile behind my mug.
Finn appears in the doorway looking like he lost a fight with his own bed.
He looks like he dressed himself in the dark—hair wild, t-shirt with its seams and tag showing on the outside, and feet clad in what could only be described as a sock identity crisis: navy blue on the left, candy-striped on the right.
He makes a beeline for the coffee pot like a man on a mission, pours himself a cup without bothering with cream or sugar and drinks it black and hot like he's punishing himself for existing before nine in the morning.
Then he drops into the chair next to mine with enough force that the table shakes.
His knee bumps mine under the table, warm and solid and utterly without ceremony.
I don't pull away.
The warmth spreads up my leg and I let it in without examining it too closely. Without asking myself what it means or whether I should feel guilty for accepting comfort from a pack that isn't mine.
"Morning," Finn mumbles into his mug.
"Morning," I say.
Malcolm turns another page.
We sit in the quiet together. The three of us. Coffee and morning light and the sound of birds outside.
It's nice in a way I didn't know I was missing. There's no careful choreography of who sits where and who gets attention and who's allowed to take up space. Just people existing in the same room without it feeling like a battle for territory.
I know I should be angry with them. I should be furious that they all made decisions about my life without telling me or asking me, but it's hard to be angry when I know they wanted to help me. And I know without them doing it the way they did, I'd still be stuck in that house with Ragon's pack.
There's still a part of me that still wants to be there, even after everything. But logically I know I wouldn't have survived it much longer.
So I am angry at them. All of them. But mostly I'm angry at Ragon. And I'm even more disappointed with the rest of them.
But I'm here now, and I have to figure out the best way to move on and go forward. I just don't want to think about how bleak my options are looking.
After breakfast, Finn mentions the garden.
We're clearing plates when he says it, casual as anything, like it just occurred to him. "There's a mess out back if you want to take a look. Might have some herbs still alive under all the weeds. It could use someone who knows what they're doing."
I know he's lying.
Not about the garden being a mess, I saw it through the window yesterday—overgrown and wild, more forest than anything intentional.
But about it just occurring to him.
He watched me garden over the fence between our houses for months.
I'd catch glimpses of him sometimes, pretending to be doing something else while I worked.
Sometimes he'd come over. Sometimes he'd just watch.
I know he's been sitting on this information, waiting for exactly the right moment to deploy it. When it could help instead of hurt.
I file that away. The careful timing. How he offers things without making them feel like charity.
"I'll check it out," I say.
His smile is small and satisfied, like I just passed a test I didn't know I was taking.
The garden out back is an absolute disaster.
Overgrown doesn't even cover it. Weeds have taken over everything, choking out whatever used to grow here.
There are remnants of what might have been intentional planting once.
A border of stones, a trellis collapsed under the weight of some vines.
But it's been abandoned for long enough that nature has reclaimed most of it.
I crouch in the dirt and work with bare hands. I don’t have any gloves or tools, just skin and soil. The earth is cool and damp from recent rain, and it feels good under my fingernails. Real. Grounding.
I pull weeds carefully at first, then with more confidence as I find what I'm looking for underneath the chaos.
Rosemary. Still alive, woody stems reaching up through the tangle.
Thyme clinging to the edges where the stones used to mark a border.
Something that might be lavender if I can uncover it and give it room to breathe.
This garden wants attention, not precision.
It doesn't need someone to impose order on it, just someone to help it remember what it was trying to be.
Nothing like Ragon's yard where every trimmed hedge was a small act of control, every flower bed a statement, every blade of grass measured and regulated to within an inch of its life.
This garden doesn't care if I'm perfect.
It just wants someone to notice it's still fighting.
I can work with that.
I'm elbow-deep in dirt when a memory surfaces.
The lake. Around my second year with Ragon's pack.
It was one of those perfect summer days where the heat sits heavy on your shoulders and the air feels thick enough to swim through. Drake wanted everyone in the water. He kept trying to cajole us off our towels and into the lake like an overgrown puppy.
I didn't want to go in.
My hair was down, wavy and loose, and if I got in the lake it would turn into an absolute mess. Frizz and tangles and hours of combing it out later while Drake apologized and Eli pretended he couldn't hear me cursing.
"I'm good here," I told Drake from my towel on the shore.
Eli appeared a few minutes later with a book he'd grabbed from the car and a sweating glass of iced tea.
"Thought you might want these," he said, setting them down next to me with that careful gentleness he always had. The tea was sweet and cold and perfect.
"You're a saint," I said.
"I try." He sat next to me on the sand, close enough that our shoulders touched, and pulled out his own book.
We sat like that for a while, comfortable in the quiet, before I asked about his shift the day before. His face lit up like it always did when he had a good story.
"Oh man, you're going to love this," he said, leaning in conspiratorially.
"This woman, must've been eighty, walks in yesterday and immediately looks me up and down.
'Are you the doctor?' she demands. I say yes, and she goes, 'You look twelve.
Does your mother know you're playing doctor?
' Then she points at my stethoscope and says, 'That better not touch me until you wash your hands twice.
Once for whatever you touched last and once for whatever you're planning to touch next.
' When I tried to take her blood pressure, she slapped my hand away and said, 'The cuff is too cold, the room is too warm, and those walls are an abomination.
Who chose that color? Fire them immediately. '
I laughed so hard I almost spilled my tea. "What did you say?"
"I told her my mother was very proud and that I had a medical degree to prove I wasn't playing." He was grinning, eyes bright behind his glasses. "She said the degree was probably fake and demanded to see my supervisor. I told her he fired me that morning for choosing the wallpaper."
"No."
"Yes. So I got another doctor, and she took one look at him and said 'this one's worse, he looks ten.'"
I was crying laughing by that point, and Eli nudged my shoulder with his. "That could be you one day. Terrorizing young medical professionals."
"I would never."
"You absolutely would. You'd be the worst patient. You'd ask if they washed their hands twice and demand to see their credentials."
"That's just good hygiene and due diligence—"
I didn't get to finish because Drake appeared out of nowhere, scooped me off the ground before I could react, and ran toward the water while I screamed.
"Drake! No! My hair!"
"Your hair will be fine!"
"It won't! Drake, I swear to god if you—"
We hit the water. Cold and shocking, stealing my breath. We went under together and came up gasping and laughing despite myself.