Chapter 22
Twenty-Two
Rhett
Her heat lands a little after noon, and I know the exact second, because the whole firehouse stops breathing at once.
We’re in the bay, the three of us, pretending to do inventory on a truck that doesn’t need it, all of us useless and twitchy and refusing to say why.
And then it comes across the street, through the alley, through closed windows and the good sense of three grown men.
Her scent, gone from ripe to full-blown, rich and sweet and desperate, an omega in heat forty feet away.
Every one of us goes dead still with the same look on our face.
Cal makes a sound like he’s been hit. Eli sets down the wrench very, very carefully, like he doesn’t trust his own hands.
And me, I grip the side of the truck and hang on, because the rut that’s been idling in me for a week just kicked over into gear, and every animal instinct I own is trying to walk me straight through the wall to get to her.
It’s the hardest afternoon of my life, and I have run into burning buildings.
You don’t get many honest days as an alpha.
Most of the time you’re a person, a guy who does his job and cracks jokes and keeps his hands to himself.
A rut is not that. A rut is the day the animal takes the wheel and reminds you, politely, that the person was always just the passenger.
Mine’s been circling a week, and now it’s got a scent to lock onto, and it does not care about plans or manners or the careful architecture I’ve been building since I was six years old to keep myself fine.
It knows one word, her name, and it wants to go, and the only thing keeping me in this bay is that I would rather die than be one more person who turned up at her door uninvited.
Because she’s in there alone. Curtains shut since morning.
Shop dark. Not one text, not to Dot, not to Della, not to us.
I’ve checked my phone so many times Cal took it off me for my own dignity.
She’s locked herself in with the worst and best days her body’s ever going to hand her, and she’s doing it on purpose, by herself.
I know exactly why. And it’s partly my fault.
I keep drifting to the bay window like it’s going to tell me something.
It won’t. Just a dark shop, closed curtains, and, once, a shape moving behind the glass upstairs, small and slow.
It takes Cal stepping bodily into my path to keep me from doing something all three of us would regret.
She’s up there right now toughing out the hardest thing her body has ever asked of her, alone, because somewhere along the line she decided that’s the safer bet.
I want to put my fist through the goddamn wall.
Instead, I count ceiling tiles and try to remember I’m a person and not the animal riding shotgun.
That’s the part chewing me up. A rut makes me honest, it turns out.
And the truth is, I know what taught her to lock that door.
Some of it’s older than us, a whole life of learning that reaching for things gets your hand slapped.
But some of it is a specific afternoon, and a specific counter, and a specific idiot who walked out of her shop cracking jokes to keep from admitting he’d just felt the ground move.
I taught her, in one clean lesson, that we’re men who have a nice time and leave light.
And now she’s white-knuckling a heat alone rather than risk finding out we’re not, and I helped build that door I’m now losing my mind on the wrong side of.
So there’s the guilt. Fine. Noted. Filed.
The rut’s good for one thing, at least. It burns off everything that isn’t true, and what’s left, standing here with my knuckles white on a truck and my brothers going quietly out of their minds beside me, is very simple.
I am not going to stand here and let her suffer alone out of a fear I helped put in her.
Trouble is, we’ve got a plan, and it’s garbage.
The plan is Eli’s, and it’s a good man’s plan, which is the problem.
We wait. We don’t crowd her. If she wants us through it, she knows where the firehouse is.
We respect her choice, all the way down, no matter what it costs.
And I’ve been nodding along to that plan for a week because it sounds like decency, and because arguing with Eli is like arguing with a mountain.
But I’m looking at that dark window, and I’m finally seeing the flaw in it, the one none of us wanted to say.
Waiting sounds like respect. From here, though, with her locked in alone with her own stubborn shame, it looks a lot more like three cowards letting a scared woman talk herself out of the thing she wants, and calling it manners.
I get why we made the plan. It’s a good plan for a shy omega who needs a little room to decide.
Wren isn’t shy. Wren is a bricked-up fortress with a bakery on the ground floor.
The whole approach is built around her asking, and she was never once going to ask.
We might as well have based it on her sprouting wings.
We could wait by this phone until the heat passes, and she’d ride the whole thing out alone, taking it as proof of every quiet story she already believes about herself.
Waiting doesn’t respect her choice. It just lets her fear make the choice for her.
There’s a difference between not crowding somebody and abandoning them on the doorstep of their own bad decision. And somebody in this pack has to say so out loud.
I look at Cal, who’s got his head against the truck like he’s praying to it. I look at Eli, who’s gone to stone by the workbench, holding the line by sheer will while it costs him everything, because that’s what a prime does, he pays the price so the rest of us don’t have to.
And I understand, with the horrible clarity of a man in rut, that it’s got to be me.
Not Cal. Cal will follow his heart straight through a wall, but he won’t overrule his prime, he loves Eli too much.
And not Eli, because Eli’s the one stuck in the plan, the one whose whole job is holding the line, who can’t be the one to break it without help.
It has to be the one who never takes anything seriously.
The joke. The good-time guy. The one nobody, including me, has ever once looked to for the serious call.
There’s a joke in there somewhere. Rhett Maddox, voice of reason.
Somebody alert the papers. A week ago I’d have made it, too.
Gotten the laugh, let the whole moment slide right past, because that’s the trick, you make the joke and nobody catches you ducking.
But she’s up there in the dark being brave and stupid and alone.
And the joke, for once, is not worth what it costs. I am so tired of ducking.
Which means I have to walk over to my prime and say the truest thing I’ve got, out loud, no punchline, no exit.
And admitting I want her for keeps, that I want it badly enough to fight my own prime over it, is the single most terrifying sentence I own.
I’ve spent my whole life making sure nobody knew I wanted anything past a laugh, because wanting out loud is how you hand people the tools to leave you.
It’s a good system. Kept me safe since the first grade.
I never once got left standing at a door I’d knocked on, on account of I never knocked.
But a good system that keeps you safe and empty is just a polite way to describe a life spent in the parking lot of everything you wanted.
And I’m done. I decided it somewhere between the scent hitting the wall and now.
I would rather knock on her door and get told to leave than spend one more year being the guy who was too clever to try.
Turns out a rut doesn’t give one single damn about my system.
“Eli,” I say, and my voice comes out wrong, stripped, nothing funny anywhere in it, and both their heads come up because they’ve never heard me sound like this. “We need to talk, and I need you to actually listen, because I’m about to say something I have never once said sober.”
Eli looks at me for a long moment. Weather versus a verdict, and for the first time in six years I hold his eyes and don’t reach for the joke that would let us both off the hook.
“All right,” he says quietly. “Say it.”
So I do.