Chapter 48
Chapter Forty-Eight
Callaway
“Fucked is relative . . .” I rake a hand through my hair, and it does nothing to calm the buzzing under my skin. “Kline. My parents’ attorney.”
Monty’s jaw tightens. His eyes go flat in that way that makes my insides go both warm and cold—warm because I know he’ll protect us, cold because I know what he’s capable of when he decides someone is a threat.
“But I want to tell you and Ves at the same time,” I add, and my voice dips, because the next part matters. “They mentioned her. They mentioned the baby.”
Monty rises from the bench in one smooth motion, controlled but immediate. No wasted movement. No questions that don’t matter. The bench squeaks and it’s the loudest sound in the room.
He steps closer, towel in hand, water bottle forgotten. “What else?”
“They’ve been digging,” I say, and even saying it makes my jaw ache. “They want me to get rid of my ‘indiscretions.’ They’re threatening to out us, destroy my career. They want me in New York in seventy-two hours. And they said—”
My throat goes tight—not in some pretty, poetic way. In a furious, ugly way. In a “don’t you fucking dare” way.
“They said she’s not suitable,” I finish. “They said the baby needs to be . . . resolved.”
Monty’s face doesn’t change much. That’s the most terrifying thing about him. The reaction is contained, but I can see it anyway, like a door closing somewhere deep.
He reaches for my wrist—firm grip, not tender—and checks my pulse with his thumb like he’s grounding himself through me.
“Let’s go upstairs and wake her up,” he says. “We’ll do it gently.”
He snags his shirt from the floor, pulls it on without hurry, and in that small act I see what he’s doing—collecting himself. Putting a barrier between his rage and our soft girl.
We move through the hallway together, silent. At the top of the stairs, Monty slows like he’s entering sacred ground.
Outside the bedroom, I pause. After taking a deep breath, my hand touches the doorknob. I turn it quietly, like we’re breaking into our own life.
The room is dark—blackout curtains sealing out time, sealing out certainty. No hint of morning. No clue if it’s early or late. Just the bed, the dim outline of Vesper curled in the middle like she’s made herself small without meaning to.
She’s wearing my shirt.
I sit on the edge of the mattress and brush my knuckles along her cheek. Her skin is warm. Real. Alive.
“Hey,” I whisper. “Sunshine, morning.”
She makes a tiny sound, half annoyed, half soft, and her eyes blink open into the dark.
“What time is it?” she mumbles, voice rough with sleep. Then—because she’s Vesper and she cannot wake up without attitude—she adds, “Did we buy a bunker? Because I’m not emotionally prepared to live in a sensory deprivation tank.”
Monty’s mouth twitches. My heart does something stupid.
I lean in and kiss her forehead, because I need to give her one second of soft before I hand her the truth.
“Not a bunker,” I murmur. “Just blackout curtains.”
She squints at me, eyes still half-lidded, trying to focus in the dark. “Okay, good. Because I’m already growing a whole human and I really don’t have room in my life for a house that’s committed to full-time gloom.”
Monty’s hand slides to her hip, firm and protective. “Vesper,” he says quietly.
“Okay,” she says, and the softness is gone. She sits up slowly, pulling my shirt tighter around her like it’s armor. “What happened?”
I swallow. I look at her face in the dark and I hate that she has to hear this at all.
“My parents called,” I say, and I keep my voice gentle even as my stomach flips again.
“What did they do?” she asks.
Not what do they want? Not what did they say?
What did they do?
“They hired someone. They called it risk management.” My mouth twists. “Same thing, different packaging.”
Monty’s hands curl at his sides. His fingers flex like he’s about to grab something.
I keep going before he can interrupt, because if I stop, he’ll fill the silence with images that make him violent.
Monty opens the curtains, Vesper sits up straight in the bed and listens to what I have to say. Everything, except the whole “take care of the baby” bit because that’s not something you tell your partner. Our baby is loved and protected, so fuck my parents.
Once I finish, there’s silence. We look at each other and then, “So you’re saying we either come out . . . or they drag us out, publicly?” Monty breaks the silence.
I nod in confirmation.
His gaze moves from me to Vesper, not frantic—never frantic—but alert, calculating, already mapping threats and exits and contingencies like that’s how he keeps breathing.
Then he looks at her fully, and something in his expression softens into a demand that’s also devotion.
“What do you want, baby?”
Vesper blinks, caught off guard by being handed the steering wheel.
“Me?” she says, frowning like the question is a trick. Like she’s waiting for someone to yank the rug out from under her the second she admits she wants anything at all.
“Yeah.” I keep my voice gentle, because I can feel how fragile the room is—how close she is to turning this into a joke and climbing back behind it. “You. What do you want? Because we need a plan before my parents decide our lives are their next press release.”
Vesper’s mouth twists, that sarcastic sunshine grin fighting its way to the surface even though her eyes look raw.
“This affects you too, Ves,” Monty says, and he shifts closer—not crowding, not hovering. Just there. A presence. A wall at her back. “Your career. This new stage of your life is—”
“My boss knows about us,” she cuts in, and the way she says it is almost smug, as if she’s holding up a tiny shield that says I’m not alone. “They’re discreet, very supportive but also . . . he’s in a relationship like ours.”
Monty’s brows pull together, an almost imperceptible reaction—curiosity and probably disbelief. The man is famous. His career as a musician and a producer is unprecedented. Obviously, he knows how to do it. Then I remember his son-in-law, who is also in a poly relationship.
Okay, so she’ll be fine career-wise, and maybe we could try to see if they can give us some pointers. Teach us how to keep our lives without losing ourselves.
Vesper keeps going. “That’s why working with my therapist has been . . . helpful.”
She presses her lips together, then blows out a breath like she’s about to jump into cold water. “I feel like I have to go to Juniper Ridge. Tell my dad. Maybe call my brothers.”
Monty is the one who speaks first. “Are you sure?”
His tone is careful. Protective. But there’s something else in it too—something like he already knows what it’s like for family to turn into a tribunal. Like he can see the exact second this could go wrong.
Vesper’s shoulders rise with a sigh that tries to be casual and fails.
“It’s your careers I’m worried about,” she says to me, and I hate that her instinct is still to protect us from the consequences of loving her.
“Hockey isn’t accepting of . . .” Her voice drops on the last word, like she can’t finish the thought without telling us what we already know.
I reach for her hand and squeeze.
“We’ll figure it out, Ves,” I say, aiming for convincing and landing somewhere between I’m lost and delusional because this world doesn’t get a love like ours. “Maybe the Orcas will understand.”
Monty exhales through his nose like he’s already done the math and found a loophole. “Santos Calderón-Bélanger, one of the defensemen on our team, has a husband. And a wife.”
Vesper’s head snaps toward him. My eyebrows shoot up.
“He’s open enough,” Monty continues, “just not . . . public-public. His husband is a famous musician and learned how to keep everything low key. Mills is totally supportive of them.”
I arch an eyebrow. “A famous musician?”
“Yeah.” Monty nods as if it’s not big deal. “They have a kid. Another on the way.”
My brain scrambles, because this is the first time in twenty-four hours I can picture a version of our future that doesn’t involve blood in the water.
“When were you going to share this morsel of information with us?” I demand, because what the fuck? “You’ve been holding on to that like it’s classified.”
“I found out last night after the game,” he says, calm as ever, like this isn’t the most important thing he could have told me while I was on the verge of taking a bat to my family’s legacy. “You were too busy celebrating the win and the whole we might make it to the playoffs.”
I lift my free hand. “Still. It seems like something you could’ve mentioned in the past twelve hours.”
Monty’s gaze slides to me, and his expression turns into that flat, warning look he gets when I push. Like he’s a door with three locks and I’ve learned exactly where to put my shoulder.
“On the drive back,” he says, voice stripped down to gravel, “you were too busy taunting the fuck out of me while I drove.”
I try not to smile.
I really do.
But the memory hits me anyway—hot and immediate, like my body kept the receipt and has been waiting to slap it on the counter.
It had been a seventeen-minute drive. Seventeen minutes from Portland to Lake Oswego, and somehow it had felt like a lifetime and a crime and a confession all at once.
Dark roads. Streetlights spacing out like they were giving us privacy on purpose. The dashboard glow turning Monty’s face into something carved—jaw tight, eyes fixed forward, every muscle insisting on control like control could save him from wanting.
His hands were on the wheel, knuckles pale, grip brutal. Like if he held on hard enough, he could keep everything inside him contained.
He was wrong.
Because I’d been there—close enough to feel the tension rolling off him in waves, close enough to see the way his throat worked when he swallowed, like he was forcing down a sound. Close enough to watch him pretend I wasn’t undoing him.