Chapter 19
ELI
Brunch was a crime scene.
Rowan and Cassian treated the “all-you-can-eat” sign like a dare, and the buffet lost. Three plates each. Four for Cassian if you count the mountain of bacon he referred to as “structural.” Jess laughed so hard she snorted orange juice, which I’m pretty sure counts as a baptism around here.
Now it’s three in the afternoon, and the cabin is quiet but for the soft chorus of two Alphas sleeping like they’re bears in hibernation.
They made it as far as the living room and surrendered: Rowan stretched on the couch with one arm over his eyes like the sun offended him personally; Cassian draped sideways in the recliner, boots off, a throw pillow crushed in a death grip.
Jess disappeared to her room with a paperback a while ago. So she’s either reading or napping.
Even though the Alphas just ate, I know they’ll want dinner, even if we eat much later than normal. I check the fridge for anything that might be healthy since we’ve screwed up any nutritional food since we got here.
The radio on the counter murmurs from a local station, the kind that plays songs with real instruments and a DJ who sounds like he wears knit hats on purpose. I keep it low. No point waking anyone.
I lean into the fridge and take inventory: baby greens, a lemon the size of my fist, a leftover heel of sourdough, cherry tomatoes rolling bright and smug, two chicken breasts I can treat kindly, or not at all if my charges remain comatose.
There’s a little jar of capers I forgot I’d bought when we stopped for supplies, and half a cucumber in a Ziploc.
Good enough to make something edible and healthy.
A floorboard creaks softly in the hall as I wipe down the counters.
Not an Alpha. Their footfalls are heavier, the air changes first, like pressure.
This is lighter. A hush and then a doorway: Jess, shoulder tucked into the frame, thumb holding her place in the paperback.
One of Rowan’s sweatshirts hangs to her mid-thigh; bare legs, warm skin.
Damp hair says she showered, and I am not at all thinking about steam on her collarbone.
“Do you ever stop cleaning?” she asks, smiling.
“Occupational hazard,” I say. “If I leave Cassian alone with crumbs, he adopts them.”
The radio shifts into a low-piano intro, something slow and honest. Her scent threads through the kitchen—vanilla, a hint of coffee, skin warmed by the shower. I file the details away like I always do: catalog first, analyze later.
“How are the food casualties?” she asks, nodding toward the living room.
“Nonverbal,” I say. “Both. Rowan mumbled something about ‘never speak of waffles to me again.’ Cassian is currently spooning a pillow.”
She laughs, bright and unguarded, and I feel the cabin tilt a degree toward the right.
We move around each other easily as I set the cutting board down. She reaches automatically for the towel at the oven handle, folds it into a neat square, and sets it beside me. Small domestic grace notes. The sort of thing you only notice when you’ve been starved for them.
“You okay?” she asks, soft, like she knows the question has weight.
About Meredith. About the way the kitchen hums, and the bedrock under my ribs shifted a hair this morning when Rowan took his ghosts out into the fog and came back breathing.
“Define okay,” I say lightly, then honestly: “Better than yesterday.”
She studies me for a beat. Not searching for cracks—just…seeing. It’s disarming, being looked at without a verdict attached.
“If it helps,” she says, “I like that he told me about Meredith. I think he needed to hear himself say it out loud.”
“Yeah.” I pick up the lemon and roll it beneath my palm. It’s way too early to start making dinner, but I like the prep. Gives me something to do besides pull her into a bedroom with me and see if she’s okay with that side of me that loves women just as much as men. “He did.”
We fall into a quiet that isn’t empty. The radio DJ says something about “a song for slow afternoons by the water,” and the music swells, a warm guitar line braided with piano and a woman singer who sounds like she’s been loved enough to fray at the edges.
Find myself swaying while I lay the knives out for later.
“You dance?” she asks.
My mouth curves. “Of course. My mom made me take three years of ballroom when I wanted to be Fred Astaire in tap shoes.”
“You would have been terrifying with a cane.” She leans on the counter.
“I still could be. Just haven’t found a cane that fits me.”
Her smile is contagious. “Wow. Trying to picture you in a tux with a top hat and a cane, dancing.”
I dry my hands, then hold one out. “Why picture it when I can show you?”
She blinks, thumb still hooked in the paperback, then slides it onto the counter, face-down on a clean dish towel like it’s precious. She slips her fingers into mine. The kind of touch that asks a question and answers it at the same time.
“You sure?” She teases playfully.
“Entirely.”
I guide her into the open patch of floor in the kitchen in front of the stove.
The song settles into a steady rhythm—enough to move to without thinking.
My palm finds the small of her back, and I keep a respectable distance, even though I want to pull her flush against me, feel every curve, learn how her hips move when there’s no fabric between us.
Want to show her that gentle doesn’t mean lukewarm, that I can make her feel just as desired as Cassian’s fire or Rowan’s intensity—just with a different kind of heat.
The patient kind. The kind that pays attention.
“Where’d you learn?” she asks quietly as we sway into a turn.
“Dragged to cotillions. My mother believed posture could save nations.” I angle us around one of the chairs at the end of the table. “Once I stopped wanting to die, I figured out it was just pattern recognition. Like people. Steps, signals, the way a shoulder lifts before a turn.”
She glances up at me then, smiling with her eyes more than her mouth. “You read rooms the way other people read books.”
I shrug, not apologizing for it. “With Rowan and Cassian, if I don’t look for the currents, I miss the rip tide. Like I did with Blake.”
Her fingers tighten, just a little, where our hands are linked.
“Ah, Rowan told you. Thought so.” I pull her closer, inhaling her scent as the vanilla is brightened by the quiet citrus when she’s feeling too much.
“What he probably didn’t tell you was that Blake tolerated me for both Cassian and Rowan’s sakes.
But I let it slide when I shouldn’t have.
Once, he went into a rage because a spec of glitter from one of Meredith’s evening dresses somehow got on his cheek.
When I teased him about it, I thought he was going to rip my head off.
He left for two hours after that, and part of me hoped he stayed away. I should’ve known then.”
“You can’t blame yourself.”
“Can’t I?” The words come out sharper than I mean them to.
I turn us through another measure, buying time to get my voice under control.
“I read people, Jess. It’s what I do. I catch the tells, the micro-expressions, the shifts in body language that everyone else misses.
And I missed that. Missed that he was dangerous. Missed that his charm was a mask.”
Her hand tightens on my shoulder. “Eli—”
“He was worse with me than with them,” I continue, because now that I’ve started, I can’t seem to stop.
“Blake knew I was the one watching, the threat to whatever he was building toward. So he played it perfectly—laughed at my jokes, asked my opinion, made me feel included when I knew damn well most Alphas barely tolerate Betas in packs.”
The memory tastes sour. “That glitter incident? I laughed it off. Told myself everyone has bad days, stress… all excuses I wrapped him in because I wanted to believe we’d finally found someone who got it. Who understood that Meredith loving all of us wasn’t dilution, it was multiplication.”
We turn, and Jess follows the lead without missing a beat.
“By the time I realized he was isolating her—little comments about how she should rest more, skip events, stay home—it was too late. I brought it up once to Blake, thinking I could get him to stop. He said I was being paranoid. That he cared about her, that I needed to trust the process.” My jaw clenches. “So I backed off. And she died.”
Jess stops moving. Just stops, right there in the middle of the kitchen, and looks up at me with something fierce in her eyes. “You didn’t kill her. He did.”
“I know that.” The words feel true and hollow at the same time. “Doesn’t change that I should’ve pushed harder. Should’ve trusted my instincts instead of second-guessing myself because I’m ‘just’ a Beta and what do I know about Alphas?”
“You know everything,” she says quietly. “You see everything. That’s why they need you.”
Something in my chest loosens. Not forgiveness—I’m not there yet, might never be—but space. Room to breathe around the guilt instead of drowning in it.
I swallow. Part of me wants to dodge it, turn it into a joke the way I always do. But I let the truth stand instead. “You’re allowed to take up space here. That includes joy. That includes wanting things. That includes—” I gesture between us. “This. Whatever this is.”
Another song comes on the radio, slower, and we keep dancing.
We turn through another slow measure. Her breathing evens against my chest. She’s lighter than she looks, or maybe she just lets me carry more of the moment than I expect.
I don’t lead with pressure; I lead with a suggestion and see what she does with it.
She tests me a little, spins when I don’t indicate one, and I catch her back easily, hand steady at her waist. It makes her laugh under her breath, a private sound.
We’re close enough that I can feel it in my sternum.
“You’re trouble,” I say, but I’m smiling.
“Only when I want to be.” She’s grinning now, pleased with herself. “You didn’t expect that.”