Ivy
The kitchen table looks like a fucking war room.
Laptops and phones everywhere, and a half-empty pot of coffee that's already been refilled three times. A stack of lined paper because Wraith prefers writing on that to typing. Plague's gigantic dispenser of medical-grade hand sanitizer standing guard beside the sugar bowl.
Thane's jaw hasn't unclenched, and he hasn't said a word about why Whiskey and Valek were off in the middle of the night and tracked mulch and dirt in when they came back.
But he's shelving it because Eliza needs statements by five, and this pack isn't going to implode over paperwork.
Not on the Captain's watch.
"Sit down," he says to the room.
Whiskey drops into a chair so fast he almost falls out of it.
Plague is already seated, laptop open, fingers poised and ready over the keyboard.
Wraith and I are in the same chair again because he won't let me out of his sight, and he's been even more my shadow than usual since Valek and Whiskey came in last night.
He pulled me into his lap the second he sat down and his arms locked around my waist.
I don't mind one bit.
I lean back against his chest, phone in hand, and settle in. His chin rests on my head, his heartbeat slow and steady against my upper back.
We've got a system now.
Valek is leaning against the counter, tea in hand, not sitting.
"Valek," Thane says through his teeth, pointedly looking at the seats.
Valek ignores him.
Wraith shifts behind me, his free hand drifting to his face. The bandages are bothering him again. He's been pulling at the edges all morning. Tugging the tape, adjusting the gauze where it presses against the stitches.
I'm still not sure if it hurts or if he's just anxious about it. When I ask him, he just signs fine. Which isn't really an answer.
He can't wear his mask. The wounds are too fresh. Plague said twenty-four more hours minimum before anything presses directly against the tissue. The only reason he doesn't need surgery is because he's an alpha, and alphas heal fast.
Plague, who is for once not wearing one of his disposable surgical masks, watches Wraith for a moment before pushing his chair back without a word. He disappears down the hallway and comes back with one of his folded scarves. He puts it in front of Wraith and returns to his laptop.
"This is perfect," I say, picking it up with a grateful glance at Plague, who gives me a short nod in return. I twist around on Wraith's lap to drape it around his neck, then loop it so it's loose around his lower face. His blue eyes watch me the entire time. "See? Even better than the gaiter."
I kiss his nose before turning back to the laptop, and he nuzzles into my neck, his arms tightening around me.
"Alright," Thane says, giving up on Valek and pulling his laptop closer. "I'll go first."
He types hard and fast while he speaks out loud. Every word is direct, doing exactly what it needs to do and nothing more. Captain-speak honed by years of press conferences and post-game interviews.
Plague reads over his shoulder—literally, he moves his chair beside Thane's—and edits in real time.
Well. Nitpicks.
Thane is pissed and growling by the end of it, but it sounds good.
"Next," Thane says. He reads Plague's over his shoulder the same way Plague read his. "Plague. You can't use the word exsanguination in a PR statement."
"Why not?"
"Because normal people don't know what it means."
"They can look it up, then."
But he changes it.
Plague's statement is… well, expected. Medical terminology, timelines down to the second because of course he was watching the clock, factual observations stripped of emotion. Until one line near the end, where he refers to me as his beloved mate.
Not just mate.
Beloved.
And this alpha, who puts so much thought into every word and action, types it with no hesitation.
I turn so red I can feel the heat. I have to look down at my phone so nobody sees my expression.
Whiskey's statement is a disaster.
Three drafts. The first reads like he's the one with a concussion instead of Valek. The second is somehow worse because he tried to sound professional and Whiskey's version of "professional" is using words like herefore and thusly.
The third Plague basically rewrites from scratch while Whiskey hovers behind him, protesting every edit.
"You can't say Wade was being a little bitch."
"But he was."
The stubbornness survives every edit. So does the opening line, which Whiskey refuses to add his legal name to, or change it from Yo, Whiskey here.
The core of Whiskey's statement—the raw, bull-headed refusal to apologize for protecting his pack—stays intact no matter how many times Plague smooths the edges.
It reads like a man who'd do it all again in a heartbeat and dares anyone to tell him he's wrong.
Wraith's turn.
He pulls the lined paper toward him, picks up a pen, and writes. It's one continuous flow of ink across the page. I've never seen him write like this.
His handwriting is atrocious.
I mean atrocious.
The letters lean in different directions. His Rs look like Ds. His Ns could pass for Cs or Us depending on the light. One word could either be instinct or insect, or it might be an entirely new word he invented through sheer force of bad penmanship.
I try not to giggle because he would absolutely misunderstand and get embarrassed. He still doesn't get why I find him adorable.
He finishes, sets the pen down, and slides the paper to the center of the table.
Silence.
Whiskey picks it up. Squints. Rotates it ninety degrees. Squints harder.
"Bro," he says slowly. "Does this say the blood on the dick fucked with your head?"
Wraith's head tilts.
"Right here." Whiskey points. "After on the—is that on the dick?"
R-I-N-K, Wraith fingerspells flatly.
"That is NOT what that says. The R looks like a D. The N looks like—Plague, come look at this. Tell me that doesn't say dick."
Plague leans over and studies the word, his eyes narrowing.
"It says rink," he confirms.
"LOOK at the R!"
"It's a poorly formed R. Blood on the dick doesn't even make sense, Whiskey."
"It's a D! And the N is absolutely a C. The I and the K are fine, I'll give him that, but it spells D-I-C—"
Wraith's hand shoots out and smacks Whiskey upside the head without looking, almost knocking the tea out of Valek's hands. He catches it somehow, but not before it splashes over and hits Plague's cheek. Plague is up from his chair and clear across the room with a hiss.
Whiskey is now wheezing with laughter. "I'm framing this. I'm framing this and putting it on my wall—"
Wraith reaches for him again and Whiskey leaps out of his chair to scramble out of range, still cackling.
Plague comes back, swiping the tea off his face with a clean wipe, and snatches the paper from Whiskey with a resigned expression. He reads it slowly.
Then he lowers the paper, looks at Wraith, looks at the paper, and sits back down in front of his laptop with a relenting sigh. "Should probably type it up," he mutters, already starting.
Line by line, Wraith's words emerge from the wreckage of his handwriting. When Plague finishes, he reads it once to himself. His fingers still on the keyboard.
He doesn't say anything for a long moment.
Then he turns the laptop toward Thane.
Thane opens his mouth to start reading it out loud, but Wraith's palm comes up, and Thane hesitates.
Not yet, Wraith signs.
Thane leans forward, studying his brother. "You don't want us to read it right now?"
Wraith shakes his head once.
"You want me to just read it at the press conference? Cold?"
A nod.
Thane holds his gaze for a long moment. There's some kind of brotherly telepathy passing between them, and the rest of us aren't part of it. I can feel Wraith's pulse against my back, faster than I'd expect from his stillness.
"Okay," Thane says quietly. "I'll read it cold."
He clicks to close the window with Wraith's statement on it and slides the laptop to the side. His expression gives nothing away, but I notice he doesn't look at the rest of us.
Now I'm fucking worried.
Whiskey, who has been uncharacteristically silent for the past thirty seconds—a personal record—opens his mouth.
"Don't," Plague says, without looking at him.
Whiskey shuts it.
I twist slightly in Wraith's lap, just enough to glance up at him. His blue eyes meet mine and soften, and he raises his hand to gently swipe his thumb along my cheekbone.
Tea.
There was tea on my cheek.
Whiskey bites his lower lip so hard he pulls a face and it takes everything I have to not laugh again. Thank the gods for the pack clown. It's not easy to spiral when Whiskey's in the room. Even when he's just existing.
Thane clears his throat. "Valek?"
Valek pulls Plague's laptop toward him. Plague makes a noise of protest, but Valek ignores him, typing as if he already knows exactly what he's going to say.
Two minutes later at the most, he turns the laptop back around to show me.
Ivy Byrne is my scent match and my mate. The force used was proportional to the threat presented by Wade Kelly, who had already attacked another member of the Ghosts' pack and was escalating aggression and threats toward our omega. I acted in her defense and would not hesitate to do so again.
I stare at the screen, blinking. This is the same alpha who can't say the word feelings without grimacing. The same alpha who kissed me in his dark room and then staggered back like I'd shot him.
And he wrote my scent match and my mate in a formal statement to the league without blinking.
Plague reads it. His eyebrow lifts.
"That's… aggressive."
"It's accurate."
"It reads as combative. Soften it."
Valek's jaw works. The silence stretches long enough that I think he's going to refuse. Then he glances at me and I give him an encouraging nod and mouth "please."
He reaches over without moving the laptop and deletes the last eight words, then hits the period key once, hard, with a look that says he thinks he's doing everyone a massive and difficult favor.
"There," he says. "Softened."
Plague reads the revision and his mouth thins. "I suppose that's the best we'll get."
"You're welcome."
Then it's my turn.
The room shifts. Whiskey picks up his phone and starts scrolling through loud cat videos. Plague clicks around mindlessly on his laptop. Thane checks his messages.
Valek gets a worn paperback out of his bag.
It's a vintage bodice ripper with a Cyrillic title, the kind with a dreamy hand-painted cover, but he isn't really reading it.
He's watching Whiskey from across the table as if the entire point of this is to bait Whiskey into harassing him with questions about it.
Fucking with Whiskey seems to be a sport for Valek, and I'm not complaining. It is funny.
But Whiskey is too focused on the cat videos.
They're all pretending to be busy. All except for Wraith, who I think might actually be so exhausted, he's fallen asleep again. His face is nuzzled into my neck and his breathing is slow and steady and soft against my back, his scarred hands resting in my lap and arms loose around my body.
I stare at my phone screen. The cursor blinks in the empty notes app.
This is the part where I write about Wade.
Not the version I've been telling in fragments, either. I can't get away with a detail here, a confession there, like I parceled out to each alpha as I learned to trust them.
This is the official version. The one that goes on the record. The one that says my name is Ivy Byrne and my ex-fiancé forced a mating bond on me and I burned it off my own body to escape.
The one that torches whatever was left of my invisibility. Because I have to protect my pack the only way I can.
I start typing.
It comes in pieces. I write the end first, the part about the flat iron, the smell of my own skin burning because I'm definitely not going with the sanitized version of this that makes Wade seem redeemable, the bus ticket I bought with the last cash I had, and how I came to the Ghosts' arena with nothing and found a pack of alphas.
Or rather, a pack of alphas found me, starting with Wraith.
Starting with overcooked chicken soup when he doesn't even fucking eat chicken.
Then I go back to the beginning, when Wade was everything I thought I wanted. Then the middle, when wanting turned to trapping.
My hands shake on certain sentences.
I backspace. Retype. Backspace again. Sigh and think.
Nobody interrupts.
The room stays quiet except for the occasional rustle of Valek turning a page. At some point, a chair scrapes. I don't look up. Footsteps move to the kitchen. The coffee maker hisses and gurgles. Footsteps return.
A fresh mug of coffee appears at my elbow.
Valek leans back against the wall without a word.
His book is already open again before I fully register what happened, his silver eyes locked on Whiskey over the book and the cover angled carefully so the first thing Whiskey sees when he looks up is something that's going to make him say something crazy.
"Thanks," I mouth to Valek.
He inclines his head and the smile he gives me is a real one this time. It isn't wolfish or sarcastic, and it softens the angular planes of his face.
I keep typing. When I finish, I read it once, then send it to Thane with a whoosh sound from my phone.
The sound makes Whiskey look up.
"Hold on. Hold the fuck on. Have you been reading that this whole time? While the rest of us were having emotional breakthroughs? You've been sitting there reading Russian titty literature?"
Valek gives him a sharp grin, his eyes lighting up. "Would you like me to read it to you?"
I can't hold it in anymore. I laugh my fucking ass off, so hard and loud Wraith startles behind me and growls into my neck.
Thank the gods for Whiskey.
All of them, really.