Chapter 32
BIANCA
Owen fell asleep between my thighs.
His face is pressed against me, turned just enough to breathe.
One bruised arm is trapped beneath my leg, and his mouth is still warm against skin that has finally stopped begging for attention.
His swollen eye is the first thing I see clearly.
Fury moves through me before the rest of my body has even woken.
I don’t move yet, but for the first time in days, my body isn’t begging for anything. No cramp winds tighter in my pelvis. The bonds are warm and heavy with sleeping alphas.
Packing five adults into my childhood bedroom is slightly unhinged. The double bed is laughably small, but I used to stare at this ceiling and imagine one of them climbing through my window, then get greedy and try to fit all four into the fantasy.
Weller is next to the wall, an arm heavy over my waist. Tristan is curled along my other side. Freddie is sleeping on a thin blanket on the floor.
The room is a mess and desperately needs a window cracked.
Empty plates are stacked on my desk, and water bottles lean out of the trash can.
Towels hang over the chair and the footboard.
Everybody showered at some point because the blood is gone, but the clean skin beneath it only made the damage easier to see.
I remember pieces of the heat, but a lot is missing.
Every time my awareness returned, one of them was inside me or holding me so tightly I couldn’t tell where my body ended and theirs began.
Owen’s deep voice at my ear while I cried for him to get closer even though there was nowhere left to go.
Tristan swallowing my sounds like he was consuming me.
Weller holding my face and making me look at him until I could tell him what I needed.
Freddie feeding me ice from his fingers because I was complaining about being too hot.
My body is sore in places I didn’t realize could be sore, and there are bite marks down my chest and bruises scattered over my thighs. None of it feels like the fantasies I used to have in this bed. Those were much tamer.
Owen’s fucked-up eye opens a sliver. For a few seconds, he only looks at me from between my legs. Then he lifts his head, and the movement pulls a rough sound from him.
“Did you fall asleep eating me out?”
His cheek drops back to my thigh. “It was the only thing that made you stop crying.”
Okay then. Heats are fucking weird.
Tristan makes a miserable noise and drags the sheet over his face. On the floor, Freddie wakes abruptly, feels around for a body that isn’t there, then finds my foot hanging over the edge of the mattress and closes his hand around it.
“Morning,” he mumbles. “Are you hungry, nauseous, horny, or about to cry? Those are the choices I’ve been given lately.”
“E, none of the above.” My voice is rough.
That wakes Weller. He immediately pushes himself upright, squinting toward the thin daylight around the curtains. “You slept through most of yesterday and the day before. How are you feeling?”
I look at the water bottles, the plates, Owen’s face. “I’m okay. How long have we been in here?”
“It’s been seven days.”
Seven fucking days. I couldn’t account for most of them if someone held a gun to my head.
Freddie gets to his knees and leans across the bed to touch my forehead.
“Winston checked on you every day. Clara too. Your mom stayed at their house until the heat passed, and the attorney called this morning about your dad. The judge signed off on his release. Now they’re waiting for the jail to finish processing him. ”
I press my fingers into my eyes and give myself a moment to absorb that Dad could be home today.
“I want coffee,” I say. “Then I want to know every single thing I’ve missed.”
Freddie returns with coffee, breakfast sandwiches, and Ezra, who stands in the doorway and looks me over until his shoulders finally lower. Megan is somewhere downstairs on the phone with Anna. Their ordinary noise travels up through the vents, and something in me loosens.
“What happened after we split up?” I ask, counting bruises and all the careful ways they’re carrying their bodies.
“Our fathers hired the men who followed us,” Weller says. “They wanted their assets back, and they wanted you. Now they’re dead.”
“They’re dead?”
“Yes.”
Weller nods at Ezra. “Ezra got himself loose. He freed us.”
Ezra passes me his phone. The news clip plays silently: an aerial shot of what’s left of the old warehouse among miles of wet trees, its patched roof peeled open and two walls collapsed into the blackened interior.
Twisted roofing and burned timber bury the floor.
The caption says crews recovered human remains believed to belong to three people.
Identification and cause are still pending, though the anchors have already found the frozen corporate accounts, the fathers’ collapsing businesses, and enough photographed criminals to build an entire afternoon out of the phrase deal gone wrong.
“Ezra’s been watching the coverage,” Tristan says. “The public story is an illegal deal that went bad. No one has connected it to us.”
“The fire did most of the work,” Ezra says. “The scene’s a mess, not magic, but there isn’t much left to trace. Nothing public points toward any of you yet.”
“Yet?”
“I’m not promising you the future. I’m telling you where we are this morning.” He takes the phone back when the clip begins again.
The rest of the day disappears into showers, stripped sheets, cleanup, and an alarming amount of Mexican takeout.
Dad’s release is still crawling through whatever part of the system requires everyone to move as slowly as possible, so Winston goes to wait for him.
The others disappear when the front door opens even though I don’t ask them to.
One second the living room is full, and the next there’s room for my mother to step inside.
I’m on my feet as soon as the door opens, my arms around her neck. We hold each other for minutes without speaking.
“Oh, thank god, Bianca—you’re all right.” Her hand moves over my hair, my shoulder, the side of my face, never settling. “I’ve been so worried about you.”
“I’m okay. I’m sorry about taking over your house—I didn’t realize...”
“Don’t apologize. It gave me the opportunity to get Winston off his feet and help Clara with the nursery.”
The question has been chewing at me all morning, but I don’t know how to ask it.
We end up on the couch with my head in her lap, the way we used to when I was little and sick enough to want her but not sick enough for my bed.
Her fingers comb through my clean, damp hair.
I cry without deciding to, and after a minute, she does too.
A long time passes before she asks softly, “Do you think you can ever forgive me?”
“I... I do forgive you, but that doesn’t mean we’re fixed.”
Her hand stops in my hair.
“Don’t lie to me again, please.”
She looks away. “I’m sorry.”
“Then tell me the truth next time.”
She nods.
“Will you stay in Emerald Hills? Winston says your father’s release order went through. He could be home tonight.” Her voice catches, but she keeps going. “We can put our family back together.”
My throat hurts. “I’m not sure what our plans are yet. We have a place near the beach. But I’ll come home and visit. You and Dad and Winston—well, everyone—can come visit us too.”
She nods tearfully and pulls me into another hug.
“Mom?”
“Yeah, baby?”
“Did you...” I stop and catch the hand still resting in my hair.
Her fingers close around mine. She holds my gaze, then nods once.
Until now, I thought every dangerous part of me came from him.
“We found a payment trail for Winston’s accident,” I say. “It led back to Montgomery. The guy who hit Winston died a few weeks later.”
Her lips part, but nothing comes out. She looks toward the front window, and the horror that moves over her face is so naked I have to look away.
An hour later, Mom has washed her face, and we’re sitting in the living room waiting for Dad when the doorbell chimes.
But it’s not him.
The woman on the porch is in her fifties or sixties, wearing a navy skirt set and holding a briefcase in one hand.
“My name is Leah Valentina,” she says when my mom opens the door. “I’m counsel for the Montgomery Medical Trust. Mr. Dashwood spoke with me yesterday.”
I look at Weller as he steps back into the room. The others have stayed upstairs.
“She located us while you were still recovering,” he says. “I told her you were medically unavailable and that no one would make decisions on your behalf.”
“What is this about?”
At the kitchen table, she opens her briefcase and sorts through the documents before she speaks.
“Dr. Montgomery’s death created an immediate authority problem,” she says.
“The clinical decisions remain with licensed staff, but the trust controls funding, appointments, property, and several organizations that can’t operate indefinitely without a controlling trustee. He named you to that position.”
“Me?”
She slides a piece of paper across the table. My name appears in the first paragraph and again on the next page, Bianca Quinn printed in the same black type as the rest of the words I still don’t understand.
“His other daughters will receive substantial trusts and specific properties,” Leah continues.
“Those inheritances don’t depend on your cooperation.
This isn’t a will reading, if that’s what you’re wondering.
The trust became active when his death was certified. Probate will take considerably longer.”
“I don’t understand. We weren’t close.”
“I can’t speak for him, but Emmett Montgomery had a very high opinion of his own judgment. He wouldn’t have selected a successor casually.”
I still don’t understand. I’m not a doctor. I can’t run any of this.
Leah turns several pages toward me. “The trust funds nine outpatient clinics, three residential treatment programs, and temporary housing for omegas leaving unsafe packs. There are physicians, trauma counselors, legal advocates, job-placement services. The majority of his work ran through those programs, and they have some of the strongest long-term outcomes in the country.”
The pages are full of houses where omegas slept safely and clinics where someone believed them when they said they were hurting. I keep looking for the part where the words change shape and show me the man I knew.
“What about the omegas he forced into experiments? I’m not supporting anything like that. Can I stop it? Let them go?”
Leah’s forehead creases. “I’m not sure what you mean by forced. Every participant in the trust’s files has signed consent, an assigned advocate, and documented withdrawal rights.”
Montgomery had my mother’s signature on an injection she didn’t remember authorizing. The restraint marks on my wrists lasted longer than the paperwork that said I was being treated.
“The records can be wrong. My mother signed paperwork she doesn’t remember signing.”
“Then they should be reviewed by people who never worked for him.” She closes the folder in front of her.
“As controlling trustee, you can suspend funding and replace administrators immediately. You cannot make clinical decisions, but you control who is permitted to make them and whether a program continues. Everything is available to you—properties, trial records, medications, consent forms. You can speak to every participant through independent advocates if that’s what you want. ”
“I want every file preserved. No one deletes anything. And I want outside people talking to the participants before we decide any of those consent forms are real.”
Leah watches me for a moment, then writes it down.
“There is also the financial portion,” she says. “The trust holds a substantial liquid portfolio in addition to the clinics, patents, and controlling interests. His personal estate will be handled separately.”
I find the current valuation halfway down the next page and read it twice because I don’t trust my eyesight.
The word no is already in my mouth when Weller puts his hand over mine. “You can help a lot of people with it. You don’t have to accept it for yourself.”
At the refuge, we stretched every donation until it tore. A broken furnace meant moving six omegas in a safe house before dark. One prescription could swallow the grocery budget. Ezra could turn this kind of money into years people didn’t have to spend looking over their shoulders.
Leah pulls a thinner file from the back of her briefcase. “There is one dependent matter requiring immediate attention. Dr. Montgomery’s adopted daughter, Whitney.”
The photograph clipped inside shows a building in Switzerland, pale stone against snow. Whitney’s medical summary begins beneath it. Paralysis. Neurological damage. A list of psychiatric diagnoses long enough that I stop reading.
“She remains under medical care there,” Leah says. “The trust owns the facility, and you now have the authority to approve its leadership.”
“It says secure, but she had outside access. She isn’t safe, and she isn’t well.”
That makes Leah sit back. “Then I would recommend an immediate access and staffing audit. You can replace personnel, rotate her point of contact, and restrict unsupervised technology while an independent physician reviews her care.”
A signature could move Whitney somewhere worse and call it treatment. The power sits in front of me, neat and legal, and I don’t want it. I don’t even want her dead anymore. I want her unable to reach us, and then I want to move on with my life.
“Do the audit,” I say. “No private devices, no one person handling everything, and suspend anyone that’s been working with her while they’re investigated. Implement a rotation where she isn’t with the same person for longer than a day or two. But her medical care stays in place.”
Leah removes one final document and turns it toward me.
I sign.
Bianca Quinn