Chapter twenty-eight #2
“You said that to a touch-starved omega who’s been living in your house for weeks, who’s sick, who has nowhere to go, who you know is being stalked by Brennan Foster?”
“Yes.”
“After you called her a reject a few days ago?”
“Yes.”
Miles looks at me the way he looked at Brennan the first time he saw him. With the clear, cold knowledge of someone who’s lived inside cruelty and understands all its faces.
“Fix it,” he says. “Right now. Go to her room and fix it.”
He thinks she’ll let me. I don’t.
But it won’t be because I didn’t try.
I nod. Stand and leave. Walk the hallway to her door. It’s closed, no light underneath.
I knock. “Lily?”
Nothing.
“Lily, I need to talk to you.”
Silence.
I open the door. The room is dark, bed empty, covers thrown back. Closet closed.
Her window is locked, her bathroom empty.
“Lily?”
I check under the bed, desperate. Check the closet. Shower curtain. Nothing. Nothing.
The house suddenly feels enormous.
Back to the hallway. Living room, kitchen, dining room, guest bath. I open the front door and look at the porch. Her shoes aren't by the door where I remember seeing them earlier.
I go back in and upstairs to the hall closet.
Her coat is still there, hanging where she left it.
Her coat is here. She is not.
Panic snaps through me, icy and electric, the kind that eats the edges of your vision.
“She’s gone.”
I say it to the dark, then louder, turning back toward the pack room.
“She’s gone!”
They come. Garrett first, Miles close behind, Cyrus last. Their faces moving from confusion to alarm.
“What do you mean she’s gone?” Garrett.
“She’s not in her room. She’s not anywhere in the house. Her shoes are gone, but her coat is still here. She left.”
“She left the house?” Garrett’s voice cracks.
“It’s February,” Cyrus says. “It’s freezing outside.”
Miles pushes past. Checks Lily’s room himself, as if I might have missed her, like she might appear if he looks hard enough. He’s back in thirty seconds, white-faced.
“She didn’t take anything,” he says, his hands shaking. “Her medicine is on the nightstand. The suitcase is still in the closet. She has nothing, Gabriel. No coat, no phone, no money. She walked out into the cold with nothing.”
“She doesn’t have a phone,” I say stupidly.
Why didn’t I buy her a damn phone?
I could have at least bought her a phone.
“You drove her out.” Miles is in my face, tone precise and lethal.
“You drove a sick, vulnerable omega out of her shelter in the middle of winter with no coat, no phone, and no way to call for help.
She could be anywhere. She could be freezing.
She could be—“ He can’t finish. “What kind of alpha does that, Gabriel? What kind of pack lead drives out an omega who has nowhere to go?”
I have no answer. The thing I am now—the alpha who terrorized his own scent match until she fled into the cold—is the thing I’ve spent my life trying not to become. The thing Miles’s old pack was. The thing Brennan is.
“I’m going to find her,” I say.
“I’m coming.”
“No. You stay here in case she comes back. If she shows up, call Garrett’s phone. Don’t let her leave again.”
“Gabriel—“
“Miles.” I take his face in my hands. He flinches—a small, involuntary pull that cuts deep—but I hold on. “I will find her. I promise. But I need you safe, and I need someone here if she comes back.”
He stares at me, then nods, once.
I look at Garrett. “Take the east road toward town. Check the bus station, the main drag, anywhere she might try to get transport.”
“On it.” He’s already moving, coat and keys in hand.
“Cyrus, take the west road. The bar, the gas station, the Hollows border.”
God I hope she didn’t go towards the Hollows.
Cyrus just nods.
“I’ll take the north road toward the highway. She might try to walk to her sister’s. She’s mentioned her before. I looked up her family before I brought her here. Her sister is two hours north.”
“She’s walking to her sister’s house?” Garrett looks sick. “In a t-shirt? In February?”
“She’s desperate enough to try.”
“Should we call the registry?” Garrett asks.
I shake my head. “Not unless you want her picked up and handed over to the Fosters.”
We stand in the front hall, three alphas pulling on coats and boots while our omega watches, terrified, from the shadows.
The house behind us is warm and bright, thick with the scent of the people we love, and somewhere out there in the dark, a girl with no coat and no phone is walking away because I made her believe she was worse than nothing.
“Gabriel.” Miles’s voice, hard and soft at once. I turn.
His face is set. “Bring her back.”
He didn’t say home because this was never her home. I made sure of that.
“I will,” I say.
The cold hits like a punishment as I step outside.
Garrett goes left. Cyrus goes right. I go straight, toward the highway, toward the dark, toward the girl I’ve been destroying while pretending I was protecting someone else.
The road is empty. The night is endless. It’s like the world already swallowed her whole. My headlights carve nothing but blackness, frost, and the absence of the person I should have been holding instead of destroying.
I drive.
And for the first time since Lily walked into my life, I pray.
I pray to the dark, to the cold, to whatever might be listening.
Please let me find her.
Please let me find her before someone else does.
Don’t let me be too late.