Chapter 15 She Didnt Call
Callum
I keep my hands on the wheel because that's the only thing that feels controllable right now.
The road unspools in front of me, dark and empty. Isabella is in the passenger seat, her shoulder turned slightly toward the window, and the silence between us has the density of two people who are done pretending.
"Isabella." I say it without heat. "You did that on purpose."
She doesn't turn. "Did what?"
"The question. The timeline." I watch the road. "You knew exactly what you were saying."
A beat. "And so what if I did." Not a question. "You looked heartbroken, by the way. Very convincing. She didn't even glance at you."
"We ended a long time ago." I hear myself say it. I've said it enough times that the words come out smooth now, worn down from use. "You don't have to keep reaching for something that's already finished."
That's when she turns.
"I don't have to reach?" Her voice is a sound I haven't heard from her before — something stripped down to its core, past the sweetness, past the careful softness she deploys for rooms full of people. "I'm not the one reaching. I've never been the one reaching."
"You take it off," she says. "Every morning when you leave for the office, you take it off." She laughs, and the laugh is not a good sound. "And then you come home and put it back on and look at me like I'm supposed to be grateful."
The light ahead turns red. I stop.
"Your secretary. The woman at the front desk. Three people in senior positions. Did you really think I didn't know? Did you think I built nothing for myself when you were too distracted to notice? They all report to me, Callum. Every single one."
I don't say anything.
The light turns green. I drive.
"This is what you chose." I sound tired. "You knew. Before any of this, you knew how things were. I was trying. I am still trying." I pause. "Rowan never crossed any line. That's the truth. Whatever else you want to say about it — she never crossed it, and neither did I."
Isabella makes a sound. It starts as something close to a laugh and comes out the other end as something else.
"You actually believe that." She wipes at her face and the gesture is furious, not grieving. "She came back here and started waving herself in front of you and you think she hasn't crossed a line? You think I'm the problem?"
"I think—"
"I put something in her drinks tonight."
The car stops. Not at a light this time. My foot finds the brake without my brain giving the instruction and the car lurches to a halt in the middle of the road.
My hands are very still on the wheel.
"The same thing," Isabella says, "that I used the night before your ceremony. The compound that causes the frenzy response. Artificial heat." She's looking at her own reflection in the darkened window. "All ten of those shots. It's already in her system."
"What did you do." The words come out level. They shouldn't.
"What I had to." Isabella turns to face me, and there are tears on her face but her eyes are clear. "You want to know what's going to happen? She's going to feel it start and she's going to panic and the first person she calls is going to be you. I know that. I know she'll call you."
I don't answer.
The silence that fills the car after that is not the same as the silence before it. It has a shape. It has a duration, one minute, five, ten. The phone on the center console doesn't move. The notification light doesn't change.
I stare at it. I am aware that I am staring at it. I cannot stop.
Half an hour.
Isabella stirs beside me. The certainty has left her posture and been replaced by something rigid and confused. "She should have called by now." Her voice has lost something. "She can't — she wouldn't go to him, she doesn't even know him properly, she wouldn't—"
The image arrives without invitation: the way Lachlan's arm came around her in the doorway, the unhurried confidence of someone who doesn't need to ask. The angle of her head against his shoulder when she wasn't quite steady on her feet.
Something climbs up the back of my throat.
"Get out."
"Callum—"
"Get out of my car." The sound coming out of me doesn't belong to the version of me that handles rooms. It belongs to something older. "Now. Get out. Now."
She gets out.
I drive the way I haven't driven in years — no speed limit, no careful lane discipline, nothing but the road and the thing that has gotten hold of my chest and is not letting go.
I know what the feeling is. I've been calling it concern. I've been calling it worry. I have been very careful about what I call it.
The building comes into view. Twenty-two floors. Her light isn't on.
The elevator arrives and I get in and my reflection looks back at me from the mirrored panel — jacket disheveled, jaw set, eyes already doing the thing I cannot allow in public. Red bleeds into the edges. The pressure behind my sternum has teeth.
The elevator is too slow. I get out at floor four and find the stairs.
Alpha endurance isn't something I think about, usually.
It's just there, like breathing. Three steps at a time, the expensive wool of my jacket catching the heat of exertion, my hair coming loose from where it was combed back at the start of the evening.
By the eighteenth floor my lungs are working hard and I don't slow down.
Twenty-second floor. The corridor. 2201.
I knock. The sound is too hard to be a knock. It's impact, it's demand.
"Rowan." My voice bounces off the walls and comes back to me strange. "Open the door. It's me. I know about the drug, I know what Isabella did, I'm here — open the door."
Nothing.
I knock again. The door shudders.
"Rowan." Lower now, and I hear what's in my voice and I cannot help it, it's been there for two years and I have been very precise about keeping it contained,
"You need to open the door. You don't know him. Whatever he's told you — he's not the one who's supposed to be here with you right now. I am. I was always going to be the one who came. You know that. Open the door."
The corridor doesn't give me anything back.
The neighbor's door opens an inch. A face appears — a wolf, I can feel it from here, someone who lives in this building because of what they are and not just who they are.
They take in my eyes and they close the door again. Fast. The click of the lock following behind.
I step back. Then my foot comes forward.
The door is reinforced. Werewolf-grade, the kind buildings like this use because their residents can break standard doors without trying. The first kick dents it. The second buckles the frame. The third takes it off.
The light from the corridor spills into the apartment and shows me everything.
Nothing.
No coat on the hook. No bag by the door. No sound, no warmth, no trace of the frequency that I have been tuned to since I was ten years old and stood in a room holding two birthday gifts and made a choice I didn't understand yet.
The apartment is empty.
I don't know when I sat down. I'm in the center of the room, on the floor, in the wreckage of a door I kicked in to find no one, and the city outside the window is doing what cities do at this hour. Indifferent, continuous, nothing to do with me.
She's not here.
I sit with that.
The sky outside goes through its slow changes — the purple-black of deep night, then the grey that comes before grey resolves into anything else. I don't move.
By the time the light through the broken doorframe has gone from artificial to natural, I still don't know where she is.
I just know she didn't call.