22. Dash
Dash
I don’t tell her until I have the glass of water in her hand. It isn't strategy in the cold sense, not the kind of calculation that belongs in a courtroom or faculty review or whatever version of hell Sloane’s pack has been living inside for the last three months. It’s just survival.
Calliope Monroe has spent too many weeks going pale around phones, flinching when a notification lights up, and pretending her hands are steady because she thinks the rest of the world will punish her if they aren’t.
So I make her sit on the edge of the sofa first, with the heavy wool of her robe pulled tight around her shoulders and the glass pressed carefully between both palms.
Rain drums against the extension windows in a hollow, relentless rhythm. The lamps are low because bright light has been too much for her since I woke her and brought her out here after the call, and the throw blanket around her shoulders is pulled tight beneath her hands.
“Callie,” I say, crouching in front of her so she does not have to look up at me. “Sloane is coming. He’s about ten minutes out, and he’s not alone. The rest of his pack is with him. The Omega too.”
She goes quiet in a way I hate, a total shutdown so complete it feels like she’s stepped out of her own skin and left her body sitting politely on my sofa.
Her gaze slides to my phone on the coffee table, and she stares at it like it is an animal that has already bitten her once and is waiting to see if she will offer her hand again.
“He found me,” she whispers.
“Sloane called you. I answered,” I tell her, keeping my hands visible on my knees because every Alpha instinct I have wants to cover, contain, and lock every door in this house.
“He's my brother, Callie, but this is my house.
You don't have to see him. You don't have to see anyone who arrives with him.
My house has locks, it has cameras, and it has me.
I don't care whose blood he shares if you say no.”
Her eyes finally lift to mine. They are dark and searching, moving over my face like she's trying to find the seam in it, the place where a lie might be stitched under the skin.
For three months, I have been the one bringing tea, checking in before I knock, walking her to her car without making the walk feel like surveillance.
Now I am the person telling her the storm has made it all the way to the porch.
“They’re coming here?” she asks, and the last word cracks just enough that her mouth tightens around it. She glances toward the hallway that leads to the bedroom, then back at the phone, and something bruised moves through her expression. “With Theo?”
“Yes,” I say, because anything softer would feel like handling her.
“Sloane says there are things you don’t know.
Things done to both sides. Forged. Manipulated.
I don’t know the full story yet, and I’m not going to pretend I do.
I only know he sounded like a man trying not to come apart while he begged me not to wake you up with his voice. ”
Her breath catches. The glass finally trembles, water ticking softly against the side, and I reach out only far enough to steady the bottom without taking it from her. She looks down at my hand, then at her own, as if surprised to find both still attached.
“I don’t know if I can hear him,” she says. “I don’t know what happens if he says my name and I believe him. I don’t know what happens if I believe him and it turns out I’m still stupid.”
The word stupid makes something in my chest go cold.
Garrett’s name has not been spoken in this room yet tonight, but I can feel him in the shape of that sentence.
I can feel him in every careful apology she makes to furniture, weather, doors, men.
I keep my voice level because rage would only give her another thing to manage.
“You aren't stupid, Calliope. You’re sitting in a room with a man who answered your phone and found his brother on the other end. That isn't a small thing. You’re allowed to need time before your body understands what your head hears.”
She closes her eyes for one breath. When she opens them, she looks toward the main house instead of the extension bedroom. The movement is small, but I know what it means. She's deciding where to be seen, and I hate that she has to decide it at all.
I moved her to the living room of the main house ten minutes ago, before I told her, because I refused to let Sloane’s first sight of her be in the bed she has been sleeping in beside me.
I wanted her to meet them somewhere she could walk away easily. Calliope deserves to meet the wreckage of her old life from a room with lamps and books and a door she can walk through, not from under twisted sheets like a secret I am keeping from my own blood.
“I need to be ready,” she murmurs, standing too quickly. The robe slips off one shoulder, and she catches it with a jerky hand before smoothing her hair. It does nothing to tame the loose curls at her temple, but I don't tell her that. “I need to look like I’m not—”
“Like you’re not what?” I ask when she stops, but I don't move closer. The question comes low, quiet, and edged with the kind of care that does not require an answer.
Her throat works. “Like I have been waiting for him to come and hoping he never would.”
I stand with her because staying crouched now would feel like trying to keep her small. “Those can both be true.”
She looks at me then, and the look lands harder than anything Sloane said on the phone.
Callie has spent months making herself legible in tiny pieces: the tea she prefers, the hallway she avoids, the way she can laugh during lunch and go silent before the sound is finished.
Now the whole of her is in front of me, terrified and aching and still capable of choosing the door.
“Dash, if this is another trick—” she starts, and the rest does not make it past her mouth.
“Then I will end the visit before it reaches you. You aren't alone in this house.”
Headlights cut through the rain before she can answer.
They sweep across the wet gravel of the driveway, flash against the window, and turn the glass briefly silver before the engine dies.
The sudden absence of sound has weight. Callie goes very still behind me, one hand at her throat, fingers pressed near the place where Sloane’s bite sits under the robe and whatever scars the last three months left beneath it.
I move to the door, slow enough that she can tell me to stop.
She doesn’t. The Alpha in me rises with every step, steady and territorial in a way I usually keep buried under grading rubrics and committee meetings.
This is my brother outside. This is also my house, and Callie is behind me.
Both things are true, but only one of them matters if Sloane forgets where he is.
The knock isn't hard. That makes it worse. It isn't the knock of a man demanding entry or an Alpha announcing ownership. It is a broken sound, hesitant and uneven, as if the hand that made it almost failed before reaching the wood.
I open the door only far enough to fill the frame.
Sloane stands on the porch in the rain, and the first thing I think is that my brother looks wrecked.
His dark hair is plastered to his forehead, his coat soaked through, water dripping from his jaw to the collar of his shirt.
None of that is what stops me. It is his eyes.
They are hollowed out, bloodshot, and frantic with a grief so raw it has made him dangerous in the way starving men are dangerous.
Not because they want to harm, but because they have forgotten there is a world outside what they have lost.
“Dash,” he says, and my name sounds like it has been dragged over glass. He takes half a step forward, one hand lifting toward the doorframe before he catches himself or sees my face. “Please.”
“Stay there,” I say, my voice low enough that it won't carry far behind me but firm enough to make the boundary unmistakable.
“You don't take one more step toward her until I understand exactly what happened three months ago. I watched her break, Sloane. I am not letting your grief become another thing she has to survive.”
He flinches as if I have hit him. His hand drops to his side, empty and shaking. Whatever he expected from me, it was not mercy. Maybe it was not even suspicion this sharp. Maybe he thought blood would buy him a softer threshold, but blood isn't the currency in this house tonight.
Behind him, another man steps into the porch light. He's taller than I expected, controlled in the way men get when control is the only thing standing between themselves and violence. His hands are open in front of him, palms visible, his soaked cuffs clinging to his wrists.
“We have proof,” he says, his voice a controlled rasp that keeps itself leashed. “Not all of it in a form she needs to hear on a porch in the rain, and not from us before she chooses to listen. But Garrett did this. We didn't let her go.”
Sloane’s face twists at the last sentence, but he does not interrupt.
That restraint tells me more than anything he could have said.
The Sloane I remember from our childhood filled every room he entered, loved too loudly, fought too fast, and never learned how to lose an argument gracefully.
This man looks like he has been remade around a silence he could not break.
My gaze shifts to the third figure.
The Omega stands partly under the controlled man’s coat, though coat is too generous a word for the way he's swallowed by it.
He's slight, trembling hard enough that I can see it from the doorway, his hands locked around a piece of gray wool pressed to his chest. His face is tilted toward the house with such bare, desperate hope that for a second I can't look at Sloane at all.
The boy looks like a ghost who has followed a scent trail back to his own body.
The air changes behind me.
Callie has moved closer. I feel it before I hear it, the slight shift in warmth at my back, the tiny catch in her breathing. Her hand brushes the back of my arm, not grabbing, not hiding, only asking for space without words because words are too expensive right now.
I don't want to move. Every instinct I have wants to keep myself between her and the rain, between her and my brother, between her and the entire pack that arrived at my door carrying three months of damage in their mouths.
But this can't be my choice. If I make it mine, I become another locked door in a life that has had too many of them.
I step aside only enough to open the line of sight.
Callie’s gasp is a sharp, broken thing. Her eyes don't go to Sloane first. They don't linger on his ruined face or the way he's shaking in the rain.
They don't go to the controlled Alpha with his hands open and his grief held behind his teeth.
They go straight to the Omega clutching the gray sweater.
“Theo?” she whispers.
His name leaves her like something pulled from somewhere deep inside of her. The Omega makes a small, keening sound that cuts across the porch and seems to enter her body before the rain can touch her.
Theo’s sound reaches her before anyone else does.
Callie’s hand tightens on the back of my arm, then loosens, and I know before she moves that I have already lost the right to keep her behind me.
This isn't surrender. This is recognition.
She steps into the rain with her robe pulled tight around her shoulders, and the Omega on my porch breaks her name open like he has been holding it in his mouth for three months.