Jack’s chair scrapes. Archer is already standing. Tristan’s door opens before I reach the front. Nobody speaks. We move through the home in silence. Four Alphas who are not a committee and don’t need to be. Ryan moves, the pack moves, that’s the crux of it.
I open the door.
She’s at the end of the river path.
She’s not running. She walks with an even pace, her bag over one shoulder. Her hands are in her jacket pockets. The night is cool. She is walking toward wherever she’s decided to go next, which is somewhere that isn’t here, and the position of her shoulders says that she’s been doing this long enough that leaving doesn’t look like leaving.
Except I know what leaving looks like on her.
I know because I watched her come in and I know because I’ve been watching everything since.
“Lola.” My voice in the quiet carries.
She stops.
She doesn’t turn around immediately. She takes one breath—the rise of her shoulders, the deliberate intake—and then she turns. Her face is illuminated in the low light of the moon. She’s been crying. Not dramatically, she’s not a person who cries dramatically, but the evidence is there on her wet cheeks.
She looks at me. “Ryan.” A warning and an acknowledgment as the same time.
“No,” I say.
She blinks. “No what?”
“No to whatever explanation you’ve conjured.” I walk toward her. A steady pace, unhurried, the same pace I use for everything because urgency signals alarm and alarm makes people move. “No to the version of this where you’ve decided it’s better for us if you leave.”
She opens her mouth.
“No,” I repeat.
I stop when I’m close. Not arm’s length, closer. The deliberate proximity of someone who is making a point with his body as well as his words, because she reads space better than most people read sentences and I want to be legible.
She looks up at me. Her jaw is set. “You can’t—”
“I’m not stopping you,” I interrupt. “You can leave. The road is there, the car is where Archer put it, you know the route. I’m not blocking anything.”
She holds that, looking for the catch.
“I’m telling you,” I say, “what it means if you do.”
“Ryan—”
“You told us tonight. On the pier. You trusted us with the truth. That’s not something you can unpack and carry back out.” I hold her gaze. “And you know that. That’s half of why you’re leaving in the middle of the night instead of telling us you’re going.”
Her jaw tightens. She’s hearing the truth and negotiating with it. “I’m protecting you,” she says. “All of you. The town. What they did tonight for me—”
“They did it because you’re theirs.”
“I’m not—”
“You are.” Simple. Direct. Honest. “Sweetwater Valley doesn’t do that for strangers. You know this because you’ve been here long enough to know. They did it because in two weeks you’ve become someone they claim, and that’s not something I did and it’s not something the pack did. It’s somethingyoudid, just bybeing who you are.”
She looks at the ground briefly. Processing. “The police will return. They’ll come back with more information, better information, and when they do—”
“Then we handle it. We handle it with what you know and what the pack knows and what this town knows how to do. We don’t handle it by letting you disappear into whatever comes next alone.”
“You don’t know what comes next.”
“Neither do you. That’s not an argument for leaving.”
