“I'm moving,” he says, and I can hear it, boots, keys. “Suppressants, she takes?—”
“Whatever she takes, it's losing. Bad. Get to her house, fast as you can. I'm on her porch now and I'm not leaving it.” I keep my voice low, for her, close to the wood. “And Finn. She's okay. Stubborn and scared and hurting, but she's tough as boots. We just have to reach her.”
“Yeah.” His voice cracks, does what it almost never does. “Yeah. Go.”
He spent this whole arrangement swearing it was fake. In it for his mother, nothing more, a coworker in a bad plan. One text and one shaking sentence stripped all of that down to the stud.
Logan I have to try twice.
He answers on the second attempt, on the sixth ring, and his voice is wrong before he says a full word. Flat. Scraped hollow.
“I saw it,” he says, before I can get anything out. “The second it came in. I've just been— I've been sitting here since, Hudson. I didn't know what to do with it. She said goodbye. She saidhave your lives backlike she was handing something back she never wanted, and I couldn't— I didn't say anything to anybody because I didn't know what there was to say.”
And there it is, the whole of Logan in four sentences. He got the same text the rest of us did and read it clearer than any of us. It knocked him flat and left him there. The man's been sitting alone with his heart on the floor since the text landed, because the woman he's loved for five years just tried to hand him back his life.
“Logan. Listen to me.” I keep it gentle, because you have to, with him. “It's not a goodbye. It's worse and it's better. She's in heat, brother. Right now. Alone in there with the curtains shut, and she sent that text going into it, because she'd rather set us free than let us see her need anybody.”
Silence. Then the sound of a very large man standing up very fast.
“Where,” Logan says, and his voice isn't hollow anymore. “Tell me where.”
“Her house. Right now. I'm already here. Go.”
I hang up and I call Lily, and while it rings I slide down to sit on her top step with my back against the door, close as I can get to her, and I do what I never do, the one thing the whole town would bet money I'm not capable of.
I stop performing. There's no one to perform for. It's just me and her quiet porch and the smell of her coming through the gap at the sill and a fear so big and so plain I don't have a single joke to lay over the top of it.
I've spent my whole life staying light, staying up on the surface where nothing can pull you under. And I sit on Josie Porter's step and let it pull me under anyway, all the way tothe bottom, no kicking, no coming up for air. Turns out I've been swimming for this exact spot the whole time and calling it treading water.
She thinks nobody would come.
She sent that text believing, all the way down, that three alphas would read it and feel relief. That we'd been counting the days. That she was the arrangement and never the point.
Lily picks up. “Hudson? It's seven in the?—”
“Lily. You've got Josie's spare key. I need it at Josie's, fast, and I need you to not ask me why until after.” I keep my hand on her door. “It's not bad, exactly, but it's not good, and she needs us, and she's the only person in this town too stubborn to say so. You in?”
Half a second, and a muffled word to somebody, Ethan's voice in the background already asking. Then Lily, who loves her too, who's watched this whole thing from the front row. “We're grabbing it. Ethan's driving. We'll be there in ten. Don't you dare leave that door.”
I wasn't planning on it.
Whatever she wrote in that text, whatever she's decided about herself in that overheating little house with the curtains drawn, she got exactly one thing wrong.
We came. All three of us. The second we knew.
Now I just have to get through that door and prove it.
Chapter 31
Josie
The knock comes from very far away, through water, through cotton, through the roar of my own blood.
I'm on the bedroom floor when I hear it. I don't remember getting on the bedroom floor.
I remember the group text, sending it with shaking hands at dawn, the last clean decision I could make before the tide came in.Let them go. Do this the way you were always going to have to do it. Alone.And then the wave took me and time went strange and slippery, and now I'm on the floor with a pillow clutched to my chest and every inch of my skin two sizes too small.
It's bad. It's so much worse than the suppressants ever let it get. Five years of pills holding this down, and now my body has come to collect all at once, with interest.
