Page 68 of What We Don't Say: Part Two

“I thought you had shut me out because I had failed you,” Sloane says. “I thought you hated me enough to survive leaving. I never thought you were alone somewhere believing I was the one who sent you away.”

Theo pulls back just enough to look at me. His eyes are red and swollen, his lashes clumped with rain and tears. “He told me you didn't love me anymore,” he says, and the words come out careful, like each one has to be carried with both hands. “He said you were happier without the noise. He said if I kept asking, I would make everything worse for the Alphas.”

My breath disappears. “No,” I whisper, and the sound barely exists.

Theo crumples again, and I drag him closer. My hands move over his back, over the cardigan, over the thin line of his spinebeneath damp wool. “I thought I was the one hurting you,” I say into his hair. “I thought you were better off. I thought you finally had what you needed and I was just in the way.”

He makes a jagged, wounded sound and presses his forehead against mine. “Never. You are the quiet place, Callie. You are mine too.”

The porch tilts under me.

I hear Sloane make a sound, but I can't look at him yet. The word mine from Theo’s mouth pulls too many memories loose: his fingers in my hair, his face tucked against my thigh, the way he had watched me in the kitchen like I was something he had been allowed to want for the first time. I loved him before I knew what to call it. I left believing my love was poison.

“I thought you didn't want me,” I say, and the admission comes out as a sob. “I thought all of you finally realized I was not enough.”

Sloane drops to his knees and hit the porch boards. He looks up at me with his hands still open, his face a map of total, unshielded agony.

“You were never extra,” he whispers. “I know saying it now does not fix the fact that he made you live three months believing I thought you were.”

It sits there between us, ugly and true, while Theo shakes in my arms and Dash stays behind me like a locked door that has chosen to open only when I turn the handle.

“The officer,” I start, and the words scrape their way out. “The key. The report. Sloane’s name on a thing he says he never touched.”

The rest starts arriving too fast. The porch light hums louder. Rain beads on Sloane’s eyelashes. Idris' hands stay open. Theo’s breath comes hot and frantic against my neck. The report, the money, the phone call, the locked room, the officer telling me I was not wanted, the way I stood outside a house I had loved andlearned there was a legal language for being erased. My throat closes around all of it.

Dash moves into my line of sight without touching me.

“Callie,” he says, his voice low and steady enough to hold. “Are you at my house?”

I drag in one breath. “Yes.”

“Is Theo with you?” he asks, and he keeps his body angled so I can see the door, the porch, and his face all at once. His hands are empty. His expression is focused, careful, furious in a place he isn't letting reach me.

“Yes,” I say, and Theo’s arms tighten around my middle.

“Are you safe right now?” Dash asks. “I need the answer for this moment only.”

Theo’s face is wet against my neck. Sloane is on his knees in the rain with his hands open. Idris stands behind him, looking like every controlled part of him has been split down the center. Dash is beside me, not holding me back or pushing me forward. I press my palm to Theo’s back and make myself answer the question I can survive.

“Yes,” I say. “I am safe right now.”

Dash nods once, and the porch steadies by a single inch. Sloane bows his head like the answer has struck him, and Idris closes his eyes for half a second before opening them again. Theo keeps his face against me, breathing hard, but the growl in his chest loosens into something smaller and sadder.

“We have enough to know Garrett built this,” Idris says, voice low and careful. “You don't have to carry all of it on a porch in the rain. But you need to know one thing before anything else is said. We didn't send you away.”

I look at him then.

Idris' eyes are wet. I have seen him furious. I have seen him pleased, controlled, amused, commanding enough to make a room settle around him without a raised voice. I have never seenhim look like this, standing in the rain as if every inch he does not take from me costs him something.

“He does not get this porch,” Idris says. “Not tonight. Tonight, you decide who comes through the door.”

The words should make me feel powerful. They make me tired. But beneath the exhaustion, something small and bruised lifts its head. I can say yes. I can say no. I can say not yet. No one moves until the answer comes from me.

I look at Dash.

He's watching me, not Sloane, not Idris, not the soaked porch or the mess of muddy shoes and broken history waiting to cross into his living room. His face is calm because he has made it calm for me, but the tension in his jaw tells the truth. He would close the door if I asked. He would stand in front of it all night. He would send his own brother back into the rain and never make me explain why.

That knowledge nearly undoes me.