"Hoodies stay on," Kit promised, standing up and lifting me with him like I weighed nothing, before setting me on my feet. "Warm pile. We’ve got the perimeter."
We moved to the back. It was a tight squeeze. The bunk was designed for luxury touring, but four adults was a Tetris game of limbs.
I crawled into the middle. It wasn’t a choice; it was gravity.
Kit took the back wall, a solid line of heat. Alfie curled around my front, tucking his head under my chin. Euan took the foot of the bed, weighing down my legs, a heavy, grounding pressure that stopped the phantom tremors.
The lights went out.
In the darkness, the scents mingled. Blackberry. Molasses. Tea. Citrus.
It wasn't noise anymore. It was a chord. A perfect, major chord resolving after months of dissonance.
I felt Alfie trace the letters on his thumb against my hip bone.Ask.
"Good night, fox," he whispered.
"Night," I murmured.
Four in. Six out.
Only this time, I wasn't counting alone. I could feel Kit's chest rising and falling against my back, matching the rhythm perfectly. As exhaustion claimed me there was only question that I couldn't stop from running through my mind. What would change when we all woke up tomorrow?
SEVENTEEN
Zia
I woke up reaching for a heat source that wasn’t there.
My hand swept across the cool duvet, finding only empty space where warm, solid mass had been hours ago. I blinked, the dim gray light of the bus filtering through the heavy blackout curtains I kept pinned shut.
Silence.
The back bunk, which had been on the verge of claustrophobic last night, felt massive. Too big. It felt like an abandoned stage after the rig had been struck.
I pushed myself up on one elbow, a sudden, sharp pang of rejection hitting me right in the center of my chest. They left. After the heat, after the friction, after the "pack sleep" that had felt like the first time my spine had actually untangled in five years, they had bailed.
Then I saw the note.
It was taped to the wall right at eye level, a piece of heavy-stock paper torn from a technical rider notebook. The handwriting was sharp, architectural. Euan.
Z,
Calculated probability of you waking up panicked if surrounded by three Alphas: High.
We vacated to the lounge to restore your perimeter. You are safe. The door is unlocked.
- E.
Below his precise script, a jagged scrawl in black Sharpie:
Coffee’s hot. Tea’s hotter. Come find us, fox. — A
And at the bottom, in thick, deliberate block letters:
We’re just down the hall. Furniture if you need it. — K
I pulled the note off the wall, my thumb tracing the indentations of the ink. They hadn’t left because they were done with me. They’d left because they were terrified of frightening me. They were still playing by the rules of a contract I was practically begging to burn.
