“She’s really leaving,” Diego whispers, his voice cracking.
“She’ll be back,” Tristan says, but the usual confidence is missing from his voice. “She has to come back. Right?”
I say nothing. I can’t speak past the knot in my throat, the raw, physical ache in my chest. I just keep staring at those closed elevator doors as if I could somehow will them to open again, to reveal her standing there, having changed her mind.
But they remain shut. Cold. Unyielding.
Dane is the first to move, turning to head back into the penthouse. “We should get ready for work,” he says, his voice devoid of emotion. “There’s nothing we can do now.”
“Nothing we can do?” Diego repeats, incredulous. “We can go after her! We can?—”
“No,” I cut him off, the word sharp in the quiet hallway. “She made her choice. We have to respect it.”
It’s the right thing to say. The honorable thing. Even as the words leave my mouth, every cell in my body is rebelling against them. My alpha is raging. She is ours. Our beta. Our mate. We should be chasing her down, bringing her back, keeping her safe.
But I force the instinct down, burying it beneath years of hard-earned control. She’s not a possession to be claimed. She’s a woman who made a choice, and we have to honor it, no matter how much it tears at us.
“Come on,” I say, turning to follow Dane inside. “Let’s just?—”
And then it hits.
It’s not a slow return. It’s not a creeping buzz. It’s not even the familiar, grinding static that’s been our constant companion for years.
It’s a wave of pure, white-hot agony that slams into my skull, so violent it makes my knees buckle. The world dissolves into a roaring, shrieking wall of static, a thousand times worse than it ever was before. It’s not just a noise anymore; it’s a vicious beast with claws and teeth, tearing at the inside of my brain.
I hear Diego cry out, a sharp, wounded sound. I see Tristan stumble, his hands flying to his head, his face a mask of pure, unadulterated torment. Dane just stands there, rigid as stone, but I can see the sweat bead on his temples, the tremor in his clenched fists.
“What the fuck,” Tristan gasps, his voice barely audible over the roaring in my ears. “What the actual fuck?”
The static has never been like this. Never this intense. It’s as if whatever dam Zoe’s presence built in our minds has not just broken, but exploded outward, letting in a tidal wave of noise and pain.
“Inside,” I manage to say, though I can barely hear my own voice. “Now.”
We stagger into the penthouse. Diego collapses onto the couch, his face buried in his hands. Tristan paces, hismovements jerky and uncoordinated, like a marionette with tangled strings. Dane stands by the window, his pale eyes fixed on the street below, as if he could somehow see her taxi from fifty stories up.
And me? I can barely think past the noise. It’s deafening, disorienting, debilitating. Like someone cranked the volume on the world to maximum and then shattered the dial.
“This isn’t right,” I grit out, pressing the heels of my hands against my temples as if I could physically push the noise out. “It’s never been this bad.”
“It’s the bond,” Dane says, his voice a strained whisper. “It’s... punishing us. For letting her go.”
“That’s not how bonds work,” I argue, though I have no other explanation. “They don’t just... intensify like this.”
“Conventional bonds, no,” Dane agrees, still not looking away from the window. “But this was never conventional, was it? Four alphas claiming one beta? It’s unprecedented.”
He’s right. We’ve been operating in uncharted territory from the start. The static, the claiming, the immediate, bone-deep relief Zoe brought us. None of it follows the rules we thought we knew.
“So what do we do?” Diego asks, his voice muffled by his hands. “How do we make it stop?”
The answer is a raw, primal scream in my own head. Get her back.
“We go after her,” Tristan says, his voice a strained rasp, giving voice to the instinct we all feel. “We bring her back.”
“We can’t force her,” I manage to grit out, the words a betrayal of every possessive instinct currently trying to claw its way out of my throat. “It’s what she wanted.”
“She didn’t know!” Diego cries, lifting his head. His eyes are red-rimmed, his face pale with pain. “She didn’t know it would be like this! For her, for us! We have to tell her!”
“Tell her what?” I counter, the static making my own thoughts feel jagged and sharp. “That we’re in agony withouther? That’s exactly why she left, Diego. She doesn’t want to be our medication.”
