I’m not ready for the alternative.
Three speechless Alphas stare at me.
Three.
Three men who have, in the span of twenty-four hours, caught me when I collapsed, changed my clothes when I was soaked, monitored my fever through the night, bought groceries and cooked breakfast and pulled out chairs and remembered how I take my coffee—three men who are currently looking at me as if I’ve just described a war crime with the casual delivery of a weather report.
And I don’t understand their faces.
The horror. The anger. The something-else that I can’t name because I’ve never seen it directed at me in this specific configuration.
I shrug.
Again.
“I don’t get why it’s a big deal.” The sentence exits my mouth with the genuine bewilderment of a woman who has normalized her own destruction so completely that other people’s reactions to it register as disproportionate. “I’m obviously on the suppressants now. And they replaced me anyway. So maybe it’s actually a good time for me to check and see if all the side effects are doing something to my health.”
I pause.
The pause catches in my throat.
“But then…I don’t have a pack. So.”
The sentence trails off.
Dies.
Dissolves into the apartment’s silence with the quiet surrender of a woman who has just outlined the closed loop of her own suffering—can’t get medical care without a pack, can’t have a pack without being used, can’t be used without suppressants, can’t have suppressants without dying—and doesn’t seem to recognize that the loop is a cage.
The silence lasts three seconds.
Then there is stomping.
Heavy, seismic, the footsteps of a six-four Alpha whose body has decided that this apartment cannot contain what he’s feeling and the only option is to exit before the feeling exits him in a form that involves structural damage. Roman crosses the apartment in four strides, each one carrying the impact of a man who is not walking away from the conversation but physically removing himself from the proximity of information that has made his hands unsafe.
The door swings open.
Slams.
The force rattles the hinges, shakes the corkboard’s pins, sends a tremor through the floor that I feel in my bare feet. The sound is absolute—a period at the end of a sentence that I didn’t know I was writing.
By the time the crash registers, he’s gone.
I stare at the closed door.
The confusion on my face is total. Unadulterated. The unfiltered bewilderment of a woman who has just watched a man she’s known for over a decade physically remove himself from a room because of something she said, and cannot for the life of her connect the cause to the effect.
Alaric sighs.
The sound is quiet and carries the weight of a man who has been bracing for impact since the conversation shifted and received it exactly as hard as he predicted.
I look at him.
Then at the door.
Then at Alaric again.
“Why is he mad?”
