And I let all three of them hold me together.
Chapter 27
Vee
I lie in bed and stare at the ceiling.
I came up here to take a nap, but it isn’t working. My brain won't stop running the conversation back—everything Drake said, everything I said, how his face crumpled when I told him I still loved him and hated myself for it. How I walked out anyway.
I keep landing on one thing.
Marie is gone.
After everything. After all of it—the nest, the zoo, my heat, all those months of being erased one inch at a time from a life I'd spent five years building. After everything they did and everything they didn't do.
They don't even have her anymore.
That should feel like justice. There's a part of me that does feel that way, a small ugly deeply human part that feels something uncomfortably close to satisfaction. But mostly I just feel tired. I spent five years with those alphas thinking I was building something, and now Marie is back at the registry and Drake is sleeping on a couch a few feet from me with a broken bond still healing in his chest. Ragon has nothing left but Eli. Jasper isn’t even his and I’d like to be a fly on the wall when he finds that out. God knows what he thinks about the turn of events.
What was the point of any of it?
I roll onto my side and pull the blanket up.
I try not to think about Eli.
I fail.
Drake's betrayal, as devastating as it was, made a certain terrible sense. He was scent-drunk and weak-willed and I watched it happen in real time. I saw it coming long before I was willing to admit it.
Eli is different.
Eli was the one who noticed things. Who fixed me tea without being asked because he'd seen me get tired at this hour enough times to know I'd need it. He remembered which chair I preferred at the table and which lamp I left on at night and exactly how I took my coffee. Like he'd been studying me out of genuine interest rather than obligation. He never made me feel like I was too much or not enough or taking up space that wasn't mine.
He was my safe place in that house.
And then Marie arrived and he was still there, still attentive, still noticing—except somewhere the noticing stopped being about me. The tea stopped appearing. The little considerations that had made me feel seen dried up one by one, how things end when no one wants to have the conversation about it ending.
I heard him through Marie's bedroom door. I know exactly how far gone he was. And knowing it doesn't make it better, because the part that cuts is the part before that—the part where I watched the careful attentiveness I'd believed was love redirect itself entirely onto someone else, and he didn't even seem to notice he'd done it.
There are people who hurt you and it surprises you. And there are people who hurt you and some part of you saw it coming for a long time before you were willing to admit it. Eli was both, somehow, and I don't know how to hold those two things at the same time except badly.
I don't want to miss him. I don't want to wonder if he's sitting somewhere right now thinking about me like I used to sit and wonder if any of them were. But refusing to wonder takes effort and I'm running low on that tonight.
I shove the thought down and stare at the ceiling again.
Outside, gravel crunches.
I sit up. It’s a car—too deliberate to be someone turning around, the engine cutting with intent. I'm out of bed before I've made a decision about it, padding to the window and shifting the curtain.
A dark blue sedan. Chase's car.
My stomach drops a little. Not dread exactly, more the feeling you get when something that's been building finally tips over the edge.
I grab a sweater off the chair and go downstairs.
Alex is already at the door, and when Chase looks up and sees me on the stairs he tries to arrange his face into something reassuring. He's not entirely successful. He has the look he gets when he's about to say something important, that investigator stillness I've learned to read.
"Hey," he says.
