Then I turn back toward the building to get my keys from the desk where I left them.
That's when I see her. Marie.
She's standing at the window of the registry common room. Second floor. She must have seen me come in but she's not looking at me.
She's looking at the parking lot.
At Vee's pack.
Her face is doing something I can't read from here. Something that doesn't look like the expressions I catalogued in the months she lived in my house. Not the charm, the deflection or the careful management of how she was perceived. It’s something rawer than that.
She's staring at the scarred alpha.
Staring at him like someone who has recognized something they weren't expecting to.
I feel the old pull. The ache that lived in my chest for months and drove every bad decision I made. Even now, faded and strange and nothing like what it was, it's there. The scent match. Still real even if everything else was ruined.
I look away from her.
I think about Vee sitting across from me a few minutes ago sayingthat's not love, Ragon. It never was.
I walked away from something real because I was waiting for something certain. I had love—imperfect but genuinely given—and I put conditions on it and called it reasonable while I watched it wither.
I won't make that mistake twice.
I get my keys and walk to my car without looking back.
***
The house is quiet.
Not the quiet of evening or the quiet of everyone asleep, but the absolute quiet of vacancy. I stand in the doorway and let it register. All the rooms that used to hold people, the kitchen where someone was always cooking, the living room where someone was always occupying a chair, the hall where footsteps used to overlap and intersect throughout the day.
Nothing.
I get a glass from the cabinet. Then the bottle from the shelf where I've been putting it back less and less carefully lately. I pour and I walk down the hall.
Her room.
The door is open. I don't know why I keep it open. Her room is the same as was when she left. Her clothes still in the closet, shoes lined up by the door. The chair she slept in is still by the window that’s facing Alex’s house. Or what used to be his house. I don’t expect them to return.
Vee’s bed is just a bed frame and a mattress with then sheets on top. Bare… just like she left it.
I sit on the edge.
The springs give under my weight. The mattress still holds the faint shape of where her nest used to be—the impression of it, the places where she'd layered and arranged and built herself a space that felt like hers in a house that kept trying to make her feel like she wasn't.
She never rebuilt the one I destroyed.
I noticed. I noticed and I placed it away under things to address later and then later never came because I was always somewhere else. With Marie. Being the kind of alpha I told myself I had to be.
I tip back the glass.
The whiskey burns going down.
I lie back on the mattress and look at the ceiling.
Outside the window the sky is doing that thing it does in late afternoon, going gold and long, the shadows stretching across the yard. Somewhere in some town Vee is with her new pack, probably cooking dinner in a kitchen too small for all of them, probably laughing.
