"Stop," Finn says.
I look at him.
"Whatever you're thinking," he says. "Stop."
"You don't know what I'm thinking."
"You're thinking this is because of you." He holds my gaze. "It's not."
"If I hadn't—"
"Vee,” he says. "Alex made a choice. Alex always makes choices. It's the thing he does—he sees a problem and he solves it. He doesn't ask anyone's permission first." He pauses. "This one is on him. Not you."
"He did it for me."
"He did it for all of us," Malcolm says. His voice comes out rough. He's still looking at the door. "He did it because he's Alex and Alex would rather blow himself up than watch his pack suffer."
He finally turns away from the door.
His face is one I’ve never seen before. There’s no smirk or armor. There’s none of the real warmth I always see underneath. This is something rawer than all of those. This is Malcolm genuinely undone and not knowing what to do with it, which for Malcolm expresses itself as movement.
He picks up his phone, and calls Alex.
It rings. And rings. Then goes to voicemail.
"Alex." His voice is controlled but barely. "Call me back. Right now. I mean it."
He hangs up. Calls again immediately.
Voicemail.
"You absolute—" He stops. Breathes. "Call me back."
Finn takes the phone from his hand. "Give him a minute."
"I'll give him nothing." But he lets Finn take the phone. He runs both hands through his hair and makes a sound that isn't quite a word. "He didn't even—he didn't tell us. He didn’t warn us. He just decided and he did it and now he's just—" He gestures at the empty doorway. "Gone."
"That's Alex," Finn says.
"I know that's Alex." Malcolm drops into a chair. Hard. "I know exactly who he is. That's the problem."
I cross to Rhys.
I sit on the floor beside him and don't say anything. He looks at me. He looks lost like Drake seemed lost when he got here.
It’s not quite the same though. He's not lost how Drake was then. But there's something in his eyes that belongs to a man who has just had something taken away that he didn't expect to lose.
I take his hand.
He looks down at our joined hands.
"This isn't your fault either," I say.
He doesn't say anything.
"Rhys."
He looks at me.
