Chase: Don't forget what I said. You did good work. I mean it.
I pocket the phone.
Good work.
Good work that required me to turn around and go back.
Good work that I would do again because it got her out.
Because she's safe now. She's away fromhim.
I push through the registry doors into the cold afternoon air.
The thing about the long game is that it works.
It got her out.
Which was the point.
I just have to figure out how to live with the version of myself that played it.
I head toward my car.
The hearing is coming.
And after that, whatever comes next.
Chapter 8
Vee
Three days in and the shape of the place is settling around me.
It’s not home, but familiar enough that I'm not startled awake anymore when the floorboards creak or when I hear footsteps in the hallway outside my door.
Morning comes with Malcolm already in the kitchen.
He's at the table with a mug of coffee and a book, wearing glasses I didn't know he owned. They're thin-framed, silver, and they make him look softer somehow. Less like the broad-shouldered alpha who helped me through my heat and more like someone who spends Sunday mornings doing crossword puzzles, just... extra large.
When I walk in, his eyes flick up from the page, register the borrowed shirt still hanging from my shoulders, then return to his book with nothing but a slight nod of acknowledgment.
I pour myself coffee from the pot he's already made. The mug is warm in my hands. I sit across from him at the small wooden table and we don't speak.
His silence has no waiting in it. No expectation lurking underneath. No countdown ticking toward the moment I should be doing something else, saying something else, performing better.
Ragon's silence was always a countdown. Every quiet moment stretched thin with the weight of what I should bedoing, what I should be saying, how I should be proving I deserved to be there. Even when he wasn't speaking, I could feel his assessment. His judgment. His disappointment in whatever I was failing to be.
Malcolm's silence costs me nothing.
I sip my coffee and watch him turn a page. The clock on the wall ticks. Outside, a bird sings from somewhere in the trees. I exhale and my chest loosens just a little.
It's such a small thing. Sitting in quiet with someone who doesn't need me to fill the air with proof of my worth. But it feels massive. Like learning to breathe differently.
Finn wakes loud and chaotic twenty minutes later.
I hear him before I see him, footsteps thundering down the stairs like he's being chased. A muttered curse. Something crashes in the hallway that sounds expensive.
"I'm fine!" he calls to no one in particular. "Nothing broke! Probably!"
