"Fear," he said.
He didn't look at me. He looked at his hands, hands that managed millions of dollars, hands that had cleaned the shame from my skin hours ago.
"I was eighteen years old," Anders said, his voice devoid of its usual arrogant cadence. "And I was terrified of being an Alpha. My father… he taught me that control was the only virtue. That slipping, even for a second, made you an animal."
He looked up, meeting my eyes. The icy blue was fractured.
"When I smelled your distress," he confessed, "it hit me like a train. My instincts screamed at me to grab you. To snarl at the security guards. To claim the space. And that terrified me. I thought if I moved, I would lose control. I thought I would become the monster the handbook warned us about. So I froze. I hid behind the rules because I didn't trust myself to be anything other than a threat."
He swallowed hard, his Adam's apple bobbing.
"I sat there and watched you suffer because I was more afraid of breaking protocol than I was of your pain. And I have hated myself for that cowardice every single day since."
I stared at him. The boy who followed the rules. He hadn't been indifferent; he had been paralyzed by his own biology.
"And you?" I looked at Simon.
Simon pushed his plate away. He looked sick. He rubbed his thumb over the ink stain on his middle finger.
"I didn't think you were real," he whispered.
The admission was so strange it made me blink. "What?"
"I lived behind my sketchpad and pencil, behind the lens of my camera," Simon said, gesturing vaguely to his eyes. "I spent all of high school watching people like they were characters in a movie. It felt safer that way. If I was the observer, I couldn't get hurt. When you started shaking… when the crowd turned…"
He shook his head, a dark lock of hair falling into his eyes.
"It looked like a scene. A tragic, beautiful, horrible scene. And I did what I always did. I captured it. I thought if I drew it, I could understand it. By the time I realized you were a person, a real, breathing person who was practically bleeding out in front of me, it was too late. Security had taken you."
He looked at me, his dark eyes pleading.
"I turned you into content, Tessa. Because if I acknowledged you were a person, I would have had to acknowledge that I was doing nothing to help you. It was dissociation. And it was unforgivable."
The table felt smaller now. The air was thick with burnt sugar and regret.
Then, the mountain spoke.
"I was just a coward," Daniel rumbled.
He didn't make excuses, didn't cite philosophy or instinct. He just put his large hands flat on the table.
"I was big," he mumbled. "I've been six-foot-four since I was fifteen. Everyone always looked at me. They expected me to take up space. And I hated it. I just wanted to be invisible. I spent four years trying to fold myself into the smallest possible shapes so no one would notice me."
He looked at me with those warm, hazel eyes. "I saw you. I smelled the fear. Somewhere in my mind, I knew I could stop it," he said. "I knew if I stepped forward, if I used my size, the security guards would have backed down. But I was scared that if I stepped out of line, the laughter would turn on me. I let you take the bullet because I was too scared to stand in front of it."
He exhaled, a sound like a tire losing air.
"I lost my voice that day, too, Tessa. I've spent years talking into a microphone for strangers because I couldn't say one word for the girl standing three feet away from me."
I looked at them.
Three men. Three distinct failures.
Anders failed because he worshipped order. Simon failed because he worshipped distance. Daniel failed because he worshipped safety.
I had spent a decade hating them. I had built a fortress of glass and steel to keep people like them out. I had written books where the Alphas were perfect, where they knew exactly what to do, where they never froze, never faltered, never feared.
But the men sitting at my table weren't characters in a T.L. Rose novel. They were messy. They were flawed.
