Page 109 of What We Don't Say: Part One

Sloane makes a sound that is almost a growl. It cuts off fast, like Idris has stopped him with a hand or a look. Callie’s fingers tremble against my scalp, and Idris’s hand tightens on her shoulder once before he lets the pressure ease.

“I wanted to come to her anyway,” I say, opening my eyes to the shadowed underside of the table. “I knew I needed her. Then I got here, and I couldn’t tell if asking was unfair.”

For a breath, the room holds itself completely still. Sloane’s hand appears beneath the tablecloth, palm open on the rug a few inches from my knee. He doesn’t touch me until I move my foot into his reach, and when his fingers close around my ankle, his grip is warm and careful enough that my chest hurts.

Idris crouches beside Callie’s chair. His face is partly hidden by the tablecloth, but I can see his mouth, the hard line of his jaw, the control he’s using like both hands around a blade. “Thank you for telling us,” he says.

“I don’t want everyone to fight.”

“We know.” Callie answers before either Alpha can, and her voice shakes more than it did a minute ago. She keeps her hand in my hair anyway. “Nobody is fighting over you under my dining table.”

Sloane breathes out hard, but he doesn’t turn it into a joke. His thumb moves once over my ankle, then stops there, steady pressure instead of restless panic. Idris stays crouched, one hand still on Callie’s shoulder and the other resting against the floor near Sloane’s, close enough for me to reach if I want him.

“I can go back to the sunroom in a minute,” I say, because the instinct to offer obedience is still there and still loud. “I know I should be there.”

“No,” Idris says, and the word is quiet enough that it doesn’t bruise. “You can breathe first.”

Sloane’s fingers tighten around my ankle, then loosen. “And when you go back, Callie comes with us if you want her there.”

Callie’s hand stops in my hair.

I lift my head from her knee just enough to look through the gap in the tablecloth. Sloane is on the floor now, close and strained, his eyes bright with too many things he isn’t letting loose. Idris watches him for one second, then looks at Callie, and whatever passes between them makes the air shift.

Garrett’s words are still in me. I can feel them, cold and careful, trying to arrange love into separate rooms. But Sloane’s hand is on my ankle, Idris’s hand is beside me on the rug, and Callie’s fingers are threaded through my hair, trembling while she refuses to let go.

I press my cheek back against her knee before anyone asks me to move. “I want her there,” I say, and the sentence comes out quiet but complete. “When I go back, I want Callie with me.”

No one answers right away. Above me, Callie takes one careful breath. Sloane’s growl starts low and breaks before it becomes sound, and Idris says Garrett’s name once, so quietly that the table seems to hold it with us.

Idris

The front door clicks shut behind me with a soft, expensive sound that belongs to Garrett’s house more than it belongs to any of us. I come back from the side entrance with no delivery box, no cooling inserts, and a quiet in the house that makes the back of my neck tighten before I reach the dining room.

I hear Sloane before I see him. His voice is low in the dining room, scraped raw around the edges, and the scent rolling out with it is smoked cedar and brown sugar gone sharp with fear. “Callie, baby, I need you to tell me if he said anything else,” hesays, and the careful softness in his tone only makes the restraint underneath it more obvious.

I step into the dining room and take in the whole scene before anyone can explain it badly. Calliope sits at the long table with her laptop open, a student essay under her pen, and her left hand buried in Theo’s hair beneath the tablecloth. Her pen is angled over a margin as if she might still make a note about comma splices while an Omega trembles against her knee. Her hand gives her away. It moves steadily through Theo’s curls, but her fingers shake every time they pass the back of his neck.

Sloane stands in the doorway to the sunroom with one hand wrapped around the frame hard enough to bleach his knuckles. His other hand is on the back of Calliope’s chair, close to her shoulder without quite touching, and the restraint in that small gap tells me how close he’s come to losing control. He looks like he wants to tear open the walls, the floor, his own skin, anything that might give him a thing to fight instead of a boy hidden under a dining table.

Theo is tucked under the heavy oak table with one of Calliope’s gray sweaters around his shoulders. I see the side of his face through the fall of the tablecloth, cheek pressed to Calliope’s knee, eyes open but fixed on the shadowed space between her chair and the table leg. One hand grips the hem of her pants. The other is curled into his own sleeve, tight enough to make the fabric strain.

Sloane looks at me the moment I enter, relief and fury crossing his face so fast they nearly become the same thing. “He won’t come back to the sunroom,” he says, and his voice drops lower when Theo’s hand tightens on Calliope. “He came in here and crawled under the table. Garrett talked to him in the hall, and now he keeps saying he’s scared he’s asking too much.”

Calliope finally looks up. Her face is composed the way a cracked cup can still hold tea if nobody touches it too quickly.“I didn’t pull him out,” she says, her voice low around the confession. “I didn’t know if I should.”

“You shouldn’t have pulled him out,” I say, and some of the panic leaves her mouth before the rest of her believes me. I cross the room slowly, keeping my steps audible, and set one hand on the back of her chair beside Sloane’s. “You gave him somewhere to stop.”

Sloane’s throat works. He wants to answer. He wants to say the sunroom was somewhere to stop, that his arms were somewhere to stop, that every blanket we arranged this morning was meant to be enough. I know him well enough to see all of it move through him, and I also know Theo will feel every inch if Sloane lets it loose here.

“Sloane,” I say, turning my head without taking my hand from Calliope’s chair. “The pharmacy texted about the side-door delivery. I checked the side entrance and there’s no box. Check the camera and make sure they didn’t leave it by the gate or below the frame.”

His eyes narrow because some part of him hears the redirection for what it is. The rest of him needs a task badly enough to take it. His hand slides from Calliope’s chair to her shoulder, and he bends to press his mouth into her hair before he moves. “I’ll be right back,” he tells her, but his eyes drop toward the tablecloth when he says it. “Theo, sweetheart, I’m checking the door. I’m still in the house.”

Theo’s fingers flex in Calliope’s pants. “Okay,” he says from the shadows, and the word comes out thin but clear. Sloane looks wrecked by the fact that he answered, then makes himself leave before the urge to stay wins.

I wait until Sloane’s steps move down the hall before I crouch beside Calliope’s chair. Her hand is still in Theo’s hair, the motion slower now, as if she’s afraid any change in rhythm will take the floor out from under him. I touch the outside of herknee first, light enough for her to decide whether she wants more, and when she doesn’t pull away, I let my thumb rest there where Theo can see it.

“Calliope,” I murmur, keeping my voice low. “Look at me for a second.”