Page 1 of What We Don't Say: Part Two

Theo

My heat’s over. That’s the first thing I understand when I come back to myself. The air should be thick enough to blur the edges of everything. My body should be pulling me down into the deep, hot place Bellwether spent two years teaching me not to fear, the place where instinct has rules and touch has meaning and the nest becomes the whole world. Instead, I’m shivering so hard my teeth keep catching, wrapped in two blankets with a cooling cloth sliding off my collarbone and a doctor’s fingers pressed against the inside of my wrist.

The center of the nest feels wrong. The pillows are still in place, and the sheets are still tucked the way Idris likes them, and one of Callie’s sweaters is bunched against my ribs where I must’ve dragged it close.

There’s a hole where her scent should be. Honeyed pear and vanilla tea, soft enough to breathe around. I keep turning my face into the sweater, trying to find more of her, but every breath gives me less.

“Stay with me, Theo,” the doctor says. Her voice is calm, but it has the careful edges people use around cracked glass. Dr. Mercer from Bellwether is kneeling beside the nest with her bag open, a cuff around my arm and a small reader clipped to my finger. “Tell me your name.”

“Theo Mehra,” I whisper. My throat aches around the words, but they come out whole. Quiet, shaky, mine. “Theo Star Mehra.”

“Good. Do you know where you are?”

I blink past her shoulder. Sloane is near the windows with one hand braced against the frame, his body folded forward like something inside him has been struck and he’s trying not to fall from it. Idris stands beside the nest, too still, one hand on the back of the chair he hasn’t sat in. His knuckles are pale against the dark wood. “Home,” I say, then the word twists too tight in my chest. “I think.”

Sloane makes a sound under his breath. Idris’ head turns toward him, but the doctor gets there first, her eyes flicking up in warning before she looks back at the reader on my finger.

“Your pulse jumps every time they do that,” she says, and I know she means the sounds the Alphas keep swallowing. “Sloane, Idris, I need both of you to pull your scents back as much as you can. His heat response is already unstable.”

“It stopped,” I say before I can decide if I’m allowed to. My fingers tighten around Callie’s sweater until the seams dig into my palms. “It was coming, and then it stopped.”

Dr. Mercer’s face softens in a way that scares me more than if she frowned. “It didn’t stop cleanly. Your body interrupted the cycle under acute distress. That’s why you’re shaking and why your temperature dropped too fast. We’re going to keep monitoring you.”

“Interrupted,” I repeat. The word feels like a door closed on my fingers. “Did I do something wrong?”

Sloane turns from the window so sharply the curtain rings scrape against the rod. “No, sweetheart. No, fuck, don’t even put that in your head.”

His voice breaks on the last word, and my body answers before my mind can. The reader on my finger chirps. Dr. Mercer looks at it, then at him, and Idris steps between Sloane and the nest just enough to block the worst of him from rolling over me.

“Sloane,” Idris says, low and hard. “Breathe before you come closer.”

Sloane looks at him like he might tear through the floor to get to something buried underneath it. His eyes are red-rimmed and wild, and his shirt is wrinkled like he’s been gripping it in both fists. “She shut the bond.”

Sloane’s hand presses harder against his chest. I don’t know exactly what a bonded Alpha feels when a Beta closes the connection. Bellwether explained it with diagrams and careful terms, all neural pathways and consensual bond closure and emotional feedback disruption. They never said Sloane might look like this, pale and breathing wrong, one hand braced over a place I can't reach.

“Callie?” I ask. Her name hurts more than mine did. “Sloane, Callie shut you out?”

He presses the heel of his hand to his chest and nods once, too fast, like if he does it slowly something in him will come apart. “I felt her. There was terror, and then there was nothing. She closed it.”

“She wouldn’t.” The words come out thin. I try to sit up and the room tilts, bright and mean. Idris moves immediately, one hand behind my shoulders, the other gathering the blanket higher around me. I lean into him because my body knows him, because he’s warm and steady even with murder locked behind his ribs. “She wouldn’t do that unless something happened.”

“I know,” Idris says.

Dr. Mercer adjusts the cuff on my arm. “I need to be very clear. I’m documenting this as an interrupted heat response under acute pack distress. Bellwether will require a stabilization plan before I can clear Theo to remain in the current placement without further review.”

Idris’ hand goes still against my back. Sloane stops breathing. Even I understand enough for cold to slide under my skin in a place the blankets can’t reach. Placement review means forms. Forms mean people in rooms deciding whether I belong in this house, with these Alphas, near the nest that still has Callie’s sweater in it. It means Garrett’s calm voice and Bellwether’s clean paper and my body used as proof.

“I’m stable,” I say. My voice shakes, but the sentence holds. “I’m scared. That’s different.”

Dr. Mercer looks at me, and something like approval moves across her face before she hides it behind her professional calm. “It is different. That’s why I’m asking what happened instead of making a recommendation from the vitals alone.”

The front door opens.

I hear it even from the sunroom. The soft click of the lock, the measured weight of footsteps in the foyer, the pause that comes before a man decides what face he’s going to wear when he enters a room. My hands go numb around the sweater. Idris feels the change in me before anyone says anything. He shifts closer, not trapping me, just putting more of himself between me and the hall.

Garrett appears in the sunroom doorway with his coat still on and his phone in one hand. He looks first at me, wrapped in blankets and shivering in the wreckage of a heat that didn’t finish. Then at Dr. Mercer. Then at Sloane. For one second, Garrett’s face goes hard.

“Why is Bellwether here?” he asks.