Page 74 of What We Don't Say: Part Two

My whole body reacts before my mind can soften it. My shoulders draw inward, and my hand leaves Theo’s hair to press against my own throat. Let. The shape of it is too close to Garrett. Too close to permission being built around me by men who love me and men who do not. Too close to a head Alpha deciding where my body is safe, where my presence belongs, which door opens, which door stays locked.

Sloane sees it instantly.

His face goes pale, the fierce light in his eyes dying into something hollow and sick. He pulls both hands back like even the air between us might have burned me. “Callie,” he says, and his voice cracks around my name. “I didn't mean it like that. I am sorry. I heard it as soon as it left my mouth.”

“I know,” I say, but the words don't smooth my posture back out. Knowing and feeling are still in separate rooms inside me.

Sloane swallows hard. He shifts back until there is deliberate space between his knees and the couch. “I will stand between him and you if you want me there,” he says, voice shaking with the effort of restraint. “I will step aside if you tell me to. I can be a shield, Callie, but I won't make myself another wall.”

His words settles into the room quietly, Sloane still shaking a little. I can see it in his hands where they rest open on his thighs, in the tight line of his mouth, in the way his eyes keep returning to my face like he's afraid I will disappear between one breath and the next. But he does not fill the silence with more apology. He lets the corrected words stand on their own and waits to see if I can touch them.

Idris watches from the chair, expression unreadable except for the hand he has closed around the armrest. His knuckles are white. He understands the stakes. Idris, who has always used direction like care, who knows the exact pressure that can settle my body when I want it, is sitting there with every commandinside him locked behind his teeth because Garrett poisoned the ground those things used to stand on.

Dash appears in the doorway with two mugs, his cardigan hanging open over a wrinkled T-shirt and his hair still sleep-disordered at the back. His gaze moves over me once, then settles on my face. He does not ask what happened because he can read enough of it from the angle of my shoulders.

“I put eggs on the counter if you want them,” he says, voice even and neutral. “The meeting is still at ten, Calliope. You have time to eat first, and you also have time to decide that the meeting can survive without you.”

Sloane looks at the clock, then back at me, alarm flashing across his face before he catches it. “You don't have to go,” he says, softer this time, slower. “We can stay here. The meeting can wait.”

“I have to go,” I say, and the sharpness in my own voice makes Theo stir. I lower my hand back into his hair, gentling the apology through my fingers instead of stopping to give it a speech. “If I don't go, it means Garrett is still rearranging my life. It means I am staying home because he made me afraid to walk across a campus.”

Idris uncrosses his ankles but does not stand. “Then you go as Dr. Monroe,” he says. “As yourself.”

The words pull my gaze to him. Something in my chest twists, not cleanly, not comfortably. “I need the space to be that,” I say. “I need to walk into the room as a professor, not as someone everyone is trying to keep from cracking.”

Dash sets one mug on the table within my reach and keeps the other in his hand. “I can drive you,” Dash says. “Theo can ride with us, and I’ll bring him straight back here once you’re inside. Sloane and Idris can follow and stay in the lot unless you ask for them. That way you know where everyone is, and Theo doesn’t have to spend the morning wondering whether you vanished.”

Theo’s head lifts at that, hair falling into his eyes. “I can go,” he says, voice hoarse and immediate. His fingers tighten around my robe, panic flaring so fast I feel it in the tendons of his hand. “I can be quiet. I won't make trouble.”

“Oh, Star,” I whisper, and the ache of him nearly takes me out. I cup his face, careful with the swollen skin beneath his eyes. “That isn't why. You aren't trouble.”

His mouth trembles. “I don't want you to leave where I can't see you.”

“I know.” I press my forehead to his. “I am going to a faculty meeting. I will come back after. Dash’s house has my robe, my cardigan, and the bed I slept in. You can make it smell like us while I am gone.”

Theo’s breath catches on the word us. His eyes flick toward Sloane, then Idris, then back to me. He looks too tired to fight himself and too scared to stop trying.

Dash comes closer only enough to put the second mug on the table near Theo, though it smells like plain hot water instead of coffee. “You can come with me to the kitchen while she gets ready,” he tells Theo, voice low and practical. “You can choose which blanket goes on her bed. You can also sit outside the bathroom door and be miserable if that feels more honest. Both options keep you in the house she's coming back to.”

Theo stares at him for a long second, then lowers his face back into my stomach with a defeated sound. It is agreement, or the closest thing his body can manage.

The next half hour happens in careful pieces. I eat half a slice of toast because Idris puts the plate within reach and says nothing about the eggs. Sloane sits on the floor with his hands wrapped around a mug he does not drink from, watching only when I am not looking back. Dash finds my blazer from the hook near the extension door and leaves it folded over the chair instead of holding it out like I need dressing. Theo follows me tothe bedroom and sits on the floor outside the bathroom while I wash my face, one hand under the door with his fingers resting against the tile.

When I come out, he looks up at me like I have returned from somewhere farther than a sink. I kneel long enough to kiss his forehead, and he closes his eyes under my mouth. “You will come back here,” he says carefully, making it a statement because a question would cost him too much.

“I will come back here,” I answer.

I hop into Dash’s car as Theo curls in the back seat with my cardigan trapped beneath his cheek, watching me in the mirror whenever he thinks I won't notice. Sloane and Idris follow in Sloane’s truck, keeping enough distance that the rearview mirror does not feel crowded.

Dash keeps both hands relaxed on the steering wheel. He does not fill the quiet until the silence has stopped feeling like something I have to perform inside. “They are terrified,” he says eventually. “In case you were wondering what all that restraint means. They are afraid one wrong word will put you back behind a door they can't open.”

“They should be,” I say, looking out the window as the first brick buildings of Halston come into view. “I spent three months thinking they decided I was not worth the trouble of a phone call. I am not fixed because the documents were fake.”

“I know.” His voice stays steady, but there is a thread underneath it I recognize now as anger held carefully out of my way. “You are the one holding the match this time. That is a different kind of weight.”

The faculty lot is half full when we pull in. Dash parks near the humanities building but not at the closest spot, leaving enough distance for me to decide how much of the walk I can manage before anyone sees my face. Sloane’s truck stops two rows back. The engine shuts off. Neither he nor Idris gets out.

Theo leans forward between the seats, one hand gripping the edge of the console. “You will come back to the house.”