Page 31

Today, I decided to go with my gut and do it anyway. But I waited. Instead of sending the message when I finally made up my mind, I held on to it. I wonder what would have happened if I had sent it this morning instead of waiting until I got home. Would she be here now?

Leith's phone buzzes. He picks up on the first ring. "Yeah." A pause. "Where?" Another pause, longer. I watch his shoulders from the corner of my eye. They don't move. That's how I know it's bad. Leith goes more still the worse something gets. "What pack?"

Something about the way he says that last one makes me lift my head. He's not looking at me. He's looking at the window, jaw tight, eyes doing the thing where they go very flat and very focused. I've seen that look before. I don't like it.

"Any witnesses." A long pause. "And none of them—" He stops. Lets out a breath through his nose. "Right." Another pause. "Yeah. I owe you." He hangs up.

The room is quiet except for the monitors.

"Was that one of your cop friends?" I ask.

Leith nods. Once.

"And?"

He looks at me. Then at Cammie. Then back at me. He sets his phone on his knee and stays quiet long enough that I would find it maddening if I didn't know him as well as I do.

"Leith."

"She was on a date," he says. "When it happened."

It hurts, but I don’t flinch. I never let her know.

"With a pack called the Overstreets."

The name doesn't mean anything to me. I watch his face to see if it should. Something moves behind his eyes. Only for a second. A muscle in his jaw tightens and releases.

"I knew I didn’t like those guys," he says. "But I never would have guessed they were so fucking spineless."

"You're going to have to spell it out for me," I say. "All of it."

He stands and starts pacing the length of the room. "The pack she was with had a stalker. An alpha named Shayna Cummins. That's who pushed Cammie." His jaw sets in a way that tells me that's all he's going to say about it right now.

"Are you going to find this alpha?"

He doesn't respond. Just stands there with his hands flexing and squeezing into fists.

I turn back to Cammie. The pain meds are doing what they do to omegas. She'll be under for a while yet. That's good. Her body has been through something colossal, and sleep is how it heals. I know all of this thoroughly and it doesn't make the watching easier. I want her to open her eyes. To let me know she's still in there.

I take out my phone and pull up Graham's contact.

Finn: Please tell Lark that Cammie's at East Rock University Hospital. She's had surgery but she's stable.

Three dots appear immediately.

Graham: We'll be there soon.

No questions. No hesitation. I set my phone down. Cammie will want Lark here. She’ll want the people she loves close. That steadies something in me even though it hurts a little, too. The people she loves. I don't know where I fall in that. I suspect I don’t fall in it at all.

I want to be hers. The thought arrives the way true things usually do—quietly, without asking permission. I don't push it away. There's no point anymore. She's here and I'm here, and pretending I've spent the last weeks thinking about her only occasionally would be a lie I refuse to tell myself. Not anymore.

But she's Beck's scent match. I know what that means. I watched him sit in that chair with her hand in his like a man who had been rearranged from the inside. Beck, who has never in all the years I've known him looked certain about anything other than surgery. For everything else he’s casual, a little arrogant, sometimes ridiculous. But not about this. He looked at her in a way that made my chest squeeze until I thought my heart would stop. That pull is real. It's biological and it's absolute and it isn't something I can compete with.

She'll feel it when she wakes up. She'll open her eyes and find him and feel that certainty, the kind that doesn't need history or small careful things collected over weeks, and I don't know what happens to Leith and me when she does. Whether there's room for what we feel, for whatever this is, alongside something that definite.

And then there's Piers. What happens if he meets her and feels nothing? What does that mean for Beck? What does it mean for all of us?

She didn't ask for any of this. She was on a date. A terrible one, apparently, with a pack that got her pushed into traffic, and now she's going to wake up in a hospital bed to find four alphas rearranging their lives around her without asking.