Page 24 of What We Don't Say: Part Two

Kade exhales once. “Skylar will keep it clean. Send me the footage, and I’ll make the call.”

“I have to go.” I put the car in gear, because if I sit still another minute, the rage will eat the last functional part of me before I reach the right room. “I’ll send the files. I have an Alpha’s face to beat in.”

“Be careful around him,” Kade says, and the warning lands differently from anyone else’s would have. He knows what it means to want violence and choose something useful with bloody hands.

I end the call without answering. The raw files take forty seconds to send, and I spend every one of them staring at thetimestamp where Callie disappeared from our cameras. When the upload completes, I drive home with my phone face-up on the passenger seat, waiting for news I know won't come fast enough.

Idris

The house glows warm when I pull into the drive. It looks obscene from the street, all lit windows and clean lines, the kind of place people pass and imagine safety but without Callie’s presence…

Sloane’s already on the stairs when I step inside. Theo is half behind him in one of Sloane’s shirts with Callie’s sweater bunched in both hands, his face pale and eyes too wide. Sloane must feel what is coming through the bond before he sees my face, because his hand goes back to Theo’s hip, holding himsteady while his gaze drops to my coat pocket where the case number sits like a loaded gun.

“What did they say?” Sloane asks, and the restraint in his voice is a thread pulled so tight it has started to sing.

I can't answer him yet. If I look at him while I say the words, I will become the thing Zana warned me not to be in the station. So I move past the stairs toward the study, toward the spill of lamplight beneath the closed door, toward the faint scratch of Garrett’s pen moving over paper as if tonight has been ordinary enough for notes.

“Idris,” Sloane says behind me, and the warning in it is almost a plea. Theo makes a small sound, but my hand is already on the study door.

I throw it open hard enough that it hits the inside wall.

Garrett looks up from his desk. He's in a navy sweater with his sleeves rolled once, hair neat, glasses low on his nose, a file open beneath his left hand. He looks inconvenienced for half a second before concern settles over his face. That concern is what breaks the last clean piece of me.

“What did you do to the cameras?” I ask.

His pen rests on the page. He doesn't rush the motion. “Good evening to you too.”

“The porch feed is corrupted. So is the side camera. The garage skips in the same window.” I step into the study, and the storm in my scent rolls ahead of me hard enough that the curtains stir near the vent. “What did you do?”

Garrett removes his glasses and folds them with maddening care. “We’ve had intermittent issues with the exterior cameras.”

“No, we have not.”

“Idris, systems fail. Especially under high household activity. You know that better than anyone.” He leans back in his chair, eyes moving past me to the hall where Sloane and Theo havestopped near the threshold. “This isn’t the night to turn technical maintenance into a conspiracy.”

I cross the room so fast his chair scrapes back before he can hide the instinct. “I checked those cameras before Theo’s heat. I checked them repeatedly. Porch, side entrance, garage, back gate. They worked when I checked them, Garrett. They worked until the only minutes I need.”

Sloane appears in the doorway with Theo close to his back, one arm locked behind him to keep Theo shielded without pushing him away. He hears enough. I feel it when he does. The bond fills with something ragged and red, his fury dragging teeth through mine.

Garrett’s gaze flicks to Theo and softens as if our Omega’s fear belongs to him. “This is exactly why I said we would discuss placement when everyone was calmer.”

“The police report has Sloane’s name on it.” The words tear out of me before I can decide whether to save them for strategy. “The heat-space restriction was delivered to Callie at the campus. She came back here after you said you were going to help her, and then officers removed her from the house.”

Theo makes a wounded sound. Sloane turns his body farther in front of him, but his eyes stay on Garrett with such raw hatred that I feel the air around him strain.

Garrett stands slowly. “If Calliope ignored a protective restriction during an Omega medical event, the responding officers made the safest choice available to them.”

“Sloane didn’t request that restriction.”

“No?” Garrett’s mouth barely moves. “His distress was evident. Yours too. Theo’s condition was unstable, and Calliope’s involvement had already become a point of biological confusion.”

The Alpha register comes into my throat so hard I taste blood. “Do not do that.”

“Do what?” Garrett asks, calm enough to sound wounded. “Name what everyone in this house was refusing to address? She had become too central to an Omega transition she had no biological capacity to anchor. Sloane’s bond made him irrational, and you were encouraging it because you wanted her too.”

The tears come without warning, hot and humiliating and immediate. I feel them gather before they fall, and there is no space left in me to be ashamed. “Callie was mine too,” I say, and my voice cracks through the room like broken glass. “She was going to be mine. She was going to wear my fucking bite, and you made her stand outside this house with police between her and the people who love her.”

“Then you should have formalized that bond before the house entered a crisis.”