Page 35 of Heat Clickbait
"I'm sorry. About the interview. I thought," she paused and sighed heavily. "I thought if I explained, people would understand the danger. Would protect you from what happened to me."
"What happened to you was abandonment," Callie said, stronger now. "By your Alpha. By your pack. By society. And then you abandoned me too, just to make the circle complete."
The silence stretched like taffy.
"I see them," her mother finally said. "Your pack. They're all over the news. They look at you like—like?—"
"Like they love me?"
"Like they own you."
"No." Callie's voice went steel. "They look at me like I'm choosing them. Every day. Every minute. And they're choosing me back. That's the difference, Mom. This isn't something happening to me. It's something I'm doing. With them."
"Biology isn't choice, Callie. When the heat comes, when the rut comes, when the bond demands?—"
"Then we handle it. Together. Not by running away. Not by hiding. Not by abandoning each other when things get hard."
Another silence, this one heavier.
"I want you to be happy," her mother said, so quiet we almost missed it.
"Then let me try. My way. With them."
"The media will eat you alive."
Callie looked around the kitchen at all of us, and something shifted in her expression. Something that looked like determination.
"Let them try."
After her mother hung up, the kitchen stayed quiet for a long moment. Then Callie stood, squaring her shoulders.
"Forty-eight hours of radio silence," she said to Nova. "After that, we go public. Really public. Our way, our terms, our story."
"Callie—" Milo started.
"I'm tired of defending. Tired of explaining. Tired of being afraid." She moved to the window, staring out at the media circus. "They want a story? We'll give them one. The real one. Messy and complicated and biological and chosen, all at once."
"That's career suicide," Nova pointed out, but his eyes held admiration.
"No," she said, turning back to us with that savage smile that had built her empire. "That's authenticity. And it's about time the world saw what modern pack dynamics actually look like."
My phone buzzed. Mom again.
"Sunday dinner?" she'd texted. "Yes or no?"
I looked at Callie, surrounded by her pack, preparing for war with nothing but truth as her weapon.
"Yes," I texted back. "All six of us."
Because if we were doing this, we were doing it together. Media circus and all.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Callie
I woke to silence.
Not the comfortable quiet of early morning when the pack still slept tangled together in a pile of limbs and shared warmth, but the careful, deliberate silence of five Alphas trying not to wake me while having a crisis in the kitchen. The kind of silence that had weight to it, heavy with whispered conversations and barely contained anxiety. The kind that meant they'd been up for hours, probably since Ghost's ritualistic 4 AM security check where he'd slip through the house like a wraith, ensuring every lock was secure and every window intact. Definitely since Milo's 5 AM stress-baking session that I could smell even from the depths of my nest, cinnamon and brown butter and that particular edge of anxiety that made everything taste just slightly too sweet, like he was overcompensating with sugar for the bitterness of whatever news had driven him from bed.
