Chapter 12
Calhoun’s pov~
I opened the trash like a man opening a wound.
My hands shook. For a second the world went grainy at the edges, like the light had been turned down inside my skull. One scroll and the abyss yawned back at me, several emails from the Pack partners, all of them, every single one of their messages, their interest, their meeting requests were deleted. Not archived. Not ignored. Deleted. In my trash.
I blinked until spots swam. How? I’d been buried in files last night. I hadn’t touched my phone. The only other person who had been in this apartment was Carmela. That realization hit me hard. White-hot rage crawled up my veins and took my hands. Carmela.
That sheltered princess of a woman who’d never punched a clock in her life. Carmela, who wore power like perfume but had never actually worked for it. Why would she delete emails she didn’t understand? Why would she throw away a deal that meant profit for the Pack? For us?
My mouth tasted like metal. Losing this would cost…no, not just cost. It would gnaw a hole in the quarter, in the numbers I fed my decisions with for the Pack, in a dozen calculated places I couldn’t afford to bleed from.
I fished my phone out and dialed. I scrolled contacts, found Elodie’s number and pressed call. The line clicked, rang, and went straight to voicemail. Again. Again. My heart did something dumb in my chest. It slid, then missed a beat and fell into a pit.
Elodie never let anything go to voicemail. Ever.
I dug through the trash folder with my thumbs as if my hands could claw her back. My throat was raw. Then there it was: a message. And I hit restore. What I saw wasn’t an apology. It wasn’t a reason. It was a goodbye.
“Nine years loving you in silence. Five years pretending it was enough. This is the end of the line. Alpha Calhoun, I’m no longer your assistant. I no longer have feelings for you. We’re just two strangers now. In this lifetime, let’s never cross paths again p>
The text ended and the room spun.
The message burned on my screen.
I read it once. Twice. Ten times. Each word hammered into me like some blade, and yet I kept going back to the beginning, waiting for it to twist into something else, waiting for my anger to finally show up, the relief, anything. But there was nothing. Just silence. A hollowness that spread through my chest.
I should’ve been glad. Isn’t this what I wanted? For her to finally cut herself free of me, for me to stop carrying that weight, that relentless gaze that always clung to me. I should’ve felt free, finally able to devote myself to Carmela without Elodie hovering in the background like some starved ghost. But the only thing I felt was coldness. Like something had been ripped out of me, leaving behind a carcass that still breathed.
My phone slipped from my hand onto the desk with a dull thud. I stared at it as though it had betrayed me. My body refused to move.
Elodie’s face came back to me, uninvited. The way she used to look at me like I was worth worshipping, like she’d crawl through fire just to carry my sins for me. God, she was a fool. My fool. That puppy-dog devotion, it used to disgust me. And yet, there was a night… I can’t erase it. The night I fucked her for the first time. I took her virginity.
I remember the way she clung to me, desperate, trembling, like I was her entire goddamn universe. I had felt something then, something foreign and ugly that I refused to name. I shoved her away after, told her she could never own me, that my heart belonged only to Carmela. And I saw her eyes die at that moment. The light went out of them, and she swallowed her hurt like poison. That was the day she should’ve left me. But she didn’t. She stayed. She burned quietly in the background, waiting for scraps, never asking for more.
And that… that was the reason I never let her go.
For years I told myself she was just a Gamma who didn’t know when to quit. A hopeless little idiot clinging to crumbs. I thought that’s all she was, someone to warm my bed, to fill my silence, to obey. I gave her nothing but bones and she gnawed them down to dust, smiling like it was enough. My car. My penthouse. The office couch. The house I let her stay in. Every corner of my life carries her ghost, her scent, every mark of our sex. The bruises we left on each other. The way her nails dug into my back like she wanted to carve her name into me. And I let her. Every fucking time, I let her.
She was perfect in her place. The perfect assistant. The perfect shadow. She never asked for more than what I tossed her way. And now she’s gone. Just like that.
I should feel relieved. Freedom. Elation. But instead my chest feels like it’s collapsing in on itself. A dark cloud hangs heavy over my head, and I can’t breathe through it.
Why does it feel like she ripped my heart out, when I swore I never gave it to her?
Alright, love. I hear you loud and clear. You don’t want robotic rhythm, you don’t want clipped lines, you don’t want “pretty but hollow.” You want this raw. Human. Emotional. First-person, inside Calhoun’s head, cruel and cold but still bleeding through with ache. You want the reader to feel goosebumps, to feel the weight of silence, the sting of rejection, the dark tension of a man who can’t admit he’s broken but is. Let’s do this right.
I pulled away from the desk like the damn thing was cursed. My phone sat there, screen black, but I swore it was still burning holes into me. My chest ached—strange, sharp, unfamiliar—and I hated that I didn’t know why. If Elodie wanted to go, then so be it. I wasn’t going to chase after her. She wasn’t worth chasing. That’s what I told myself as I poured whiskey down my throat, but the taste was bitter, not sharp enough to drown her ghost.
Days passed. I buried myself in Carmela. Luxurious dates, mindless trips, restaurants that bled money just for a table. Designer bags, shoes, perfumes—whatever she wanted, I threw it at her. I wanted her laughter to drown out the silence Elodie left behind. I wanted her presence to choke out the emptiness gnawing at my chest. But no matter how many bottles of wine we spilled, no matter how many times I fucked her against the sheets of some overpriced hotel suite, the ache stayed.
It was in my ribs when I woke up. In my spine when I sat in board meetings. In my dreams—especially there. Elodie kept slipping through the cracks of my mind like smoke. Her laugh. The way she noticed every single thing about me without me ever asking. The way she stared like she saw past my bones, past the monster, like she still wanted what was rotting inside.
And wasn’t it strange? Carmela never noticed the change. She never asked why my eyes stayed distant. She never asked why I gripped my glass too tightly, why I drifted into silence in the middle of her chatter. She didn’t see me—she never did. Elodie always did.
I sat parked in the Ferrari, engine off, outside a boutique Carmela had disappeared into for hours. I leaned back against the seat, staring at nothing, the ache crawling back under my skin until I couldn’t breathe. When Carmela finally came out, arms full of shopping bags, her face split into that practiced smile, I felt nothing. No spark. No flutter. Just a hollow thud in my chest.
Before she reached the car, I pulled out my phone. My thumb hovered before I let the words spill.
“Don’t forget, you can always come back. If you want, you can come back only as my Gamma and nothing else p>
I sent it. My chest clenched immediately after, like the message itself had stabbed me. I stared at the screen, waiting for that little line to shift delivered. But instead it turned red. Failed. Blocked.
My stomach dropped. My hands shook. Elodie had never done that before. Never cut me off completely.
A knock at the window snapped me back. Carmela. I unlocked the doors and she slid inside, bags filling the backseat, her perfume filling the car like suffocation. I barely looked at her. My eyes stayed on my phone, praying, waiting. Nothing. The screen mocked me. My jaw locked so tight I could’ve cracked my teeth. I shoved the tremor out of my hands, forced my breathing steady. She couldn’t notice.
“Sorry, darling,” Carmela giggled, her voice syrupy sweet. “Took forever in there, I know. But some of the people recognized me, wanted pictures,you know how it is. Anyway, we should totally check out the Lucious boutiques tomorrow, mmh? Their new season just came in and I heard the shoes are to die for. What do you say p>
I locked my phone, slid it into my pocket, my face carved flat. “I won’t be available,” I said coldly. “I need to return to the company. There are unfinished matters waiting. Let me handle everything, and after that, we’ll go wherever you want. Alright p>
Her smile faltered. She stared at me for a long second, sulking, lower lip jutting out like a child’s. Finally she sighed, then pasted that saccharine grin back on. “Fine. That’s okay. I’ll help you out tomorrow, sweetheart p>
I nodded once, gripped the wheel, and started the engine. The car roared, but my head was silent. Too silent. Seeing her smile again smoothed something small, but not enough. Not nearly enough. Elodie’s shadow was still there, curling around my ribs, cutting into my chest no matter how hard I tried to shake her off.