"We can't keep doing this," I say.
Santos looks up.
Tomas closes the folder.
"We're three alphas, hiding in a house from an omega!"
"You may be, but I'm not hiding. I'm just taking it easy," Santos says calmly. His scent alone tells me that he's lying.
"She is going to be on this island for three months. She is forty meters from where we are sitting. The Nakamura delegation arrives tomorrow, and we can't keep acting like she's not here when she is." I pause. "We have to talk to her."
"I'm not hiding, I repeat. Nor stalking her room like a freaking stalker either," Santos says as he cuts his eyes at me.
Shit, he knows.
Tomas and I both look at him.
"Hiding implies I don't want to see her." Santos sets his coffee down on the side table with more precision than the action requires. "I want to see her so badly that every time I get within twenty meters of the kitchen path my body stages a revoltthat is both unprofessional and frankly inconvenient given that I wear fitted trousers."
I know the feeling.
"Besides, I tried to make contact, then ended up cutting onions like some lovesick teen."
If the shoe fits.
Tomas turns to look at the window.
"I can't stop thinking about her," I confess. "And before you say anything, I know I'm the one who got us in this mess, but I don't know how to get out of it."
The window Tomas is looking at has not changed. It is still a window. It still shows the garden. He is looking at it anyway with the focused attention of a man who has found it genuinely essential.
"Apologize," Tomas blurts out. "That's all you need to do. Get on your knees and for once say you're sorry."
Then he turns from the window, puts the folder on the cushion beside him, and looks at both of us with the expression he gets when he has been holding something carefully for a while and has decided to set it down.
"She drew her curtains," I say. "As soon as she realized I was getting close to her room."
Santos straightens. "What?"
"The first night, I was going to speak to her. Her light was on and I could hear her on the phone and then the light went off and she drew the curtains and went to sleep." I pause. "She knew I was there. Her rose went controlled right before she did it. She smelled me and she drew the curtains and went to bed."
No one says anything.
"She's not afraid of us," Tomas says. "She's done with us. Which is different, and worse, and completely deserved." He looks at me with the gray-eyed directness he reserves for moments when he has decided diplomacy is a waste of time.
"You left money on the table, Matteo. She woke up alone, found cash, and understood exactly what it meant. Three months later she is on our island not because she wanted to find us but because she needed work, and the first thing she did when she recognized Santos was introduce herself by her full name and pretend they had never met."
He lets that sit. "She is not confused about where she stands. She has decided. And if we want any chance of her hearing us at all, we have to start by being honest about what we did, or rather what you did."
I have known all of this since the study, since Santos told us she was here, since I walked the perimeter of this island for four hours trying to think of a way to approach it that didn't begin with the fact that I made a decision on behalf of all three of us without asking and called it the right call.
I acted like a dick.
I have been sitting with that quietly since Milan, and last night, standing outside a wall in the dark, listening to a woman laugh on the phone and knowing she had no idea the island she was laughing on belonged to us.
"We apologize," I say. "Not just me. All of us. We're in this together. We're a pack."
Santos looks at me.