“I was nine when my mom died,” he says. “My dad pushed her down the stairs when he overheard her telling a maid that she planned on leaving him and taking me with her.”
Shocked, I snap my head toward him.
He keeps talking, looking down at the quiet streets. “She found some disturbing photographs and discovered he was a member of Asylum. She was an omega and wanted nothing to do with it, but she was afraid he would try to involve me. I never heard her raise her voice, and she let my dad have his way about most things, but she would have died before she let him take me to his secret club. He killed her, and he destroyed everything that she had ever given me, sometimes right in front of me when I refused to do what he wanted.”
“Why are you telling me this?” I whisper, horrified.
He looks at me for the first time since he told me something so awful, I don’t want to believe it’s true. The bleak look in his eyes is all the proof I need that it is true. “So you’ll understand that when I tell you I know what it is to have someone destroysomething that means everything to you. If something happened to your book, it wasn’t me. Torin can say cruel things, but he doesn’t destroy. He knows what my dad did to me, and he has his own stories about his mom.”
“Archer?”
He shakes his head. “Archer grew up with nothing. He wouldn’t destroy your book, Juniper. None of us would.”
I believe him. For most of the year that I was with them, they shut me out. Destroying my book wasn’t something I believed any of them could do, but who else would have?
“I was reading in the library,” I tell him eventually. “And I left my book on the desk. I asked Veronica about it when I couldn’t find it the next day. She said one of you had probably put it away, but it would turn up soon.”
“I gather it turned up.” A quiet rage burns in his eyes as he puts the pieces together sooner than I could have.
“Yes. With all the pages ripped out and shredded. I thought it was you. But it wasn’t you, was it?”
He shakes his head.
“Who?”
“The only person it could have been,” he says with a bitter smile. “Veronica, my father’s best and most loyal spy. Your book…”
“It doesn’t matter.” My book is gone; there’s no point crying about it anymore.
He hesitates.
“What?”
“If I wanted to hug you, would you be tempted to push me out of the window?”
I swallow my inappropriate smile at the thought of shoving him out of my apartment window. Lucia absolutely would have, but I’m not sure, even with the things he did to me, that he deserves to die for it. “Probably not.”
“Then I’d like to risk it,” he says somberly, opening his arms.
I step into his warm embrace and stop swallowing my smile. He can’t see it with my face pressed against his chest. I inhale his warm ginger and vanilla scent. His arms feel so perfect when he wraps them around me that I never want to move.
“Your book matters to me,” he says against my hair. “I’m sorry you lost something so precious in a place it should have been safe.”
Long ago, my instincts told me I could trust him. I told Jack that my instincts were wrong. I couldn’t trust my scent matches at all. But maybe I can. Maybe they were right after all.
Chapter 34
June
Five days after I hugged Callum and wasn’t the least bit tempted to shove him out of my apartment window, I’m tired.
But not from bond sickness. This is tiredness from having to clean too many hotel rooms with not nearly enough help. Manny is punishing me for calling out, or maybe for inconveniencing him by being sick. Lucia warned me before I took the job, so it seems petty to complain about it. Like asking for a cheeseburger and complaining it has cheese.
Archer walked me to work this morning, in what’s become a routine that I think I’d miss if he ever stopped. He’d been waiting outside my apartment with a vanilla latte and a chocolate croissant. Before I walked into the hotel, I told him I was working late so he shouldn’t wait for me.
It was a lie.
After I finish work at the usual time, I head into the city and to a shop I haven’t visited in several weeks now.
