“We don’t have a daughter called Juniper,” they said, and shut the door in our faces.
Later, we bribed a servant who admitted her parents had refused to visit her in the hospital or take any of her calls. Maybe someone who doesn’t have the toxic family I do would be horrified that parents could turn their back on their own daughter like that, but it hadn’t surprised me.
“She’s in the city,” Archer says firmly as I drive through the security gates when the barriers lift. “Her sister is important. The first thing she asked Garrison was if her sister was okay. She won’t leave the city until she finds her.”
“Do you know where her sister is?”
River was a student at Haven Academy, but it closed after people learned omegas weren’t given a choice in their mates.
“We’ll find her,” he says, his tone insistent.
I raise my eyebrow at that.
Tracking a missing person isn’t a skill any of us possesses. Archer, at least, has some life skills outside of cold servants, boarding schools, and toxic manipulative parents, since he didn’t grow up the way Callum and I did. Even with those life skills, we’re clueless, and hiring a private security company to do the searching for us isn’t an option.
We can’t risk trusting the wrong person. It won’t be us who pay the price. It will be Juniper and Lottie.
“Juniper might be safer if we forget about her,” I say.
Not eager to return to a house where a housekeeper skulks around with her ears to the door of whatever room we’re in, I drive aimlessly. I spot a police station and force myself to keep driving. If Lottie weren’t a hostage used to ensure good behavior, I’d walk this box of incriminating evidence sitting on my passenger seat inside and suffer the consequences.
“She’s not safe on her own,” Archer says. “The safest thing we can do for her is keep pretending we don’t care that she’s gone. I don’t think her parents visited her even once at the hospital.”
“Yeah.” I head toward downtown, just to be somewhere new.
“It’s cold.”
“It’s no worse than what we did to her,” I say.
What we did to Juniper—the way we treated her, spoke to her, and neglected her—was even worse. Her parents might be trying to protect their reputation, but we were just trying to protect ourselves, and sometimes not even that. We wanted to hurt her. Wanted her to suffer.
And we succeeded.
We made an innocent woman’s life hell for a year, andnoneof us thought to use our fucking brains to ask ourselves why she wasn’t lashing out at us the way we’d expected her to.
We treated her like shit, and she took it. She didn’t complain or cause a scene other than when she tried to get drunk at a ball. She took it until she didn’t have to take it anymore, and then she left us.
“What we did was worse.” I say it out loud so I never forget. Maybe I’ve already turned into my mom. Maybe it’s too late to try to be a better person. Who the fuck knows? I sure as hell don’t.
“Way fucking worse,” Archer softly agrees.
I want to find her to apologize and make things right, but I don’t know if there’s any coming back from what we did. She said we were dead to her before the bond-breaking ceremony, and I believed her. I still do.
“I better go,” I say, guilt twisting me up again.
We say our goodbyes, and I end the call.
The sooner we find her, the sooner we can make things right. And if we can’t make things right, we owe her a better life than the one we gave her. Maybe she doesn’t have somewhere to stay. Maybe she has no money. Maybe she’s in danger.
We all owe her that and more. We just have to find her.
As I drive through downtown, my mind swings back to nearly three weeks ago, the last time I saw Juniper.
She stopped breathing during the bond breaking, and we lost consciousness soon after. As soon as we learned she was alive, we rushed right to the hospital. My black eye, which I had fully deserved for trying to stop Juniper from leaving, had swollen completely shut. But no one would let us in to see her. Garrison and Kylian probably told the hospital staff that Juniper wouldn’t want anything to do with us.
We don’t deserve to see her again. We don’t even deserve to breathe the same air as her, but I can’t forget her. Broken bond or not, she’s in my head, her scent a fragrance I can never forget. It—and Juniper—will haunt me forever.
How do you stop yourself from wanting someone you don’t deserve?
