And her hair. Her beautiful, pink hair, covered in a brown dye. There’s nothing wrong with brown hair, but it looksoffon her. Everything that made her Sienna, vibrant and beautiful, is hidden beneath a cloak of agony. I can see the fucking pain in her face, and it kills me.
“Sienna,” I murmur. My hands shoot out, but she recoils and I pull them back in. Gray steps up next to me.
She lifts her eyes to mine, and even they look cloudy, the bright, azure blue almost gray.
“What do you need?” Gray’s words are soft, equally aware as I am that our Soul Bonded looks breakable. Heartbreakingly breakable, and all because of us.
She glances behind us, her spine straight and her body tense. “You get thirty minutes to tell me everything,” she says finally. Even her voice sounds broken, rasping and thin. “And I mean everything. No more lies. Not a single, unspoken truth. Tell Tristan. Come back in an hour.”
“Of course,” I breathe. “Everything, Sienna. That’s all we—,”
She slams the door in my face.
Gray grabs my arm as I stumble back. “This is good, right?” he asks, a stunned tone to his voice.
“Yeah,” I answer finally, my eyes still stuck on the door, “this is good.”
Maybe.
I just hope Tris and Jax get back here in time.
We pace the yard, both of us lost in our own thoughts until Tristan and Jax pull up. I’m first to Tristan’s door, yanking it open when his hand is still up.
“Sienna will see us,” I say abruptly. “She’ll be out in a minute.”
Jax comes around the truck, a large bag in his hands. “She will?”
I nod as Tristan gets out.
“She wants to know everything, Tristan,” I say quietly. “This is it. No more lies.”
He doesn’t hesitate to meet my eyes. “Everything. Everything on the table.”
And then we’ll see if our Soul Bonded can forgive us.
21
TRISTAN
My hands tap against my side as we wait silently in front of the door. It’s a few minutes past the hour Sienna told us, but we’ll wait for as long as it takes.
Running my hand through my hair to try and tidy it, I glance across to the others. Logan is completely still, Gray leaning into him where they stand together.
It’s funny. We’ve been a pack for six years, and I never noticed how seamlessly they fit together until now. Like two puzzle pieces.
Jax is shifting restlessly, humming a tuneless sound as he bounces up and down on his feet. I can see his nerves in the way he keeps shaking his hands out, stretching. As if he’s about to go on stage.
Even though I’m expecting it, I still jolt when the door opens, slowly. Our Soul Bonded stands with her lips pressed together, thin lines bracketing from her eyes highlighting the pain she can’t hide from us.
Pain we fucking caused.
“Sienna,” I murmur. When she stands aside, I walk past her, taking in the long, low-ceilinged room, the dark wooden bar, A few tables are dotted round, and I follow Sienna’s lead as she sinks heavily into a seat and I take the one at her left side. Gray takes the other, Logan and Jax settling opposite us until we’re all sat in silence.
Sienna sighs. “You’re wasting your thirty minutes.”
She’s leaning as far away from me as she possibly can, and it stings. I want nothing more than to pull her closer, to lift her onto my lap the way I did in our garden, when the letter from the Council came and she looked to me for reassurance.
But a lot has happened since then. So I swallow it down, place my hands on the table.
