Bond poisoning, from a feral alpha.
And Charles Rivers, his face purple, screams at me as Rick shifts his feet uncomfortably and nudges him out of the door. As if he wasn’t the one hiding Brett’s feral genes, burying the paperwork with his money until I paid the price with my own life.
And still, they don’t come. None of them come.
Charles thinks he secures my silence with an offer to pay for my end-of-life care at a private Center. An offer so I don’t have to spend my last days in a cage, in a publicly-funded institution with too many patients and too little oversight.
So I can die comfortably, when my heart gives out.
But truthfully, I don’t give a rat's ass where I die. I won’t know either way.
But that voicemail plays on my mind like a loop, over and over and over again as I lay in that hospital bed. Theo’s face as he opened it.
Their absence says enough.
I killed Brett Rivers, sure enough.
I shoved him off that cliff and left him to die with no regrets for what he did to me.
But he killed me too.
So I lay in that bed until they tell me I can go home, as if it’s some sort of consolation when I don’t have a home at all. With conditions, and warnings, ten different types of medication, regular appointments with Doctor Abrams and a father that avoids me as if my disease might pass on to him too.
And I wait for my broken heart to stop beating.
Theo
Kennedy gets out of the car without saying anything at all.
“Kenny.” My voice is a rasp. “I—,”
I stop. There are no words.
None.
He hurt her. Hurt her over, and over, and over again. And we left her alone.Ileft her alone to deal with that, traumatised and hurting while I wallowed in my anger and swallowed my misgivings, focusing on that voicemail as evidence of her guilt instead of a plea for help.
She was begging us. Begging us for help, to hear her, to know that she wouldn’t say those things.
And we didn’t fuckinglisten.
Because my brother was dead, and that trumped anything and everything else in my mind.
Why is it that we give the dead grace that we would never offer to the living?
“Theo?”
My head jerks up at her quiet words. She’s moved around to my open window, and I drag my eyes over her face as if I’ve never seen her before.
Except now I see. I see the deep, dark circles beneath her eyes, the way her beautiful hair has thinned from stress. I see the small traces of blood beneath her nose from the nosebleed she had on the way home, and the way she grips the edges of her ridiculously thick sweater like it’s her shield.
My mate is broken, and it’s my fault.
Ours. Because we didn’t fucking see.
She shifts on her feet, her words quiet. “It’s a lot to take in. It’s okay.”
Everything tangles up in my throat. My apologies. My tears. My anger, and my grief.
