“What did they do?” she asked, the fingers of her right hand wrapped around her dessert fork so tightly he thought she might bend the thing.
He clenched his jaw. “To put it bluntly, they beat the crap out of me.”
Karissa’s eyes went wide. “What?”
“I put up a good fight, but there were three of them, and they were all older than me and outweighed me by at least twenty-five pounds.” He gestured to his crooked nose. “I have Lorenzo to thank for this. He kicked me in the face so many times the doctor couldn’t even properly set it.”
She swallowed hard, going pale. “You were seventeen years old.”
“And Lorenzo was twenty-eight at the time, but he didn’t seem to care about that.”
“Why didn’t you tell me what they’d done right away?” Karissa asked, looking so devastated that it took his breath away.
“You mean beyond the fact that I had believed them when they said you didn’t want to ever see me again?” Hale said with a wry smile before slowly taking a bite of cake.
He supposed the combination of moist chocolate cake filled with layers of creamy peanut butter and banana mousse was delicious, but at the moment it could just as well have been dirt. He was too focused on all the lies and everything he’d lost to worry about the taste of a meaningless dessert.
“In addition to that, I spent three days in the hospital in a semiconscious daze dealing with a concussion, broken ribs, and a smashed face. And if that wasn’t enough, there was the threat Lorenzo whispered in my ear right before he and your other brothers left.”
“What did he say?” she asked softly.
“That your dad had enough evidence on my family to put my father and brother in prison for life if I even thought about talking to you again.”
On the other side of the table, Karissa stopped trying to mutilate her fork and instead used it to slice off a corner of the cake on her plate.
Hale turned his attention back to his own dessert, taking his time eating, even remembering to take a sip of coffee now and then. Other than the silence, they probably looked like a normal couple on a normal date to those around them. Then again, maybe everyone would write off the silence because the cake was so delicious, which made a lot of sense. Itwasvery decadent.
“When you didn’t call me that weekend, I startedto get really worried. I was afraid something had happened to you,” Karissa said, her gaze still locked on her cake, which she was doing an excellent job of demolishing. “That’s when Dad and Lorenzo told me that you’d left Chicago. That your family had gotten on the wrong side of some other criminals and decided to move. They said that you’d chosen them over me and that you never wanted to see me again.”
“And you believed them?” Hale asked softly, cup of coffee halfway to his mouth. He could barely smell the rich roast compared to Karissa’s enticing lilac blossom scent that filled the air around him. “Just like that?”
“Not at first,” she admitted quietly, her eyes full of sadness. “But when I got back to school after spring break and you weren’t there…” She shrugged. “Then yeah, I guess I did believe it. You were always talking about your dad’s habit of getting on the bad side of some of the other crime families in Chicago. Plus I knew your father never liked me. It was like he thought I’d wear a wire when you and I were together or something.”
Hale considered that. When she put it that way, he could understand why she might believe he’d bailed on her. His father especially had been a train wreck back then. He’d seemingly been on the verge of going to prison or being offed by a rival at least once a week and twice on Sunday. And it was truethat nobody in his family had liked the fact that Hale was dating the daughter of a cop.
“When I told my father about the threat to send him and my brother to prison, my life as I knew it was over,” Hale said, cutting into his cake again but not eating the piece yet. “He shipped me off to a school out past Schaumburg. I had to live with an uncle who hated me for disrupting his bachelor lifestyle.”
Karissa reached across the table to take his hand. “I’m so sorry.”
Hale was so focused on what it felt like to have Karissa touch him again after so many years that he couldn’t even speak. The warmth of her skin was incredible, and her hand seemed so tiny compared to his, but more than that was the sense of connection he felt to her. He couldn’t describe what it felt like to know that she didn’t abhor the idea of touching him.
“It wasn’t your fault,” he finally said, his voice sounding rough to his own ears.
“No, but I’m still sorry about what they did to you,” she clarified. “My family broke us up. They purposely interfered in our lives and destroyed what we had, making me believe you didn’t want me anymore.”
His inner wolf howled at the realization that her family had tried to get in the way of their soul mate bond. Part of him wondered if that had been theirintent when they’d come between him and Karissa, but he immediately dismissed the idea. He hadn’t been a werewolf back then, and there was no way her family could have known he would become one.
“Why did they do it?” he pondered out loud, as much to himself as her. “I mean, I knew they never thought I was good enough for you, but to go as far as they did seems extreme, don’t you think?”
Karissa didn’t say anything for a long time, using her free hand to toy with her cake, pushing the chocolate and banana mousse around with her fork. When she finally looked up, her eyes were practically blazing with fury.
“This all happened right after my run-in with that guy who’d kidnapped those girls,” she said. “I told my dad that I wanted to tell you about my new gifts, but he didn’t want me to say anything to anyone. I pushed back on that idea, saying I was going to tell you regardless of what they wanted, but in the end, they finally talked me into waiting until after spring break to talk to you about it.”
“Which was when your brothers beat me up,” Hale said. “Doesn’t sound like a coincidence.”
“I’m sure it wasn’t. My dad sent them to make sure I didn’t get the chance to tell you about being a Paladin.” Her mouth tightened. “My parents sabotaged our relationship because they didn’t want me focusing on anything or anyone else except beinga Paladin. They looked at my gifts and saw dollar signs right from the start.”
And that greed had ruined everything he and Karissa had.
