Roach-infested foster homes with angry, alcoholic parents that barely fed me and Dallas? Check.
Being stationed in the Middle East during a summer during some of the worst sandstorms on record to the point where we were stuck inside of tents for several day stints and I thought I was losing my mind? Check.
Having to watch a diplomat who was cheating on his saint of a wife with several other women all the while pretending to be the most magnanimous Christian to the public? Check, and check (and it happened more than once).
But none of that compared to the two weeks of torture following our involuntary administrative leave and being booted off of Lennon’s security team.
Every time I closed my eyes I saw the tension in her shoulders and felt the beginnings of her despair before she cut us off from her end of the bond completely.
So, needless to say, none of us were getting much sleep around the apartment.
Collier had put a rotating agent outside to make sure we weren’t wandering around selling our story to the nearest tabloid, so aside from leaving to pick up dinner we pretty much did things around the house.
My drug of choice was running.
I ran on the treadmill night and day. Running, running, and more running until I was so exhausted that, by the time I had showered and flopped into my bed that smelled nothing of cherries or wine, I was too tired to dream.
The other guys also had their own vices.
Zeke had posted up on the couch watching any and all news coverage of the election that he could get his eyeballs on, hoping for any glimpse of Lennon that he could get.
They were few and far in between but he always made sure to shout for us when he saw her.
Not that she looked to be in any better shape than we were. She was pale and drawn every time we saw her despite her make up team’s best efforts and her smile never reached her eyes.
I had stopped going to see whenever he called because it was starting to piss me off that they were trotting her out in front of thousands of people when she was clearly unhappy.
On the flip side, Maverick was constantly on the phone trying to get back into Collier’s good graces.
It had yet to work. The guy had been trying to get rid of us since the shooting in the Kennedy garden and pissing off the president by sleeping with her daughter was the perfect excuse to do so.
But that didn’t keep him from trying. Between that and fielding phone calls from his irate grandfather who was pissed at him for a mix of not telling him what was going on and becoming front page news and dragging the notoriously private Onassis family into the limelight, Maverick spent most of his time pacing from one end of the house to the other for the majority of the day.
The press had dug up any and all information they could about us and had splashed it across the news over the past couple of weeks when there was any lull in election coverage.
My and Dallas’s entire childhood as the children of a drug addicted, alcoholic mother, our time as foster children, hell they’d even managed to track down my ex who had no qualms about talking all about us to the press.
It was exhausting, but at the end of the day it was all noise.
All we wanted was to get Lennon back.
Because, for some of us, I was worried it may be life or death if we didn’t get her back soon.
Opening Dallas’s bedroom door, I stepped into the near-pitch black room and stared at my twin lying flat on his bed.
It had only been a few weeks since we were practically pulled out of the house in Cape Cod, but his cheeks had hollowed out considerably and he had deep purple smears under his eyes.
He’d had a hell of a panic attack on the car ride back to D.C. and it had taken the rest of us to keep him from jumping out on the highway and running back to Lennon who was almost assuredly already high above our heads in Marine One.
Dallas had looked wild, his instincts taking over entirely until one of the Secret Service agents had tranq’d him so we could get back to our apartment.
From there he had deteriorated quickly and I could count on one hand the times he’d been awake and coherent over the past two weeks.
The doctor we’d brought to the house had called it separation sickness. Something that happened rarely when an alpha and their omega were separated too soon after a bond was formed.
We missed Lennon and losing her felt like losing a piece of ourselves, but Dallasneededher.
Sitting on the edge of his bed, I brushed a hand over his sweaty forehead, frowning when I realized he had a fever again.
