“Apparently she’s in trouble.”
“How?” He stutters, waving his hand way, “Tal, pull it together for me, you’re scenting up a storm.”
I ignore his comment. “Siderno got through. I doubt he’d call me if it wasn’t bad,” I offer without looking at him as I start weaving in and out of the traffic.
“She said she was staying... oh shit. Raney went to the meeting, didn’t she?”
“I feel so stupid taking her word she wouldn’t go. We should’ve remembered she’s not like that.”
“We didn’t exactly help the last time she was in trouble, did we? Fuck! So, she just faced off with Reid and Sharlene?” Hayes pulls my hand up as he goes to rub his face but stops and gets stuck looking at my hand.
And I know exactly where his head is. It makes sense, because with her back, I’m questioning everything too. I have done nothing but focus on getting ahead. I pushed myself hard to succeed in my career, I worked on living a different life after our world was turned upside down. And I fought tooth and fucking nail to be a good partner to Hayes, but now I’m wondering if all that is enough.
“Hey, you and me are solid.” I squeeze his hand, pulling it back down to rest on my thigh. It’s where it always sits when we drive.
Like always, everything about him settles me, his touch, presence, and scent included.
“She doesn’t know about us,” he says, purposely looking away from me.
Squeezing his hand, I try to bring him back to me and not avoid the conversation we need to have. “Raney was the one that pushed us together, Hayes.”
He huffs a sad laugh, still focusing on his side of the car. “Yeah, but now?”
“Let’s hope we get the chance to show her how fucking right she was.”
I can feel his emotions as much as I feel my own, and I know already what’s going to be worrying him. We’ve talked about it a million times. He sounds far away when he answers. “What if we tell her and she thinks she’s an add on? That we replaced what we had with her with our love?”
“It’s not wrong in some ways,” I answer truthfully.
“Wrong in others though.”
“Hayes, I picked you up to come with me because it was always us.”
“And Raney.”
“Are you saying you’re only with me because of her?” I ask, trying really hard to keep the ache of anger from my voice.
“Not at all. I just would hate for her to not give us a chance because she thinks we’re only focused on each other.”
I laugh softly, “At this stage, babe, she’s not even speaking with us. But given half the chance, I won’t be keeping our relationship secret. She’ll see everything laid out. All of us fell in love once, you and I stayed in love. We lost her but it doesn’t mean it wasn’t because of her love, does that make sense?”
“I know. I know. I’m just freaking out. What if we don’t get the chance? What if Reid’s hurt her again… I’ve got all this stuff I need to tell her; I have to show her and what if…”
He fades off mid-sentence and I let him get everything together in his head before I squeeze his hand for more.
“I want to believe she’d be happy for us, Talon. I want to know it would make her smile like she used to when she watched us together. That’s not wrong is it? I know my love isn’t a this or that situation, I’ve given you everything, but loving her was just as necessary once upon a time.”
After Raney got hurt, Hayes lost a lot of the light that used to be in his eyes. Sharlene stole the rest of his joy. He pulled away until I clawed him back to me by packing up all our possessions in a few boxes and running in the middle of the night. Leaving Reid wasn’t as hard as it should have been considering he was the supposed head of our pack.
Much like Colt predicted, even before the plane taking Raney home was on the horizon, his parents were out everywhere they could be denouncing her character. And actively looking for support on their claim that Raney had initiated the attack on Sharlene. Self-defence was thrown around a lot, while countless slurs on Raney’s character and her family were added. And the whole time Reid said nothing, which was worse than doing something.
Except when he did finally say something, it was to insist we publicly endorse his parents’ versions of events as a fact. Fuck me, he even wanted us to sign an affidavit against her, of course we didn’t. And then he argued the three of us weren’t really there so how could we trust his younger brother’s version, especially when Colt was always so obsessed with Raney, and Raney was taking advantage of his age. Since Colt and Raney couldn’t defend themselves they did everything to destroy them. Maybe we should have argued with him more, but at the same time the second he stopped supporting her, he’d made his decision.
The day King spoke to us at the hospital was the day Colt vanished. Then the Anders family took it one step further and wiped him from their family. All photos of him were removed from the house. And there was a sense of pride when they advised they’d successfully written him out of ‘future proofing’ their family. Reid jumped on that bandwagon, gloating how his trust fund had increased two-fold.
I could never figure out where Colt went. Nothing was taken from his room and his parents cut access to his money before the first sunset. But now it looked like he’d apparently ended up here. Pretty brave for a kid not even eighteen.
Coming here meant he was in Fallen territory. Both Hayes and I had to take that into account when we made the move. We laid low, until King and the Fallen found us. And that was a fun reunion. But they never mentioned Colt, so we never knew. It wasn’t like we were at school, and we didn’t do the whole ice-hockey thing, that was Raney and Colt’s gig.
