“Aleks!”
I turned to look over my shoulder at Caleb as he approached, his baby daughter in his arms. “Tell Remy he needs to stay,” my friend said as he approached. My eyes shifted to the taller man behind Caleb.
“I should get back to work,” Remy said, looking uncomfortable. Like me, he wasn’t one for crowds and Dante’s wedding reception was most definitely a crowd. I was doing okay with being around all the people, but if Vaughn wasn’t by my side, I was constantly searching him out. He seemed to know how important it was for him to always be in my line of sight and so he went out of his way to make that happen.
“It’s Sunday,” I said to Remy.
He looked really tired and I was certain he’d lost some weight recently. I knew it probably had had something to do with my abduction. Dante had told me how frantic Remy had been, especially when he’d learned the original plan had been for me to be taken back to Chicago.
Chicago was where Remy had spent most of his life after he’d been taken as a child. He’d never told me the details of what had happened to him in captivity, just like I’d never told him about what I’d been through, but I knew from Dante that Remy had ended up working the streets of Chicago as a prostitute.
But not by choice.
I’d heard Marcus and his friends talking about how some kids who lost their “value” or were too much trouble to train were often sold to pimps. They were then turned into drug addicts to keep them dependent on their pimps.
Or they were threatened with death if they tried to walk away.
With Remy, it had been both.
After helping to find me, Ronan and one of his men, Memphis, had helped get Remy set up in a methadone program. They’d also found him a job with a friend who owned a security firm. As far as I knew, Remy was doing well both with his recovery and working a desk job at Barretti Security, but his appearance had changed drastically in the month since I’d been kidnapped. I’d seen him only once in the past couple of weeks since I’d gotten back to Seattle. I’d invited him to come over to the house Vaughn and I were renting from Magnus. We’d moved in about a week after Dante and Magnus’s wedding because as much as I loved my brother, trying to live with him and my boyfriend at the same time was a living hell. Dante was having a little bit of trouble accepting that I’d grown up in the past month and that while I’d always need him, I didn’talwaysneed him like I had before I’d been abducted.
“I just have a little bit of paperwork I want to get done before a meeting tomorrow,” Remy said.
“At least wait until Magnus and Dante head out,” I said. My brother and Magnus were finally leaving today for their honeymoon. No doubt they’d delayed the whole thing because they’d been reluctant to leave me.
But I was well protected with Vaughn, as well as Ronan’s men, who were still shadowing me from afar. Ronan had promised me it wouldn’t need to be for much longer… they just needed to be sure that the message I was off-limits had been received loud and clear. The fact that the very men who’d reveled in my return to their world were now facing substantial time behind bars seemed to have reinforced the fact that anyone who messed with me was messing with my family.
So between Vaughn and the men I was only now starting to meet and whose stories I was coming to learn, I was probably one of the most well-guarded people in the entire world.
“Hey, you got it back,” Caleb said as he motioned to the bracelet on my left wrist.
I looked down at the little piece of braided leather and stampedmetal. It looked exactly like the one Dante had had made for me before, but with one very big difference.
“It’s just a bracelet this time,” I said to Caleb. “I made Dante take the tracking part back out when he gave it to me.”
Caleb smiled and I knew he got what a big step that had been for me.
He shifted Willa to one arm and then wrapped the other carefully around me. “Proud of you,” he whispered. I nodded against his neck.
He pulled back, then handed me his daughter. “Will you hold her while I go find Jace? He was getting her bottle ready but probably got sidetracked.”
“Absolutely,” I said.
“I’m going to go find your brother and Magnus and say my goodbyes,” Remy said when Caleb had left.
“Remy,” I began, but he waved me off and gave me a sad smile.
“I’m okay, Aleks. Just really tired. Work’s been busy.”
I didn’t believe him, but I was afraid to ask him the question that was lingering in the back of my mind.
Was he using again?
“He okay?” Vaughn asked as he came to my side.
“No,” I said quietly. “I don’t think he is.”
“I’m sorry,” Vaughn murmured. He kissed my temple.
