She nods. “The staff is going to make me leave now.”
“We weren't staying anyway,” I tell her. “Let's go home.”
She shakes her head. “What does that even mean?”
“Home. Wherever you want it to be. That's where we're going.”
Her brows pinch together. “Drew. You don't even know me. And you have a pack to tend.”
I bend down to brush her nose with mine. “My pack will be okay while I take care of my mate. My dad is still Alpha. He can handle things until I'm ready to step up.”
“I'm not your mate,” she says. “Not yet.”
“I'll take care of that, too. We'll figure everything out.”
She pulls her lip between her teeth.
“What?” I ask her.
“What about Parker?”
“He's part of we. Can you live with that?”
She looks at me for a long minute. “I can live with a lot of things.”
Parker is waiting for us on one of the benches in front of the entrance of the residential hall where the suite is. His hair is pointing in every direction from the way he keeps raking his fingers through it. He stands up when he sees us coming. Genie is wearing my shirt. Nudity might be common among wolves, but I wasn't letting her walk across the grounds bare-assed naked. I'm still too worked up and touchy to control my temper if we were to come across someone who looked at her a little too long.
“Yeah?” Parker asks, brows high as he looks back and forth between us.
I nod. “Yeah.”
“Thank fuck,” he sighs. “I made Alpha Tinsley reset the code, but he had already seen Billings. Listen, don't be upset, but I told him that we, all three of us, were leaving in the morning and to give us this suite for the night if he didn't want either me or you to go on a rampage.”
Genie snorts, and everything lifts. The stress, the turmoil, the guilt, all of it. She laughed at Parker and now I can breathe.
“We can get our things in the morning,” I tell them both. “We'll decide where we're going after a shower and some rest. Tonight has been completely exhausting. Okay?”
They both nod at me and Parker leads us to the suite and puts in the code. It hasn't even been cleaned since we left. Our scents are still heavy in the air and I breathe them in deeply. This is what home will smell like, wherever it ends up being.
Chapter Thirty-five
Genie
“You bit him.”
Parker's smile stretches wide as he inspects the damage on Drew's arm. I don't feel a drop of guilt about it. I know he's littered with other smaller cuts and gouges but he won't find those until he takes his clothes off. I don't feel bad about them either.
“I deserved it,” Drew says and goes to the bathroom to clean it off.
Parker turns to me after the water turns on. “I'm sorry.”
“It wasn't your fault.” I shrug.
He shakes his head and drags his hands through his hair again as he sits down on the couch. “It is. Every bit of this is my fault. He rejected you the first time because of me. I tried to step away but I was called back for the second claiming ceremony. I should have ignored the call.”
“You can't ignore the call, Parker. And Drew is a big boy. He made his own choices throughout everything. You may have influenced his choices, but he still made them.” I drop onto the couch next to him. “He has to take responsibility and mend the things that have been broken.”
Parker leans back, letting his head fall against the wall behind the couch with a soft thunk. “Can you do it? Can you accept everything and move forward? You don't even know him as a person, you just know the fucked up version of himself he's been since the first ceremony. I wanted to keep him for myself so bad back then that I lost part of him that night, and I kept losing chunks of him until we got here. It might take time for him to become himself again.”
