“Your eyes are already changing!” Emmy shouts in a desperate bid to salvage things, and I shut mine with a sense of finality, because we hadn’t brought that part up yet. “So maybe it just needs another jumpstart and they’ll come out for all of you when you finish claiming the others.”
A glutton for punishment, I force myself to pry open my eyelids, only to see Sabrina staring straight at me, tears flowing in earnest as she puts the final pieces together. “No.” The single word is barely more than a choked whisper, but it may as well have been a gunshot by the ensuing silence causing my ears to ring and the pain it inflicts on my soul.
“I’ll do everything I can to make sure you’re happy. I’ll take good care of you, I promise.”
Her lip wobbles as she fights back a sob, making my heart shatter, giving my counterpart plenty of room to pace. Bo can’t take it anymore, stepping into the room and looking as wrecked as I feel.
“We all will. I swear, none of us think of you as lesser. You’re everything we never risked wishing for.You;not a female wolf, but everything that makes you Sabrina Laroque,” he emphasizes desperately. “You’ve made us happier in these last couple of weeks than we’ve ever been, and you like us too, or you wouldn’t be here right now. Nothing has to change, we can keep going on like we’ve been.”
When she remains silent, Reid whispers, not looking at her, “I know that we’re worse monsters than we led you to believe, but is being loved by us such an awful fate that it feels like a punishment?”
While Bo and I couldn’t get through to her, something about the pain in my quiet brother’s voice manages to pull it off. “Of course not.” She angrily swipes the tears off of her cheeks. “But being tricked into marrying not one, buttwomen that I’ve only been dating for little more than a week is pretty fucking upsetting.”
“We didn’t trick you, you know that. As soon as I realized what happened, I brought you here to confess everything so we could all figure this out together.”
She crosses the room, continuing as if she didn’t hear me. “And realizing that if you’re right, the hell my mom put me through was to keep me from winding up in this exact position; forced to marry a pack.” A haunted look crosses her features as she slips on her sandals. “Which means it was all for nothing. Of course she hated me, she didn’t think she could get knocked up by a human, and then was stuck taking care of me on top of hiding from other wolves so they wouldn’t find her. Yet here I am, so it was all pointless suffering.”
What sort of hell is she talking about?
By Boden’s matching growl, he’s thinking the same thing. She looks between the two of us, deflating more with every passing second as she closes herself off from us brick by brick, mentally retreating. Grabbing her bag from the floor, she tells Reid, “You can fill them in. Not like you guys don’t already know more about me than I do, so may as well, at this point.” Walking past Emmy and Bo, she heads for the door.
Bo cautiously asks, “Any particular room you want me to get set up for you? Give you some privacy to think?”
Her voice is completely devoid of emotion now. “No thank you, I’m going home. If it’s cool with Reid, I’ll work from my apartment for a while. Then you guys don’t need to worry about posting someone on watch, because I won’t have a reason to leave. I’ll keep the door locked.”
“Of course,” Reid answers without hesitation, face pinched.
She steps out into the hallway, Slade leaning against the wall with his arms crossed and face as blank as the mask my mate is currently wearing. He rises to his full height, keeping his voice calm, as if speaking to a spooked doe. “I’ll give you a ride.”
Without breaking stride, she carries on. “That’s alright, I’ll walk. The other members of the wolf mafia, or whatever it is they do, all think I’m human. I’m more likely to get mugged for my computer than abducted for my magical mouth.”
Getting to my feet, I follow after her, putting a hand on her shoulder to stop her. When she turns back expectantly, her eyes are dull, a lifelessness to them that’ll haunt my dreams for years to come. My sweet girl that doesn’t pull any punches, who mouths off to people that could easily tear her throat out. All that fire snuffed out, and it’s my fault.
Withdrawing my wallet, I pull out a fifty. “Take a cab at least. You don’t have tennis shoes, it’s pitch black out, and that’s a hell of a walk; especially when you’ve barely slept. You don’t have to take a ride from one of us if you don’t want to, but you need to get one from somebody, okay? Please?”
She simply nods, accepting the money without protest and carrying on down the hall, out of the house, and out of our lives. The quiet is deafening in her absence, everyone acutely aware of the loss like a severed limb. When I turn around, the others are there, a silent vigil.
Reid is the first to recover. While the rest of us can hide our emotions flawlessly when necessary, my twin is the only one with the ability to completely shut them off. After he relays the story she gave him permission to share, he gives us the abridged version of the rest of their conversation from that day, the one that changed everything and made our relationships even possible in the first place.
“She’s pushing us away because she’s hurting and it’s the only way she knows how to cope,” he announces. “So even though she’s asking for space, I don’t think we should give it; not completely. She’s never had anyone fight for her before, or in her corner when things were hard to bear.”
Emmy looks wracked with guilt, not meeting anyone’s eye as she timidly adds, “But don’t break into her apartment. She needs that last bit of security when everything else is falling apart.” We start walking toward the front door, enough time passing that the cab should be arriving at any minute. “I agree, though. You’re going to need to follow her, even if it pisses her off. Adrian was watching her too closely at dinner. Human or not, if he sees an opening, he’ll take it.”
Biting my tongue until I draw blood, it helps appease my beast, if only a fraction, and from the wrong source. “Of course we’re following her,” I snap. Snatching the keys to the SUV, I toss them at Bo, because I don’t trust myself to drive in my current state. “Whether she likes it or not, she's our damned mate. Nobody’s touching her but us.”
