“Well, I think at this point, we know the Night Pack isn’t nearby,” Franco said. “We would have caught some scent of one of them by now. There’s a chance that they slipped around and are either north or south. They might have realized this was where we would look first if we were monitoring things.”
“We should still keep regular patrols here,” Cillian said. “Just in case we’re wrong and missed something. Or they aren’t actually here yet.”
“Already on it!” Franco replied.
“Thanks,” Cillian said. He glanced down the road in the general direction of his house, his brows knitting together, hislips a thin line. His mind drifted to Amber yet again. He gritted his teeth. Why couldn’t she just understand that he was trying to help?
Since when is locking someone in their room helping them?a voice hissed in his mind.
He flinched internally. He didn’t have time to think about that right now. What he needed to do was focus. If he couldn’t catch Eric, then everything he had done would have been for nothing. That wasn’t going to happen. Not if he had anything to say about it.
Dragging his attention back to the present, he noticed Franco watching him with a curious expression, his head tilted.
“What’s up?” Franco asked, raising an eyebrow.
“What makes you think something’s up?” Cillian grumbled.
Franco barked out a laugh. “Come on, Cillian. It’s not like it’s that hard to see.”
“Everything’s…” Cillian was about to say “fine,” but something made him pivot at the last minute. He sighed. “All right, so things are kind of shitty.”
“Amber?” Franco asked, and Cillian nodded. “What happened?”
Cillian shrugged, unsure how to describe what happened between them. What was he supposed to say? That he had forced his protection on her when she didn’t want it a second time? That she was mad at him for locking her in her room? No matter which way he framed it in his head, he still came out looking like the one in the wrong, even if he had only been trying to help.
That probably means you were in the wrong, he thought.
Franco was still waiting for him to respond.
“I might have fucked up,” Cillian grunted.
Franco’s eyebrows shot up. “What happened?”
Cillian’s jaw tightened. He didn’t want to rope Franco or the others into this. It wasn’t their problem. It wasn’t their fight. He was so used to doing things on his own that he didn’t want to burden his friends by telling them about his own meaningless problems.
Except that mindset was exactly what got him into this mess in the first place. He didn’t know what Franco could do to help, but maybe there was some benefit to roping him in. Cillian had trusted these men with his life on more than one occasion. Having someone he could trust and just vent to felt like a relief. He had never been the kind of person to talk about his issues, but the thought was now strangely appealing to him.
To his surprise, the first person he wanted to talk to wasn’t Franco, but Amber. It unsettled him a little. They were in the middle of a fight—a fight about her. Wanting to talk to her about that problem seemed bizarre to say the least, but he couldn’t shake that thought. Still, Amber probably didn’t want anything to do with him, so she was out of the question, and Franco was here.
Letting out a breath, he told Franco what had happened. Franco listened with a blank expression, not giving his thoughts away. It took both longer and shorter than Cillian had expected to tell the whole story.
When he finally finished, Franco didn’t respond at first. He stared, his tongue poking the inside of his cheek as he considered what to say.
“Anyway,” Cillian said when Franco remained quiet. “That’s pretty much what happened.”
“Why, though?” Franco asked.
Cillian frowned. “What?”
“Why?”
When Cillian continued to stare at him, Franco rolled his eyes. “You went through a lot of trouble to make sure Amber was safe. Why?”
Cillian opened his mouth, then closed it, frowning. The question of why hadn’t ever really occurred to him before. And now that it was presented to him, he had to pause and think.
Except he didn’t, not for long. The answer was obvious. It had been there for weeks, even if he hadn’t admitted it to himself.
He loved her.
