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I was officially freaking the fuck out.
Elena had been wooden since the moment I picked her up at the house after Pyke had been patched in.
It’d been later than I’d wanted it to be, but attendance of the celebration after was required.
Shots going round. Hoots and claps to the back and watching close to make sure the kid didn’t go screaming and running for the hills once Silas had revealed Crimson Crows’ true mission.
Funny, we were more comfortable with him thinking we were simply running narcotics across the country, terrorizing the streets and inciting mania and fear, rather than what we really did.
Dude had fucking wept. Dropped to his knees and wept as he swore an oath to uphold everything that we stood for.
The fullness of who he wanted to be swelling inside him. Our truth infiltrating the broken, lost places inside him.
The house had basically been sleeping by the time I made it back there. The lights cut except for a bare glow that came from the kitchen.
Elena had been asleep on the couch.
I thought that’s why she’d been quiet on the ride back to her apartment, but there was some unsettled feeling I couldn’t shake as I followed her through her apartment door, locking it back up tight behind us as I watched her head for her room.
Disquiet bubbled like a festering wound, dread thick in my throat as I followed behind her.
My boots were heavy thuds in the silence that consumed.
She sank down onto the side of her bed.
Tumult whirled around her. An upheaval to the sanctity that we had found.
Had Brinley told her that Silas had instructed me that it was safe for me to return to the compound tomorrow? That I was to pack up my things and go back to that lonely house and pretend like that was where I belonged?
The second he issued it, I should have told him right then that there was no chance of that happening.
Should have confessed.
But the admission had dried on my tongue like concrete.
“Lena.” I murmured her name like a plea. “Baby.”
She started to bob her head when I said it, and she looked up at me through the dull light.
Tears blanketed her face, though she wasn’t shying away like she’d been on the way home.
“Yeah,” she whispered.
Confusion bound me, and my eyes narrowed as I looked at her sitting on the edge of the bed.
Her face tipped up toward me. Something bold in her gaze. Something fierce in the lilt of her chin.
Uncertainty shook my head, and apprehension locked up my chest. “Did you—”
I started to ask her if Brinley had told her, only what she said ripped the question from my mouth.
“I’m pregnant.”
Ripped everything away, really.
The floor.
The oxygen.
