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“What did we do?” I howl.
My instincts are roaring, screaming at me. I need to go and find her. I need to fix it. Just to know she’s okay. Every moment of inaction is painful and sends spikes of agony through me.
The alpha inside rises, roaring its rage at the denial. Fighting Saint and Hunter. Fighting for her. I’m being torn apart from the inside out.
Hunter moves closer, throwing a thigh over mine, and whispers in my ear. Saint strokes my back and exchanges silent conversations with Hunter. I ignore them both. My past rises up with this new fatal wound, slamming into my head with painful clarity. A woman who smiles, with flowers in her hair, tells me she loves me, then locks me in a room with seven other starving children. A couple professes their adoration and takes me away, only to bring me back two months later. I’m hungry and cold and alone. And they take Saint and bring him back more feral than he was when he left.
Hunter vanishes and is brought back with demons in his nightmares and shadows in his eyes. We’re so small, and the world is so big and painful, and we can’t fight them.
And love is the reason it hurts so much.
I scream as the blows fall down on us. I cry when Saint’s arm is broken. I howl when Hunter is thrown into a closet.
And then, in the dark, where the memories are the worst…she appears, this shining light, but I’m so ruined. She won’t want to keep me. She will reject me, and when she does that, it will destroy me. We did the right thing.
My alpha instincts howl with rage, denial.
And the war continues. My past versus my nature.
My howls keep us up for hours. Until my throat hurts so much I can barely talk, until bruises start to show on my skin from fighting Saint and Hunter. It’s only when I can barely open my eyes that Saint forces my mouth open and slams a tablet down my throat. I’m grateful. Because I know what it is, and it will send me to oblivion, and for the first time, I welcome it. I want everything to go away.
But when I wake up in time to go to work, I feel dead inside. There is no hope left. No joy. Nothing but an infected wound throbbing in agony that feels like it might be the thing that finally kills me.
She’s gone.
And nothing I can do is going to fix it. She left me. Just like everyone else did. But that’s my fault, too.
Chapter eleven
Bethany
That first night wasfamiliar and terrifying. I decided to stay with the car and just drive. So I drove for hours, and when I got low on gas, I filled it up and kept driving until the tears had long since dried and my burning eyes wouldn’t allow me to keep going.
I found a park with appalling toilets and locked myself in the car. It was cold, but I was dry and safe, and the seats were comfortable. But dawn came too fast, leaving me feeling gritty and exhausted.
I thought maybe the pain would lessen, but the morning after it happened, it all felt worse. It didn’t take much to bring me to tears, and I couldn’t stop my whines.
After a few days, I could rationalise it. They broke my heart. They hurt the omega side of me that needs her pack, but worse, they shattered that long held belief that I had. The whole reasonI set out of home, the reason I stayed away from my family all these years, was for nothing. My pack doesn’t want me, can’t love me, and won’t bond me.
I’ve failed.
My mood swings are crazy, shifting wildly from despair to a fury that I’ve never felt before. I contemplate ringing my family a dozen times, but I don’t have a phone still, and there’s no way of contacting them unless I find Kelly, Raider, or Locke and get past all their security.
I just want my dad. I want his big arms to hug me and hold me tight. He will tell me it’s okay and that he forgives me.
The more I sit, refusing to leave the car for long periods in case it’s stolen, the more I’m convinced I should just go home. I went and checked the maps yesterday, and I’m an hour and a half from home. One tiny drive, and I can be back on that familiar farm.
I should leave.
But every time I start driving in that direction, I have to pull over, certain I’m having a heart attack or something because the pain in my chest is so intense.
I replay those six perfect days in my dreams and on my closed eyelids whenever I blink. Their voices startle me, and I turn to look for them. I smell bourbon, coffee, and licorice all the time, and it kills me inside.
Sometimes, in those moments between waking and sleeping, I can feel one of them moving inside me, ghost lips trailing down my throat, whispers in my ears, and the heat of a hot body against mine, and I jerk awake, only to realise that it was just a dream.
They aren’t here.
Losing them all over again is wearing me down.
