Page 63 of The Wolf and the Monarch

“Are you going to be coming back?” She suddenly asked. She sounded like a kid again.

He sighed. “Yeah, of course I am.”

“When?”

“Soon. I just need a couple more days to…decompress.”

“Okay. I get it… I just…really miss you, Benji,” she sniffled, “It’s been so hard without you here. I was so scared. When Spence came back without you, I just had to tell myself that you were still alive somewhere. I was trying to find the time to try to locate you, but Dad just kept piling on jobs for me to do. I didn't have any time and I feel so bad.”

“It’s okay. I-I imagine he did that on purpose. And I really miss you too. But we just need to lay low a bit longer.”

“We?” She asked.

“Y-Yeah… Me and Sawyer.”

“He’s with you?”

Benji nodded. “Yeah. He needed to leave too. It wasn’t safe for him there.”

“But you said he worked with them.”

“Yeah, he did but he didn’t want to. It was just…all he knew, I guess. It’s a family business type of thing. Kind of like us, just a different scenario.”

“Did he hurt you?”

He scoffed and shook his head. “No. Not once.”

“But the others did?” Benji didn’t answer that one. His silence was enough of an answer. “What did they do?”

“They did plenty. Beatings. Stabbing. Waterboarding. Teeth pulling. All that fun stuff.”

Andi gasped and sobbed again. “Benji…”

He shrugged. “It’s par for the course.”

“It’s really not,” she muttered.

“Well, it has to be. It helps make it less…fucked up.” He paused for a moment before he said, “Sawyer kept me alive. Several times. I have to help him too.”

She sighed. “I get it. Will I get to meet him?”

“Yeah. You will. He doesn’t have anywhere to go and…I don’t know. I kind of…think I want him to stick around.”

“You like like him?” She asked, clearly intrigued by this.

Benji rubbed at his eyes and wobbled his head back and forth. It was so immature to talk about it like that. He was thirty years old. But there was no easier way to say it, he supposed. “Yeah. I do like him.”

“I’m really excited to meet him then.” She said and it did sound like she was genuinely excited to. Andi was always in Benji’s corner when it came to love. She was lucky and had a high school sweetheart waiting for her at home. He was a good guy who didn’t ask many questions. He knew the basics of her job but she told him everything else was top secret and she was legally unable to speak more of it. He accepted that, her weird work hours and weird life. She was lucky and she always wanted that for her brother.

“I’ll let you know when we’re heading home.”

“Okay.”

“It was really good to talk to you…” He said as sincerely as he could.

“I’m just so happy you’re okay.”

“Yeah, I am now.”