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“I am happy,” I said. “Really, really happy.”

Almost too happy. And I didn’t want anything to fuck this up.

Chapter Fifty-Eight

Davix

“Are you going to Ember’s birthday party?” Hazel asked me the next morning. She sat at the packhouse’s kitchen island, kicking her legs back and forth underneath the stool and blowing on steam from her hot tea. “It’s next week.”

Ember’s birthday? Nobody had told me about that.

“She’s having a big party,” Hazel said, eyeing me down.

My jaw twitched, but I pressed my lips together quickly so she wouldn’t see it. I didn’t want her thinking that I still had feelings for Ember. I didn’t want to feel anything for Ember. That was why I had gone with Linda the other day.

“I don’t care,” I said, cutting a slice of banana bread. “I’m busy.”

“Is that why you started baking banana bread? Because you don’t care?”

I gritted my teeth and put the piece away, despite my stomach growling. Hazel didn’t need to know I had been baking banana bread because it helped make this all a little easier to have a piece of her here with me.

When I didn’t answer, she shrugged. “It’s a surprise party anyway, so don’t tell her.”

“When would I tell her? I don’t ever see her.”

“Yeah, sure,” she said, drawing out the word.

She didn’t believe me, and I wouldn’t believe me either with how I’d been acting lately.

“I saw her yesterday, you know,” she continued.

Hazel stared at me like she was taunting me, her gaze lingering on mine with a small smirk on her face. I knew she was trying to get a rise out of me, to get me to see how I felt about her. But no more. I could not care about her anymore. I know I had said it before, but this time, I was serious.

The next time I saw her, I would reject her.

I swallowed hard. Yes, reject her.

It was what I had to do. She’d understand. Or … she would have to understand.

“I don’t care,” I said back to her.

“Are you sure about that?”

“Yes.”

“Do you care that she and Cade confessed their love for each other?”

Fury rose inside me, and my claws dug into my palms, splitting the skin open.

“They what?” I gritted my teeth, my jaw twitching.

They love each other?

When had this happened? How had this happened? Was it because I wasn’t enough for her? I shook my head and tried to forget it. I didn’t care. I couldn’t care. It didn’t matter anyway.

I would reject her. I would reject her. I would reject her.

This was what had to be. From the start, I had known it.