by J. L. Wilder
Robbie sighed. “Yeah, I do. Fine, I’ll get you a bottle. But try to cut yourself off, will you?”
“Yeah.”
Robbie disappeared.
“What did you mean by onto us?” Charity asked Weston.
“Nothing. Don’t worry about it.”
“Did you mean onto us? Like you and me?”
“Don’t be stupid. There is no us.”
He was right, but it still stung to hear him say it like that. “Does Robbie know? I mean, that we used to be...?”
“Why do you care all of a sudden?”
“I always cared, Weston.”
“Did you? Did you care when you ran away without even telling me you were going? Funny way of showing it.”
“For God’s sake! I had to go!” she cried. “You can’t seriously think it’s what I wanted? I was living in a homeless shelter! I left my entire family behind. I had nothing. And to learn how to live as a human—it’s a whole new way of life, and it never stopped being strange and uncomfortable. It never fit. It was never what I wanted. I left because if I stayed here Hawk would have controlled me. The writing was on the wall. He was obviously going to be the alpha, and I couldn’t just stay here and let him have me! I couldn’t!” She was having trouble breathing. “I can’t believe you’re holding it against me. I never thought you would. You of all people—I thought you’d be happy I was safe, Weston. I thought you’d be glad I got away. I never expected you to call it selfish!”
He was quiet for a long moment.
“And you helped them,” she added, anxiety twanging through her. “You helped them find me and bring me back.”
“No,” he said. “I didn’t do that.”
“What do you mean?”
“They thought I helped. I didn’t. I went looking for you on my own...I was going to warn you.”
“You said you knew where I was.”
“I didn’t find out where you worked until today,” he said. “A few hours ago. I tracked you down. I was going to come back during your shift tomorrow and let you know Hawk was on the hunt for you, but...”
“But Gino found me first.”
“Yeah.”
“So, you didn’t know where I was all this time.”
“What if I had?” he asked brusquely. “Was I supposed to come looking for you?”
“I don’t know. Not...supposed to. I guess...” She looked down at her hands. It was hard to admit to this. “I guess a part of me hoped you would, that’s all. It took me a long time to stop jumping at every sound, hoping you’d found me.”
“I wasn’t looking for you, Charity. Not back then.”
Her stomach dropped.
“Why would I have?” he went on. “You made it pretty clear you didn’t want me.”
“How?”
“What do you mean, how? You left.”
“What the hell else was I supposed to do?”
“You were supposed to tell me you were going,” he said. “You were supposed to...I don’t know...ask me to come with you. There was no reason not to talk to me before you left. I know you had to run away from Hawk, but you didn’t have to run away from me.”
“I did have to,” she protested.
“But why?”
“Because what if you’d done something stupid? Don’t make that face at me. I know you didn’t want me ending up with Hawk. What if you’d challenged him to a fight or something? And what if you’d lost? I couldn’t have stood that, Weston. It would have killed me. I couldn’t let you die for me.”
The fear of that night came rushing back. She had lain in bed, knowing she had to leave, waiting for all the others to fall asleep, and the only thing in the world she’d wanted was Weston. Weston’s hand in hers, Weston’s lips on hers, Weston’s reassuring voice promising her that everything would be all right.
She had known that night that she had to leave without telling him. That it was the best way to protect him.
But now he was looking at her as if he didn’t even recognize her.
“I wouldn’t have started a fight,” he said quietly. “I’m smarter than that, Charity. I’d never fight if there was another choice.”
“What other choice was there?”
“I would have come with you,” he said. “We could have left together.”
She was stunned.
“You wouldn’t have,” she whispered.
“Of course, I would. Of course, I would.”
“You wouldn’t have left the pack. You just said so. You’re angry with me for leaving because it made everyone else realize they could leave too. You’d never have abandoned them.” That had to be true. She couldn’t believe he would have gone with her, that they could have been together all this time. It was too much to bear.
“You didn’t ask me,” he said. “You didn’t even trust me enough to ask me.”
He was right. She had been so sure that she’d known what he would say. What he would do. She hadn’t trusted him to listen to her. She hadn’t trusted that they’d be able to make a decision together.
Did that make it her fault they’d been apart all these years?
Robbie returned before she could say anything. He had a bottle of dark rum in his hand, and he handed it to Weston. “It’s all I could find,” he said.
“Bet it isn’t.”
“Fine, it’s not, but it’s what I’m giving you. Take it or leave it.”
“I’ll take it.”
Robbie looked over at Charity. “I know this is weird,” he said, “and I don’t expect you to feel the same way. But I’m glad you’re back, Charity. It’s really good to see you again.”
“It’s good to see you again, Robbie,” she said and found, to her surprise and gratification, that it was true.
He gave her a little smile and withdrew from the room.
“Yeah,” Weston said, out of nowhere.
“Yeah what?”
“Yeah, Robbie knows about us.”
Hearing the word, us from him was balm on the sting of his having denied their relationship. “You told him?”
“I had to tell somebody. I was going crazy. I half thought I’d imagined the whole thing, Charity. It didn’t make sense. I couldn’t understand how you could just decide to leave without even talking to me. I couldn’t have done that to you. It felt like you must have never really loved me at all.”
“That isn’t true,” she said. “I always loved you, Weston. It broke my heart to leave.”
He sighed and took a long swig of his drink.
“You believe me, don’t you?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know if I can.”
“Why?”
“Because what if it is all a lie?”
“It isn’t.”
“I was crazy about you,” he said. “I would have done anything for you back then. Running away from the pack would have been nothing. I would have fought Hawk, if it came down to it, but I would much rather have gotten away with you. All I wanted was for us to be together. Do you think you’re the only one who thought about what would happen if you were the omega? I wasn’t going to let him hurt you.”
“Then...then will you help me get away now?” she asked, feeling a spark of hope.
“You know I can’t do it now,” he said. “I would have done it already. We have orders. I’ve got to keep you in this room. I can’t go against that. I physically can’t do it. I would, Charity. No matter how I feel personally, this was never what I wanted.”
“But you can’t.”
“But I can’t.”
Weston took another long drink. Charity crawled up onto her bed and lay flat on her back, staring at the ceiling and pondering. Was it possible that Weston was telling the truth? Would he have run away with her back in the day if she had asked him? She had been so young back then, so unsure of everything. Weston’s love had felt almost magical, too good to be true, and if she was being honest with herself, she had been afraid to put it to the test.
But maybe there was still hope for her. Maybe together—if they could learn to trust each other—they could figure out a way to work around Hawk’s cruel edicts and find a life they could bear to live.
She clung carefully to that idea, letting it reassure her and ease her fear until finally, she was able to sleep.
Chapter Nine
WESTON
“Weston?”
He blinked. The light was coming in through the open door, and Robbie was leaning through it once again. “Um. Hey.”
“Breakfast’s ready.” Robbie frowned. “Were you sleeping?”
“No. No way.” He couldn’t have been. He’d been ordered to stay awake. But he did have the sort of foggy feeling in his head that came along with being woken up out of a deep slumber. He thought back. What had he been doing before Robbie had come into the room? The last thing he could remember was watching Charity as she lay on her back, breathing deeply, falling asleep—
He looked over at her. She was lying on her side now, facing away from him. When had that happened?
He was thoroughly spooked. He shouldn’t have been able to fall asleep. It should have been physically impossible after being ordered by Hawk to stay awake all night.
Unless...had he been ordered? He tried to think back. He remembered feeling frustrated because he’d been given an order, and that wasn’t an easy thing to mistake. But then again, it had been an order not to do something, not an order to do something. He wouldn’t have felt the weight of such an order unless he’d tried to fall asleep. So maybe he’d misjudged what Hawk was saying. Maybe he had interpreted it as an order when it had really just been advice or something.
That had to be it.
Still, he wasn’t sure he quite felt comfortable admitting the truth to Robbie. “I was just resting my eyes,” he said.
“Oh,” Robbie said doubtfully. “Okay. Well, I’m supposed to tell you that you can go to breakfast. It’s my turn to watch Charity.”
“What’s the plan?” Weston asked. “Are we just...keeping her in here forever? Because that’s crazy.”
“I’m sure Hawk’s planning something,” Robbie said.
“You are?”
“Well, no,” Robbie admitted. “He’s not exactly a planner. But at some point, he’s going to want to start integrating her into the pack, right? If she’s going to be one of us again, she can’t just stay trapped in this little room.”
“Did he send her any breakfast?” Weston asked, already knowing the answer. Robbie’s hands were empty. And Robbie seemed to understand the point Weston was making because he looked at the floor and said nothing.
“If she’s a member of this pack,” Weston said, “she’s got to eat.”
“She didn’t eat her lasagna.” Robbie indicated the congealing brick of pasta and sauce on the floor.
“She’d just been kidnapped,” Weston pointed out. “She was upset. Understandably so. Just...never mind, I’ll grab her something.”
Robbie entered the room and took a seat on the floor. “Did you sleep all right, by the way?”
“I don’t know. The floor was a little hard—” he cut himself off, but it was too late. Robbie was staring at him.
“You did sleep,” he said.
“Okay, I did. So what?”
“Hawk ordered you not to, that’s what. How did you do it? I’ve been ordered not to sleep before, I know what that feels like. It’s like you’re getting nails down your spine every time you start to drift off. There’s no way a person could just accidentally fall asleep in contradiction to an order.”
“He must not have actually given the order,” Weston said. “It’s all I can figure.”
“But he did give it,” Robbie insisted. “I heard him. I was in the kitchen at the time and heard you two talking. Just don’t go to sleep, he said.”
Hearing the phrase jogged Weston’s memory. Robbie was right. That was what Hawk had said. And there was no mistaking that phrasing. Don’t go to sleep was about as clear an order as you could get.
And yet, Weston had slept.
What was going on?
Feeling distinctly wrong-footed, he shook his head and got to his feet. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll go get some breakfast, and then I’ll bring Charity some leftovers. If she wakes up, tell her where I’ve gone.”
“Did you two...make up?” Robbie asked.
“Not exactly.” But more than Weston would have expected. He wasn’t sure exactly where the two of them had left things, but a lot of his fury with her seemed to have dissipated in the night. Some of it was just gone, but a significant portion had turned on him like a feral animal, biting into his heart. It had been his fault that she hadn’t told him where she was going.
He was oversimplifying things, he knew. They had both been young. They had both been afraid. But if I had told her I’d go anywhere with her, do anything for her, he couldn’t help but think, if I’d only said it, then she would have opened up to me when the time came. We could have left together. And right now, we’d be far from here, with nothing to worry about.
It wasn’t making up, exactly. And Weston knew that he and Charity could never be as they had been now that Hawk was about to claim her as his own. But maybe they would be able to help each other through the days to come. Maybe they would be able to build some sort of mutual trust and become friends.
He hoped so. Because he still cared for her, he realized. Very deeply. Deeply enough that it was starting to scare him.
He made his way to the kitchen. The table was covered with waffles, bowls of fruit, and plates of bacon and sausage. Weston took a seat and piled a bit of everything on his plate.
“Morning, sunshine,” Hawk said.
“Morning.”
“Sleep well?”
He very nearly slipped and responded affirmatively. Only the mocking expression on Hawk’s face saved him. It hadn’t been a sincere question. Hawk was making sport of him.
“I got through it,” Weston said, tightening his voice a little and blinking several times, hoping he looked more tired than he was.
Norma, at least, was convinced. “You eat a big breakfast and then go straight to bed,” she said. “I don’t want to see you again until this afternoon. Hawk, tell him to go to sleep.”
“Yeah, go to sleep after breakfast,” Hawk said agreeably. Weston was surprised. Hawk usually put up a show of resistance when someone tried to tell him what to do, even if it was something he’d been planning on doing all along. He must be in a good mood today.
Weston could guess why that was. It made his skin crawl. He’s got Charity now. Suddenly he didn’t feel like going to sleep very much at all.
So, he dragged his feet as much as possible, eating his breakfast in tiny bites, helping himself to second portions of bacon, piling up more fruit than was strictly his share on top of his waffle. If anyone noticed, they didn’t say anything. No one was paying much attention to Weston at all. A conversation had started about the possibility of going out on a ride that day, and it had given rise to an argument.
“Just out of town and around the countryside for a few hours,” Lita was wheedling.
“Absolutely not,” Hawk said. “There’s too much to do around here today. And who would watch Charity if we all went out?”
“We don’t all have to go. Someone could stay back. Robbie has her now, doesn’t he? He wouldn’t mind. Robbie never minds anything.”
“Besides,” Hawk said, “we all just rode into the city yesterday. We don’t need to be going out two days in a row. We can go next week.”
“I didn’t get to ride yesterday, though,” Lita protested. “You made me sit in the back of the van with Charity.”
“Yeah, well, someone had to babysit her,” Hawk said.
“She wasn’t going to get out of the back of a moving van!”
“We’re not going, Lita.”
Lita got up from the table, grabbed a cup from the cupboard, and began pulling out ingredients for a bloody mary
.
“Hey, Lita,” Weston called. “Will you make me one of those?”
“You two don’t need to be drinking this early in the morning,” Norma said disapprovingly.
Hawk ignored that. “Make all of us one of those,” he ordered.
Lita visibly tried to resist. Weston could understand. She was angry with Hawk for leaving her out of the ride yesterday, for thwarting her desire to go for a ride today, and now for forcing her to wait on him. Weston felt bad about his own part in the whole situation—he should have gotten up and made his own drink instead of asking Lita to do it for him. But he had been asking for a favor. She could have told him no. She couldn’t say no to Hawk.
And that became clear as, after only a few moments of standing there clenching her jaw, she turned back to the cabinet and pulled down four more glasses. She did not work quietly—she banged the glasses hard against the counter and slammed the refrigerator door when she removed the tomato juice. But she made the drinks.
Weston got up and helped her transfer them to the table. “Sorry,” he said quietly.
She shook her head. “Doesn’t matter.”
He understood what she meant. This was part of life. Hawk gave orders, and no matter how shitty those orders were, the rest of the pack had no choice but to follow them. That wasn’t Weston’s fault, and Lita knew it.
But why had Weston been able to sleep last night?
The question niggled at him, refusing to leave him alone. And as he drank his bloody mary, something else occurred to him. If he’d been able to ignore the order to stay awake last night, was it possible he would be able to ignore the order to sleep now?
He decided to find out.
He loaded up a plate with a waffle and a few of the different fruits. Then he stopped by the cupboard, grabbed a fresh cup, and filled it with water from the tap. “Taking food to bed?” Hawk smirked as he headed out of the kitchen, but Weston didn’t answer. He didn’t want to give his alpha a chance to tell him not to bring the food to Charity.
Hands full, he had to kick the door gently to let Robbie know he was there. A moment later, the door opened and Robbie let him in. Charity was awake now and sitting up on her mattress, her hair tangled and matted from sleep, her eyes red from crying.
