by Lyra Evans
And then the guilt, the churning confusion, a hurricane inside himself, ravaging his body. But it was a habit—he told himself—to turn to Sky in times of need. He’d always turned to Sky before, always relied on him. Until he didn’t. Until Oliver didn’t rely on anyone. That wasn’t Connor’s fault. It was a habit difficult to shake—and Sky was here, now, offering help. It was fine as long as it helped find Connor. It was okay.
Sky was at the foot of the stairs, hand reaching out to steady Oliver where Donna had let him go. She was gone then, disappeared to coordinate with her Wolves and let him do his work. He thought he heard her say that, but it was lost in the torrent of his memories. And he and Sky were alone.
“Oli, what happened? Where’s Connor?” But the question was more an accusation than concern at the end, as though Connor might be responsible for Oli’s look of terror and his collapsing control. It was enough to ground Oli, the assumption Connor was responsible. Enough to make Oliver gather himself, replace the shattered battlements of his inner fort, and find the detective that usurped the trainee.
“He’s missing,” Oliver said. “No sign of him in the house. Werewolves feel it too. Donna couldn’t smell him either. She’s sent out search parties and messengers to alert Logan and the other Alphas.” Oliver took a long, steadying breath, his mind clearing again, pulling up the evidence around him. He needed to be a cop, a detective. He needed to work.
“You think—” Sky said, dropping off abruptly as Oliver’s eyes snapped up to his face. His green eyes filled with caution edged with concern, Sky chewed on his words before he spoke them. “You think it’s related to the murders.”
Oliver noted the missing word, the other before murders. There was no evidence of a murder yet, and Oliver would continue to operate as though this was a missing persons case. Not a—no. Connor was not going to die. It didn’t make sense.
“It has to be,” Oliver said sharply, pacing around before his frenetic muscles demanded more exertion. He threw himself up the stairs, vaulting to the top floor before he realized it. He needed to search Connor’s room properly. Sky was right behind him, like a shadow. “How else do you explain the Wolves’ inability to smell him? There’s no sense evidence.”
Sky remained silent, standing behind Oliver in the doorway to Connor’s room. Staring out at the room before him, the bed in disarray, clothes left where Oli and Connor had dropped them the night before, Oliver couldn’t quite make himself enter. He’d searched this room for evidence once before, the first time he’d been in it. He thought then that Connor might be a murderer. Now, the world flipped on its head, Oliver tamped down the thought that he might be searching the room of a victim instead.
Swallowing hard against the gravel in his throat, Oliver stepped into the room, dragging at the sense training Connor had given him.
Don’t rely solely on your eyes. They can lie to you. Listen, smell, touch. Taste if you can. These things are harder to fool. Particularly your nose.
So Oliver breathed in, eyes closed, and sought out any intruding scents. Pushing away his other senses, pushing away the information flooding his brain about what he could hear downstairs or behind him, what he could feel of his own clothes on him, Oliver tried to only smell. He became painfully aware of his nakedness, having run out of bed wearing only underwear to find Connor. The movement of the air when Sky breathed behind him ghosted over his back and neck. His hair rose slightly, each follicle distinct in his mind. But as he tried to force those thoughts away, the information useless to him, Oliver found his other senses sought only to fill in a blank. There was no scent. No smell at all.
Opening his eyes, Oliver searched the room again. His gaze travelled quickly over every inch he could see, everything obvious, and finding nothing. Desperation growing, Oliver pulled at the sheets and comforter on the bed, yanking them out and shaking them to dislodge something—anything—to point him toward an answer. He stripped the bed and tossed the linens aside. He rifled through his own clothes, through Connor’s clothes, through the hamper and under the bed. He pressed his face to the floor to see beneath the mattress only to find nothing at all. An empty space, just as void of Connor and clues as the rest of the room. All he could tell, from the state of the bed before he’d taken it apart, was that there was little evidence of struggle. The covers were pulled out mostly where Oliver had slept, where he tugged at them in the night when he rolled over and over. But on Connor’s side the bed looked much as it usually did when Connor slept—slightly mussed, wrinkled only gently. The shallow dip in Connor’s pillow, where he laid his head every night, condemned Oliver and his inability to put it all together. Oliver glared at the pillow and hit it with his fist, pounding it into the mattress before whipping it across the room.
“Oliver,” Sky said quietly, and Oliver heaved from the panting. He glared around the room. If the obvious wouldn’t give him answers, he’d have to look at the less obvious. Pulling out drawers, Oliver flipped through Connor’s clothing, unsure he would recognize anything if he found it. All he found was empty spaces. Some of Connor’s clothes were missing. A pair of pants—an empty hanger the only evidence; a shirt and sweater—the space in the drawer. So the killer had dressed Connor? Or had Connor dressed himself? Oliver couldn’t remember Connor getting up at night. The buzzing in his head was back. “Oliver,” Sky said again, and Oliver pressed a hand to his forehead. “This isn’t going to—”
But Oliver ignored him. He cast spells—every one he could think of—to try and track the movements in the room. He cast for entry into the room, for signs a third person had been there, but found nothing. He cast for footsteps, hoping to identify Connor’s tracks on the ground and follow him out the door, to wherever he may have gone. Nothing. He cast for magical trail, for magical signatures, for some tiny breadcrumb of a sign that Connor was ever even in this room. Nothing. Nothing at all.
There was, of course, no magical signature in the room. Even Oliver’s signature was weakened, faded as though Oliver hadn’t been in Connor’s bedroom or practiced magic there for many, many months. Even the runes around the perimeter of Connor’s room showed nothing. Except that they were supposed to clean the room when the occupants left. And they hadn’t. The clothing they’d discarded the night before was still scattered around.
Oliver cast a charm on the runes, forcing them to glow beneath his outstretched hand. The obsidian collar glowed too, vibrating against his neck and reminding him inextricably of Connor, of Connor’s mouth on his neck and his lips pressed to the skin just above the stones. The charm forced on the runes, to test them and their effectiveness, was meant to push them to their extreme to see when and if they would give. The magic of them should only buckle under extreme pressure, extreme magical interference. Only they didn’t. After only a few moments of forcing the magic, the runes shone brightly white, then went out, like a flame snuffed on a candle.
The sudden blinking out of light was what drew Oliver’s attention to the floor. He saw it, glinting briefly in the light of the runes, beside Connor’s nightstand. As though it had fallen in the night. Connor’s cell phone.
Oliver picked it up gingerly, with careful fingers, as though it was much more delicate than it was. He held it in his hand, the warmth of the battery spreading into his palm. The screen lit up at a slight brush of the button, and Oliver’s heart stopped.
“Oli?” Sky said, his voice coming from far away. Oliver was vaguely aware of the moment Sky stepped into the room, coming to stand next to him, in Connor’s bedroom, next to Connor’s bed, and the wrongness of it all. “What did you find?”
But Oliver didn’t need to answer. Sky could read it over his shoulder. The notification on the screen was a message—from the Ember app.
Without speaking, his jaw too tight to form words anyway, Oliver swiped the phone unlocked and opened the message. A conversation popped into being before him. Unable to breathe, Oliver scrolled through it. The messages were time-stamped. They went back a day, two days, th
ree. Then further. There were messages from weeks ago. They were friendly, personal. They were flirty and suggestive. They were intimate. Promising.
The other user was a woman with dark hair and light eyes—a Wolf, based on her profile, that Oliver had never met. Moonstruck was her username, and her profile was full. Full of detail, with a hidden email address, and a gallery of pictures. All of them of her, the same woman, not a manufactured shell profile to catfish someone. This had more substance.
Oliver’s eyes found the last messages sent between Connor and this woman.
Oliver dropped the phone, only vaguely aware of the soft thud as it hit the mattress beneath his hand. His organs seemed to have fallen out of him, leaving only a gaping, cavernous void in their place. The air in the room vanishing, Oliver huffed roughly, only able to force air out of his lungs and not take it in. His head felt light, dizzy. He was choking.
“Oli,” Sky said, his voice soft and mournful, full of pity and something else. “I’m sorry—”
“It’s not real,” Oliver said suddenly, but he wasn’t aware of speaking.
“Oli,” Sky said again, taking the phone and scrolling through himself. “This isn’t—like the others. It’s old. This conversation has been going on for—”
“Not real,” Oli said again, dropping onto the bed, onto Connor’s side. The bed they shared together. The bed in which Connor had told him he wanted to make Oli whole. “Can’t be. Can’t—”
A weight on the bed next to him told Oli Sky had sat beside him. The dip in the bed pressed their thighs together. Sky’s body against his was hot, solid. He was warm and stable, a rock in the wild torrent of Oliver’s world.
“I don’t know why there’s no sense evidence, but he clearly left—”
“He didn’t,” Oliver said, and it took a moment to realize he had shouted it. Reeling himself in, Oliver said, more quietly, “He didn’t leave. He—he wouldn’t.” Sky said nothing to that, sitting only in silence next to him, waiting. Everyone was always waiting for Oli. Connor—maybe he got tired of waiting. Tears stinging his eyes, Oliver held his head up to the ceiling, refusing to let them fall. “He said we were—Fated.” It seemed embarrassing, horrifying, to say aloud. He never meant to tell Sky, never meant to admit it to anyone but himself and Connor.
“It’s the oldest line in the book,” Sky said, a hand placed flat on the mattress behind Oli, his arm pressing very gently to Oli’s back.
“It wasn’t,” Oli said, shaking his head. He remembered when Connor told him, down in his office, with Oli backed against his bookshelf, that Oliver was his Fated, that they were meant to be, and Oliver was too stubborn to let himself see it. His heart felt as though it was shrinking.
Sky sighed softly. “He’s a Werewolf and an Alpha,” Sky said quietly. “Mating a Wizard just—doesn’t make sense for him. He needs a Wolf, someone who can give him pups to keep his line, Logan’s line, going.”
Oliver shook his head, refusing to hear it. Connor wasn’t like that. It wouldn’t have mattered to him. It didn’t matter to any of his Wolves. They welcomed Oliver. They welcomed him. They offered themselves to him as Connor’s consort at the wake. They—were supposed to be his fami—
“No, he doesn’t—” Oli began, but his words were failing him. They dropped off his tongue, caught in his throat. His stomach welled with anger and hurt, acid burning inside him.
“I’m sorry, Oli,” Sky said, and he placed his hand gently on Oli’s lower back, grounding him and soothing the way he used to. The way he did when Oliver struggled with other asshole trainees or a particularly brutal instructor. The way he had done when Oliver lost his—“This is hard to hear, but based on these messages, he was only playing with you. I think you need to accept that.”
Gritting his teeth, Oliver fought the urge to scream, the sound that would tear worlds apart, building in his throat. He couldn’t believe it, couldn’t believe it was true, that Connor would do that to him, that Oliver would let himself fall into this kind of position again. A tinny ringing drew his attention, and Oliver coughed through the tightness in his throat to answer his own phone. He picked it up off the side table, swiped at the screen, and pressed it to his ear.
“What?” he said, and swallowed away the rage and roughness and pain. He swallowed the tears.
“Oli?” Rory. His name sounded like an alarm in his ears. “Are you okay? What’s—”
“Nothing,” he said, cutting her off. He couldn’t have the conversation now. Not with Connor still missing and Sky sitting next to him, his hand on Oli’s back. Oliver got to his feet, pacing around the room and leaving Sky sitting, implausibly, inescapably, on Connor’s bed. “What is it?”
A long pause followed, but Rory didn’t press him. “I read through the letters sent to Walker, the fans and fame whores who wrote about you,” she said slowly. “Most of them were just idiots and crazies, like we thought. Some made it obvious who they were and where they were from, with return addresses and everything, because they wanted to be contacted. But others were more anonymous. There was only one that stood out, different from the rest. It had no name at all, no return address, and the postage says nothing.” She paused again, and Oliver’s heart beat dully against his chest, his emotions run raw and ragged from the events of the morning. He could barely muster the appropriate interest in Rory’s possible lead. He still had murder cases to solve, with or without Connor.
“Why?” Oli asked, his eyes finding their way back to Sky on the bed. He was beautiful and impeccably dressed, though Oliver still wore only his underwear. He felt naked, for a moment, standing in front of Sky like this. But Sky had seen it all before. He’d seen Oliver, felt him, tasted him. He’d claimed him before and said it would be forever. Oliver couldn’t bring himself to feel embarrassed now.
“It’s only a few lines,” Rory said. “And it doesn’t mean much, but something about it wasn’t like the others. They all talked about how they were lucky enough to take you home, or they write weirdly pornographic descriptions about how you handcuffed them and rode them hard, or shit like that.”
“Get to the point, Rory,” Oliver said, unable to keep the snap from his voice. He felt immediately guilty, but the guilt blended so well with the anger and self-loathing he hardly noticed it. He turned to face the wall, trying to clear his mind of Sky and Connor and everything else.
She waited a moment, then said, “This one only says ‘Oliver Worth is mine. He always will be. The others are just mindless fucks, even the Werewolf playing with him. He and I both know he belongs to me.’”
And the world tilted on its axis, all the pieces of the broken glass of this case suddenly fitted into place. Oliver could see. He belongs to me.
It was Sky. It was always Sky.
Chapter 15
The realization hit Oli like a felled tree, heavy and crushing, too fast and hard to bounce back. But the shock in his heart settled quickly, fading steadily to give way to the more resilient emotion—understanding. As though he’d known it all along, had the suspicion planted in his breast, Oliver found the revelation to be some kind of release. Like air hissing out of a punctured tire, the denial blew out of him. How he’d managed to ignore it all this time, he didn’t know. Maybe it was the surrealism of it, or maybe it was horror that welled within him that this was doubly his fault, or maybe—just maybe—it was the old Oliver, the one who loved so deeply and blindly, who fell fast and hard, and couldn’t let it go, that clouded his judgment and made him useless.
But the cause hardly mattered. At this point, reality was upon him, and he had no time to lo
se. He cast the phone aside roughly, exaggerating the movement, and turned back to Sky, a grimace on his face. He huffed hard, out of his nose, once, and heaved a humourless laugh.
“Oli?” Sky asked, making to rise from the bed, but Oliver took a step toward him instead, halting his progress. “What is it? A new lead?”
Oliver shook his head, biting down on his tongue as though fighting back tears. Something pricked at his eyes as he did, but they weren’t tears of sadness. They were a kind of hysterical frustration at his own stupidity.
“Not a fucking one,” Oliver shot, sinking down onto the bed next to Sky. The warmth of Sky’s body suddenly felt hostile, like a campfire transposed into a house. What was once welcoming and nostalgic suddenly became angry and threatening. “Just more bullshit from whackjobs. Rory found no useable letters to trace this guy.” Oliver shook his head. “So we’ve still only got Connor’s phone to go on, and that—” he bit off the end of the sentence, his throat closing around the effort to produce more words. “I can’t believe I’ve been so stupid!” Oliver cried out, pressing his forehead into his palms. The honest exclamation tore out of him before he could stop it, but Sky took it to mean something else.
“You’re not stupid, Oli,” Sky said, placing a soothing hand against Oliver’s lower back. He rubbed in gentle circles there, his fingers splaying wider with every motion. His pinky finger slipped briefly beneath the waist of Oliver’s underwear, and Oliver tried to extinguish the flare that resulted. “You’re just too trusting. You give people too much power over you.”
Oliver looked up slowly, his eyes half-lidded and his lips parted. Sky’s gaze followed the line of Oliver’s lips. They were only inches away now. “You mean like you?”
He said it without thinking, a thought called from his heart unbeknownst to his head, and it hung on the air between them, a stolen breath. Sky pressed briefly closer, his side pressed to Oli, and Oliver was acutely aware of his own nakedness, of the lack of clothing between him and Sky. He wanted more than ever to launch from the bed and cover himself in all the clothing he could find, but he made himself stay, made himself withstand the intensity of Sky’s gaze.
