by Heather Long
My struggle did nothing. It didn’t stop Jasper from turning his back and walking away. It didn’t pull Rome out of the car to avenge me in silent fury. It didn’t keep Vaughn from getting back in the car like I was already a memory.
Kestrel stared at me from the driver’s seat and I reached for him, but it was too late—I was trapped in the car with my uncle, and the Vandals were gone.
“Sparrow!”
“Come on, beautiful girl, open those eyes.”
A sob ripped out of me.
“C’mon, Sparrow, open those eyes.”
The softness of that voice was a lie. They’d left me. I beat against the arms holding me, but they didn’t relax. If anything, they squeezed me closer. Not tighter. Not harder. Just closer.
The rasp of stubble rubbing against my hair and the warmth of flesh beneath my chilled fingers made me shudder.
“Please, Sparrow, c’mon, open those eyes for me.” My captor released me long enough to cup my face, and gentle thumbs swiped at the hot tears leaking from my eyes.
“Kestrel?” He came back? He…
“I’m right here, sweetheart,” he promised. “Open your eyes.”
Terror fisted my heart. What if… Violent trembling rocked me, and I forced my eyes to open. The world wavered. Instead of fog, there was diffuse light stinging my watering eyes. Backlit, Kestrel’s rumpled hair stood up like he’d rolled right out of bed.
“Kestrel,” I repeated slowly, blinking to get the tears out of the way. I’d forgotten how to cry, how much it hurt, how it choked the air out of my lungs and left my throat raw. The broken sounds in the room were alien. More so when I realized they were coming from me.
“I’m right here, Sparrow,” he whispered. “Right here. Pinch me if you have to, I’m real.” Then as if to prove the point, he pinched me. The sharpness of the contact burst through the iciness, and what little of the dam I’d managed to erect against my tears collapsed.
I flung my arms around his neck and half climbed out of the tangle of blankets and onto his lap. Kestrel didn’t say a word, just bundled me right up to him.
“I’m here,” he repeated as the sobs just poured out of me. I wanted to stop. I desperately wanted to stifle those tears and shove them all back into the dark corner that had been blown open. “I’m here.”
At some point, he started to stand, and I scrabbled hard to hold on, but he just carried me with him.
“Shh, I have you,” he whispered, not even seeming to mind that my nails were leaving half-moon shapes in his skin or that I’d locked my arms and legs. Then he settled again and freed one of his arms to drag the blankets up and around my shoulders.
I’d gone to sleep in a T-shirt and panties. Shivers kept skating over me. Eventually, I seemed to reach the bottom of the well and the tears slowed. My eyes and my nose hurt so bad. It felt like I’d swallowed glass, and Kestrel’s chest beneath my face had been soaked with tears and snot.
Oh, that was so gross. I tried to pull away, sniffling badly, and Kestrel loosened his arms.
“I’m sorry, I just—Oh, I snotted all over you.”
“Oh, who cares,” he muttered and dragged me back. “I won’t melt, and that’s hardly the worst thing that’s ever gotten on me.” It was so decidedly practical that I settled against him and used my shirt to wipe my nose. He gave me a moment, and then with a gentle hand that I could easily resist, he turned my face up so he could see me.
There was still a light on, and it had to be coming from his room. The door between our rooms stood wide open. It was still dark in here, but not so cold or lonely.
“You want to talk about it?” No pressure lived in that question.
I swallowed, dipping my gaze to the pair of birds tattooed on his pecs. They were arcing away from each other. Wings spread. Kestrels, I’d bet. I licked my lips.
“You don’t have to,” he told me. “I can stay right here until you go back to sleep if you want though.”
“I don’t want you to go.” Admitting that took everything I had.
“Then I’ll stay.”
My lower lip trembled until I compressed my mouth closed. I couldn’t breathe through my stuffed up nose though, so I swiped at my face with a hand before I dared to look at him again. The chill in his eyes was all but gone. The man gazing at me was the one I’d begun to nurse a crush on back when he was just my driver.
The one I’d let myself fantasize about.
The one…
“Please don’t tell the others?”
“That you had a bad dream?” He raised his brows. “They won’t care except to make sure you’re all right. Hell, if they’d heard your screams, they’d have ripped down the damn doors themselves.”
“But I don’t want them to know.” I opened my mouth, then closed it. “I need to trust you again. I need to know you won’t tell them my secret.”
Sadness crept across his expression so briefly, I must have imagined it. “I’ll keep your secrets, Sparrow. I won’t betray your trust again. I promise.” When I would have opened my mouth, he pressed a finger to my lips. “But believe me—we all want to protect you, and we’re all very familiar with nightmares.”
That was probably true. Might even explain the faerie lights in Jasper’s room, though I hadn’t asked him. Nor had I slept in there again. Every night I was in Vaughn’s bed, there was a light on somewhere in the room. There were lamps in here. Lights around the ceiling in Kestrel’s room.
So yeah, maybe they did know.
“If you don’t want me to tell them, I won’t,” he promised again. With careful hands, he reached up to smooth the hair back from my face, then carefully swiped away the dampness on my cheeks. “Or you can just curl up here and let me hold you while you sleep. Whatever you need.”
I wanted to believe.
I needed so desperately to believe him.
“I dreamt that you guys took me back.” There was only so much I could tell him. “You didn’t tell me where we were going or why. You put me in the car, and Jasper dragged me out of it when we got there.” Then pushed me toward my uncle, done with me. “Got rid of me because I wouldn’t trust you.”
His smooth expression turned fierce as he frowned. “You know we would never do that.” Then, without waiting for my response, he sighed. “Of course you don’t, or you wouldn’t have had that dream.” Something about the way he said ‘dream’ told me he understood there was so much I wasn’t saying, but he didn’t press.
Head back, he shifted me on his lap, and it hit me that he was mostly naked and I had a hand spread over one of the tattoos on his pecs. There was another at his abdomen, a cross all intertwined with vines. Focusing on the tattoos helped me to get my breathing under control, because I didn’t want to move, even if the gradually stiffening erection in his shorts pressed against my leg.
Still, he’d been… “Are you okay with me sitting here?”
“I’m fine, ignore my dick. Dicks do that.” He was so matter-of-fact about it. “Right now, I want you to know and to try and believe me when I say nothing—and I mean nothing—you could do or say would make us force you to go anywhere you don’t want to go. In fact, I’ll kill the first person who tries, whether they’re my brother or not.”
He held my gaze as he issued that quiet threat in a deadly calm voice.
“Why did you take me?”
“Because leaving you there seemed like a far worse idea. I can’t say we thought it all the way through,” he admitted. He touched his tongue to his lower lip, then said, “You know what, fuck it. Jasper has had plenty of time to clear this up with you. When we found out you were going to be in town, we just wanted to be close. To see you. Make sure you were all right. But you weren’t all right.” He flicked his gaze over me. “You were far from all right, although you are very talented at hiding it. Maybe better than I realized, and that’s a discussion for another day, hopefully when you believe me about being able to trust me.”
I swallowed again.
&n
bsp; “But that asshole hurt you…and you needed medical help. We could have just taken you to Doc, gotten you patched up, and taken you back. But we didn’t trust anyone there. Not after seeing those bruises and injuries. Not after realizing those assholes at the show just let that abuse continue. You were safer with us, and then you needed to heal.”
“And then and then…”
He gave me a small smile. “Precisely. Once you were here, none of us wanted to let you go back.”
“Except you.”
“I didn’t want to let you go, Sparrow.” He covered my hand on his chest. “I thought…I thought it was the best thing for you. Do I want you? Absolutely. Did I want you to have to be in our world? No. I thought yours was better.”
I glanced down to where he rubbed his thumb against the back of my hand. He’d said that before. “Not everything they write about us is true.”
“I’m figuring that out. More, you came back. You got out, and you came back all on your own.”
I bit my lip, then let it go. “Don’t ask me why.”
“I’m not going to,” he said. “You’ll tell me when you’re ready. Until then, you’re safe here. I promise.”
This time when I looked into his eyes, I saw nothing but him blazing back out at me. Sniffling once, I leaned close and just pressed my lips to his, not asking for anything but needing the contact. He returned the kiss, the pressure of it, but he didn’t try to deepen it, even when he lifted a hand to cradle the back of my head.
We stayed there, suspended in that moment, and some of the fear slithered away. I closed my eyes, and when I opened them, I pulled back. “I believe you,” I whispered.
I did. He meant it.
“You ready to try and sleep again?”
“I need to wash my face.”
“Okay.” It wasn’t until I was halfway to the bathroom that it occurred to me he might leave, and I turned to find him just sitting at the edge of the bed. The black sleep shorts he wore just seemed to emphasize the line of muscles along his thighs.
“You’ll still stay?”
He glanced up and smiled at me. “If you want me to stay, or you can come sleep with me in my bed. You won’t be alone.”
It took me a couple of minutes to wash my face. My eyes hurt so bad. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d just cried. It took several attempts to blow my nose, and then I just brushed my teeth, ’cause I couldn’t remember if I had before.
When I came back out, Kestrel waited for me. “Where are we sleeping?”
“Sometimes Vaughn comes in here early to wake me up,” I admitted.
“I’m aware,” Kestrel said. “Trust me, I have no problem shoving his naked ass back out.”
A laugh escaped at the utter dryness in his tone, and his smile gentled. When he held out a hand, I shut off the light in the bathroom and went straight to him. The door between our rooms was still open. The main light was off in his room, but the soft lights around the ceiling were on. The blue chased away the shadows.
Kestrel ushered me into my bed ahead of him, then followed behind. He wrapped me up and tucked me to his chest and chuckled when I pulled the bear over to cuddle it too. “Rome will like that you love his bear so much.”
The soft words made me smile. “It’s his?”
“Hmm-hmm. He left it in here so you wouldn’t be alone when we brought you here that first night.”
The absolute and utter sweetness in that gesture floored me. I didn’t even have words for that. I hugged it tighter. “Thank you for telling me.”
He pressed a kiss to the back of my head. “Go to sleep, Sparrow. No more bad dreams.”
“Good night, Kestrel.”
“Think you can start calling me Kellan, by the way.”
Kellan.
“It’s my name.”
“I know it’s your name, smart ass,” I retorted, and he huffed a laugh. “I just…I’ve always called you Kestrel.”
“I don’t mind that either, but my friends call me Kellan or Kel. But you can call me whatever you want.”
Kel.
“Good night, Kel.”
“Good night, Em.”
I grinned. “I like Sparrow.”
“Good to know.” He gave me a squeeze. “Now go to sleep.”
Honestly, I didn’t think I would. I really didn’t. When I was still awake a few minutes later, Kestrel—Kellan shifted us again so I was facing him this time and he tucked my head to his chest, right over his heart, and then began to stroke my hair.
I was asleep before I hit the count of ten beats.
No Broken Promises
Kellan
“Are you serious right now?” Milo demanded from the doorway.
“Yes,” I told him. “I’ve been thinking about it. I didn’t say I was committed.”
He let out a breath and then pushed into the room and closed the door behind him. I turned eighteen the following day, which meant it was time for me to go. Just like Vaughn before me. Though Vaughn had gotten a place not far away, crashing in the spare room of the guy teaching him how to ink. He’d said I could stay there for a while. I might, but the group home didn’t let us stay beyond our eighteenth birthdays.
There was still a couple of months of high school left. I could finish up and then graduate.
“But the army?” Milo raked a hand through his hair.
I shrugged. “Training. Paycheck. Free place to sleep. Money later for school, if I decide I want to go to college. It’s something.”
“Yeah, but is it what you want?” Milo pinned me in place with those dark eyes of his. “You’ve never said a word about it before.”
No, because I rarely talked about my future plans. We talked about Vaughn focusing on getting an apprenticeship, because ink was something he loved. He’d already started practicing on himself. We talked about Jasper taking business classes at the local junior college and how we could afford it. We talked about Rome and the art school in Easton. We’d done his application and managed to sneak more than a few of his pieces from the clubhouse to submit him for consideration.
Then there was Liam and the Ivy League plans his parents had for him. They’d already tried to send him up there for that private prep school the first school year after they’d adopted him. He’d been gone for three weeks. While he never admitted what he’d done to get kicked out, his parents acquiesced to the private school here instead.
It was still not with us or with Rome, but he was close enough the twins could see each other. It still baffled me why they hadn’t adopted Rome too. But the one time I brought it up, Rome said they could go fuck themselves. He wasn’t leaving us. At the same time, he never once blamed Liam for the way they’d gone after him.
Liam would never have cooperated without Rome’s blessing anyway. All they had to do was say the word, and we’d all have taken off. “Who’s getting Freddie today?”
“Jasper,” Milo said. “Don’t change the subject.” Ever since the day down by the docks, we kept an eye on Freddie to and from school. We made it clear to everyone that he wasn’t to be touched or messed with. Pick a fight with him, and it was all of us you would get. We bled for each other, no one was allowed to bleed us.
Turning, I dropped to sit on the edge of the bed and studied Milo. We’d known each other too long for bullshit. “I’m tired,” I told him. “I know what you’re trying to build, and I support that. I can send home money to keep helping…”
“Talk to me, Kel.” Like me, Milo dropped to sit on the other bed in the room. We’d gone from six in a room to three, now to two as we’d gotten older. Freddie rotated between our rooms because he was still bunking with the younger kids. His hell raising and recklessness nearly landed him in juvey, but if we let him crash with us, he slept and stayed relatively sober.
Vaughn had broken the arm of the last dope dealer who sold to Freddie. Then again, who could fault the kid for wanting an escape? We all needed one. Wasn’t that what I was doing?
“Jasper’
s getting out of control,” I said. “He leads with his temper, and he’s always on edge these days. He almost beat that asshole to death. If we hadn’t been there…”
“But we were there,” Milo replied. “That’s what we do, and the rage…it’s part of who he is. We know that. We know what he saw, and he’s only ever mentioned it once.”
Yeah, once when we’d all gotten puking drunk and confessed our pasts. That had come right in the aftermath of saving Freddie. Killing a man finished bonding us in a way that years of knowing each other had begun.
I sighed. “You’ve got plans.”
“I do, and those plans need you.” Milo raked a hand through his hair and shook his head. “If this is what you want, then I’ll support you. But no lie, brother, it doesn’t feel like something you want. It feels like you’re running. Nothing wrong with that, but I’d rather you ran toward something than away. If you need this, then fuck it all, we’ll make sure you get it.”
“I saw him the other day.”
“Your father?”
“Sperm donor.” I would never refer to that man as anything else. “He looked right through me, even though the woman with him did a hard double take.” I had the face of a monster. A man who had used his money and influence to buy and sell whatever he wanted, including my mother. Some facts I’d never needed to know. Didn’t change who my parents had been. But that asshole? Learning about him had definitely cracked something inside of me.
“Want me to kill him?” Milo asked. “Or do you need to be the one to do it?”
This right here was why we were brothers and always would be. A wordless promise we’d made a long time ago. No questions asked, if I said let’s do it, we’d leave and get it done. If I said no, he’d leave it alone until I was ready.
Chapter 26
Kellan
The next couple of nights, I just slept with Sparrow. Vaughn wasn’t amused when he found me there, but I enjoyed the hell out of answering his sinful little come-on. The best part of it all was when she burst out laughing. I could have left them in peace and he could’ve cheerfully fucked her into a better mood, but I didn’t.
