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When she’s under control and her breathing has slowed, I haul her to her feet and shake her. She yanks away from me, smoothing her hair back into its normal sleek gray bob, before folding her arms over her chest.
“Tell me where she is.” My bark ripples over her, makes her mouth part even though I can tell she doesn’t want to.
“I don’t know. She left,” Gladys Benson says, sniffing like she’s well rid of her granddaughter. Or maybe it’s because I just nearly choked her. I suspect it’s the first.
“When?” I snarl at her, resisting the urge to curl my hand around her slim neck and squeeze again.
The older woman must sense the direction of my thoughts because she brushes her fingers over her throat before she answers. “When do you think?”
“Answer the fucking question,” I snarl at her. Even though I know. I already know. The stale scent hanging in the air, the clothing gone from the closets, the items gathered together on the bed. The ring she left behind. I know.
It doesn’t stop my knees from hitting the floor again when Gladys says, “the day you made the announcement. A week ago.”
I fall forward, catching myself on one hand while the other goes to my chest, like that will keep my heart from breaking.
“I tried to get her to stay,” her grandmother is saying, but I hardly register her words. “I tried to convince her to hear you out. Get a chance for closure, at least. But you know how Sylvie is. Stubborn little thing. She’d made up her mind that she was leaving, and so she did. She left.”
She left. She left. She left.
The words echo around my head. I know they’ll haunt me forever. Until the day I fucking die.
My phone buzzes in my pocket, and it startles me enough that I suck in a breath, and the tightness in my lungs eases somewhat. Somewhat, but not all the way.
“Where-” I manage to gasp out. “Where did she go?”
Gladys shakes her head. “I don’t know. She wouldn’t tell me.”
A week. Vee’s been out there alone for a fucking week and her grandmother doesn’t seem to care. Doesn’t seem to give one fucking shit that her seventeen-year-old granddaughter is gone. Vanished.
Just like that, all of my anguish over my missing mate vanishes, morphs into anger. Anger at this woman in front of me who made my girl’s life so hard.
“You could have made her stay,” I snarl. “You should have made her stay.” Gladys stumbles back a step as I force myself to my feet. “You’re her guardian. You should have made her stay.”
“She left before I even had the chance.”
“You’re fucking lying!” I shout, lunging toward her. She screams and stumbles back, tripping over her heels and landing on her ass. I go after her, but suddenly hands are on me, holding me back, keeping me from taking my rage out on the woman cowering at my feet.
“Ford, stop!” Jackson’s bark hits like a ton of bricks and my entire body locks up. He’s never used it on one of us, never needed to. That’s he’s using it on me now, shows how fucked up I am, how feral.
“She’s gone, Jacks. Fucking gone.” I point a finger at Gladys and she flinches back, like I might go after her again, even with three of my brothers between us. “That bitch has been lying to us.”
Jackson’s brows lower. He takes a deep inhale, and I see the moment it registers. Under the angry alpharomones I’m pumping out, that have saturated the room, there is the distinct lack of Sylvie.
He spins on her grandmother, and I expect him to lunge at her, to tear her limb from limb for keeping this from us. But he only chokes out one word. “Why?”
There are so many questions in that one word. Why didn’t you tell us? Why did she leave? Why didn’t you make her stay? Why? Why? Why?
She folds her arms over her chest and lifts her head, managing to look down on all of us even though she’s inches shorter. “You deserve to hurt after what you did to her.”
She’s not fucking wrong.
“Tell us where she is now,” Asher urges, his voice gruff with emotion. “Please.”
Gladys shakes her head. “I told you, I don’t know where she is. It’s been a week. I haven’t heard from her. If she wants to come back, she will. You should respect her choice.”
Davis snorts. His good boy persona dropped the instant it was clear Gladys would not do what we asked. “Don’t pretend like you actually give a fuck about her. We know you don’t.”
There’s a flicker over her face, maybe guilt or shame, but then it’s gone. “Everything I’ve done has been to give her a better life. One better than what I lived, what her mother lived. She deserves that.”
