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He’d lowered it.
I stepped back after that, but not far. My own shoulder didn’t leave Wolf’s. They touched, and I wasn’t going anywhere.
None of us were.
“I’m going to repeat myself, son.” Ramses’s deep tone edged differently now. It encompassed an unease when it was normally lax and easygoing. Out of all my god dads, Ramses was without a doubt the one most relaxed. He was the peacemaker, the one all of us went to (adults included) for a level head and reason. Ramses didn’t have his own problems. Even when he had them, he didn’t have them. He brushed that shit off like nothing. “Ares, what do you mean when you said you found her?”
Wolf had given him that. My friend had gotten at least that out.
Wolf’s lips moved, but no speech passed them. Face red, eyes haunted, he looked like he’d be sick right in front of us. He dampened his mouth. “I said I found her, Dad. I did. I swear to God I did. I found her, Pilar.”
The name gave me pause, my swallow hard. I closed my eyes but only gave myself a moment.
Get your shit together.
Now wasn’t the time for me to break down, but I noticed more than one eye on me in that moment. Wolf was completely distracted, but both Wells and Thatcher were looking at me.
“You okay?” Wells mouthed, and I barely kept eye contact before I was squeezing Wolf’s arm.
I covered the phone. “You can do this.”
He had to do this, had to for her.
Wolf waited patiently for his father’s response, his face aglow, and the brick fireplace did that. We were still at his house, pizza boxes open. The pies had grown cold when none of us had the stomach to fucking eat them.
Ramses sighed into the line. “We’ve talked about this, son,” he stated, another breath in his voice. He’d regained his calm, my godfather so collected. “You can’t find Pilar. She is gone, and we will not be getting her back.”
He probably thought he had to say such things. Wolf had a history. Ares thought for a while he could find her and actually to the point where he’d become obsessed.
He’d even ran away.
It’d been a dark time, a real dark fucking time, and put the fear of God in all of us. We thought, for a time, we might lose our best friend, Thatcher, Wells, and me. Ares had gone into a deep depression, and even his parents couldn’t pull him out of it, his parents who had so much love and support just like the rest of ours.
Thatcher, Wells, and I had a lot of regrets back then. Regrets that we let Wolf go as deep as he had into that dark cloud. His depression had started during the countless days in which he’d searched for his long-lost sister, the days which turned up empty each and every time. Why the guys and I felt responsibility for that was because we’d covered for Wolf. He’d run away quite a few times dating back to as young as elementary school.
He’d been searching leads.
That last time he’d left, left to find her had been so fucking bad. Ramses and Brielle ended up finding him in California of all places. At twelve years old, our buddy had hopped on a bus and traveled thousands of miles because some chick over there simply had the same name as her. He’d done things like this… rash and crazy things to chase the memory of a person he’d never gotten to meet. It never was Pilar in the end.
His searches always came up empty.
Wolf’s anger signaled the end of his searches. He’d never been Mary Sunshine, but without his searches… without hope, his depression unfurled into something else. He got real mean, nasty and self destructive, and I think a part of him hoped that he’d been the one taken from the hospital that day instead of Pilar.
If only so his parents didn’t have to deal with him.
Of course, he’d never say that, but all of us knew him. We knew his heart. He was shit at hiding it just like the rest of us.
That was why I was especially being so rigid now, refusing to feel anything. I couldn’t. I couldn’t break fucking down when my best friend was trying to tell his dad something way bigger than me. It was bigger than what I was feeling.
Stop being a bitch.
I realized I wasn’t breathing. It wasn’t until Wells cuffed my arm, the other hand still on Wolf. I wanted to shove Wells away. I wasn’t a bitch. I was fine.
So why the fuck did I let him stay?
I said nothing, letting him do that shit, but I didn’t look at him. I refused, squeezing Wolf’s arm.
“This isn’t like before,” Wolf’s voice cracked into the line. His eyes pinched tight. “Dad, it’s different.”
