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She didn’t trust you.
My chest caved again, ripped raw from the inside out. I felt like I was cut in two, bleeding.
“Whatever it is, we’ll handle it,” Dad said, his words thick but steady. “We’ll fix it, and I won’t hate you. Just tell me what it is. Tell me the truth.”
The truth was madness, painful, but it had to be done. All this was bigger than me.
My love for her was secondary.
Chapter Three
Present
Dorian
Ares’s house was chaos…
And we were at the center of it. Us kids got the kiddie table while the parents worked around us, and what used to be Ares’s house became a hub. The parents brought in their resources of cops, lawyers, and anyone else they believed could be of any use. Adults were moving in and out of rooms, opening and shutting doors, and us kids couldn’t do anything about it.
They wouldn’t let us.
We’d done our part, mucked shit royally the fuck up, and now, our parents were attempting to undo all the shit we’d gotten into. We hadn’t seen any of them in what felt like hours, and Thatcher, Wells, and I hadn’t seen Ares or Bow in at least an hour. Ares left with his parents to go back to the hospital barely after leaving it, and Bow was on the cusp of a panic attack after everything in the last twenty-four hours. She’d ended up going with her mom and Cleo, Wells’s mom, to drive the block and calm down. The Mallicks hadn’t been able to sit still either, hence why they were back at the hospital now. From what I understood, they still couldn’t get in, but I didn’t blame them for being there.
I should be there.
My mom hadn’t let me when I’d suggested it, neither of my parents listening to me at this point. I’d talked enough I think for both of their likings, and though my mom had said I couldn’t go back out, she’d ended up joining the Mallicks. She’d gone along with them and my god dad Knight. He had ties to the military, and from how it had sounded as they all left, he was trying to get in contact with old friends. He was trying to get in that hospital, and I wondered if that meant completely stepping over the law and anything else. The law wasn’t on our side here. My parents, our families, had the cops in their pockets, but even they couldn’t get into the place where the news was saying Sloane was being held.
My grandfather had locked it all down, and though the news was saying otherwise, I knew the truth. According to the media, the general public was being kept out of the hospital by their security and for the safety of Sloane herself. They were trying to protect her, the reports stressing the need for it.
She’d been kidnapped.
I didn’t know the details from there. None of us did, and at this point, the news knew more than fucking we did about Noa. We knew she’d been taken, taken by who was supposed to have been her dad. He took her again and…
Well, now she was back at that hospital. We’d all seen her on the news being rushed in. That’d been hours ago, though, and Thatcher and Wells watched that shit the press was going on about now. My friends gauged their time between studying me pacing and that gossip shit on the tube. They’d stopped telling me to sit down a long time ago.
I suppose they’d gotten tired of me telling them to fuck off.
I was spiraling at this point and well aware of it. I didn’t know what my grandfather was doing. I didn’t know his plans, but I did know he had to be in that hospital with my girl. Mine, and that fact alone had me with a bandaged hand. I’d punched a mirror in the bathroom about an hour ago.
I’d be answering to that eventually, my hands working, fingers flexing. Wells had pulled all the little pieces of glass out while Thatcher had swept up the mess, and not one word was exchanged between the three of us. They hadn’t dared, and I hadn’t either.
I might scream if I did.
“I can’t do this shit,” I huffed, heading toward the door. I passed the couch that held my buddies along the way, their heads angling back. Thatcher was up off the couch in seconds, and Wells bounded over it.
“Parents told us to stay put.” Wells raised a hand to me, bold enough to do it. Out of all of us, he was probably the only one who could beat me in a sprint, which was probably why he got to the door faster. He wasn’t as tall as the rest of us, but he was the leanest. “D—”
I shoved him against the door, physically putting him there. My buddy raised his hands, but I had a feeling it was mostly out of respect. He could hold his own, just like any of us. We were the biggest dudes on the fucking football field. Wells’s head touched the door, lazy bottle-blond all over the place. “What are you doing, man?”
I didn’t know what I was doing, but my insides were twisted up enough to justify it. A dull knife slicing at me, stabbing me, couldn’t have felt worse. “Back off.”
Wells’s hands lowered the same time Thatcher’s shadow cast over the pair of us. He probably could stop me. He was bigger than me but only just.
He chose not to in the end and actually opened the door when I shoved Wells off it. Thatcher raised his hands too, head cocked, dark circles under his eyes. None of us had slept in the last twenty-four hours. He nodded toward the door, his spiked earring dangling. He was giving me his permission to go.
Not that I needed it.
I was over this kiddie table shit, and I didn’t care if I could help or not. I needed to know at least what was going on.
