AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Oh,nowyou want to talk.” Murhder narrowed his eyes. “You didn’t have the decency to return my calls before. But with consequences falling on your head you’re looking for conversation? Fuck you, Nate. It’s too late.”
“Fine, I won’t pull a gun on a cop-bot again—”
“Not even close to a solution.”
Nate threw his hands up. “I wasn’t even on duty last night. When I’m fighting, I’m tight—”
“I’m not going to argue with you about this. The decision is final.” Murhder looked away. Looked back. “I know you went through some horrible things in your past. How you survived in that lab, I do not know, and nobody expects you to just put all that behind you and move along like none of it happened. But even with your past, you are responsible for your actions, and the consequences are hitting now.”
“What does Mom say?”
The darkness that came across that face was the protection of a bonded male for his mate. “You’ve broken her fucking heart. And I’m leaving it at that because the only thing that will hurt her more is me with your blood on my hands. Immortal or not, I want to tear you the fuck up for making her cry like she has the last twenty-four hours. After years of the same. Do yourself a favor and drop that subject right now.”
Nate closed his eyes. And to avoid feeling like an absolute asshole, he distracted himself by trying to imagine his life without the fighting.
“I can’t just sit here and do nothing,” he said.
“We’re well aware of your work on the human side,” came the dry response.
As his surprise obviously showed, Murhder cocked a brow. “Did you think we didn’t know? And you can play in that cesspool until it blows up in your face if you want, I don’t care—and neither does the Brotherhood.”
“I thought we weren’t supposed to be involved with humans,” Nate shot back.
“You’re not one of us anymore. So your business is your own.”
Murhder went over to the door and opened the way out, and Nate reminded himself that this was one of the goodbyes he’d been dreading most—so yeah, it was good to get it behind him. Hell, arguably it covered his adoptive mother as well.
God… he hated that he’d hurt her so badly.
Just as the door was shutting, he said roughly, “What do I have to do to get back in?”
Murhder looked over his shoulder, his red-and-black hair shifting across his strong back, the leather of his jacket creaking.
“Start caring about someone other than yourself and then maybe we’ll talk. Until then, you have what you’ve wanted. We’re all leaving you alone.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Resolve to evolve. Be your own reason for change. Anything that is given to you by someone else—motivation, purpose, esteem, well-being—can be taken away from you…
As Bitty sat at her desk at Safe Place, she was processing intake forms, updating patient files in the database, and typing in her own session notes—and the strong female voice piping into her ear was nearly as familiar as her own after the last month.
But the message was hitting different tonight.
Well-being is like territory in a battle. You must fortify and surround it with high walls of self-regard. You must protect it with your army of healthy habits…
Usually, she just sucked the words in and held them tight in her consciousness, repeating them, applying them to her own life, trying to go as deep as she could with whatever the message was.
Tonight, there was a parallel processing thing going on. As she typed on her keyboard, and double-checked the words she was using, and took pulls off her insulated Starbucks traveler, her brain wassifting through the content and probing for bullshit. She’d watched the videos so much that as the presentation(s) rolled out, she could picture the woman on her trademark red and purple stage, striding up and down, being the end result she was promising, everything that she wore and all that she looked like proof that her program of reinvention, self-determination, and empowerment worked.
Bitty reached up and readjusted the pod in her left ear. Then she flipped the page on the legal pad next to her.
God, she had bad handwriting.
And good job she was just transcribing. There were only so many things her brain could do at once.
As an ad interrupted the flow, she glanced at her phone screen and waited for the five secs to pass so she could hit skip. The little break provided her with an opportunity to take her own internal temperature on the merits of the material.
Her conclusion? After three hours of listening with a critical mindset instead of an acolyte’s one?
