“I’ll get dressed and meet you on the porch.”
When she closed the window and vanished, he replaced the screen before making his way to the front of the house. Climbing the porch steps, he sat in one of the chairs and gripped the arms as the sun rose higher. Lights flickered on in the homes of some of the hunters who were starting to wake.
Across the way, the lights in the building holding the communal kitchen turned on. The smell of coffee brewing drifted through the air. The women there would soon start cooking for the single men returning home, the widowed hunters, children without parents, and anyone else who simply felt like having company instead of being alone. And of course, for those who just didn’t want to cook.
From the time he was seventeen on, there were many times when he took advantage of the meals from the communal kitchen. After his mother died from an accidental drowning a few months after a Savage killed his father, it was easier to go to the kitchen.
He’d grown tired of all the hunter women bringing the meals to him. He sought company that didn’t lecture him on keeping a clean home or beep when his meals finished heating.
The women in the communal kitchen also didn’t give him those sad, sympathetic looks that made him want to crawl into a ball. They dealt daily with the broken hunters who simply sought company or to be left alone.
They didn’t show up at his door with plates in hand. And not only did those women give him those awful, pitying stares, but they somehow always managed to find their way into his house where they would tsk and flutter about like nervous birds while still treating him like he was a pathetic, broken thing.
Heloathedit.
They always had something to say about the house he barely touched after his mom’s death. It was always dusty and needed a vacuum, but when he wasn’t sleeping, he was at training or eating, and truth be told, he was too sad to bother cleaning the place. It didn’t help that he was never quite sure if the drowning was accidental or not.
Now that he had Elena, he understood better why someone couldn’t go on after losing a loved one, but he’d still been there, and his mother had left him. She also wasn’t a vampire who’d suffered the shattering loss of the mate bond.
No, but hunters do feel some of the mate bond too. Maybe not as strongly as a vampire, but it’s there,he reminded himself.
For the first time, he saw his mother in a whole new light. If she had killed herself because she couldn’t live without his father, he understood why a little better. It still stung, but some of the resentment that was always present toward her faded as the sky turned pink and yellow streaks kissed the bottom of the clouds.
Closing his eyes, he formed an image of his mother in his mind. She’d always been beautiful, and while he loved his dad, she was the one who was always there for him. She’d bandaged his wounds, kissed his boo-boos, cut his hair, and looked at him with that amazing twinkle in eyes nearly the same shade as his.
Recalling that twinkle, he questioned if maybe he’d been wrong to suspect her all these years and she had drowned accidentally. She’d loved him dearly; he’d never doubted that, so would she have willingly left him?
Then he realized it didn’t matter. It was fourteen years ago, and it wasn’t like he was ever going to get the answer.
When the door creaked open, he turned as Elena slipped from the house and quietly closed it behind her. When she glanced up at him, his heart swelled with love. He’d discovered his mate in this wonderful woman he was meant to spend eternity with, and he couldn’t lose her.
“What’s the matter?” Elena whispered.
The look on his face was one of trepidation, resignation, and a strange sort of helplessness she’d never expected to see from Logan. It caused panic to clutch at her heart and claw at her insides.
When he simply stared at her as if he were trying to figure out what to say or do, she shifted nervously. What was going on?
“Logan,” she whispered.
“Ronan called a few minutes ago. They have a hunter who was also injected. Asher and I are to return immediately,” Logan said.
Something inside her withered like a worm on a sidewalk in August. He was going to leave her. She understood why, of course, and had always known this day would come, but she still wasn’t prepared for it.
“I want you to come with me,” he said. “But if you decide not to, or if you can’t right now, I’ll understand.”
“But you’ll still go.”
He hesitated before replying. “No.”
Elena had never expected to hear the word come out of his mouth. She stood there and stared at him, but if she was shocked, she was sure it was nothing compared to the dumbfounded look on his face. He hadn’t expected to say that.
Logan couldn’t believe that word had left his mouth. He hadn’t come here to tell her that. It wasn’t what he told Ronan and Asher and not what he’d planned to do only minutes ago. He was here to inform her that he was leaving, and she had to make her choice, but the words lodged in his throat.
His entire life had been about the battle. He’d trained since he was a child to destroy the Savages, and now, with demons roaming the earth, they needed every hunter and vampire they could get in the battle, but he couldn’t compel her to leave or make a choice, not after everything she’d endured.
And he couldn’t go without her. He couldn’t leave her here without him. Hunters surrounded her, but none of them would protect her like him. They still had no way of knowing what Leonardo and Diego might become, and he couldn’t take the chance of something happening to her while he was gone.
He had to return to his compound and the war waging there, but he wouldn’t do it without her.
