Page 168 of Pucked Around and Found Out

I reach into my pocket and pull out the letter. I don't say anything. I just hold it up between us and watch his face do the work.

“I'd bet my left nut that whatever's inside that envelope involves a college far from here with the best hockey team in the country.” The words taste bitter on my tongue. I watch the color drain from his face, watch him look away, and something cold settles in my gut. “I'm right, aren't I? You opened yours.”

His jaw locks. A muscle feathers in his cheek. “Yeah.” He forces the word out like it costs him something.

“If Alex gave us these…” I let the sentence hang, let him follow it to the same place I've been sitting with for the last hour. “Who's to say he didn't give one to her?”

The silence that follows is different from the one before. This one has teeth.

“Fuck.” It comes out barely above a breath.

“Yeah.” I stare at the letter in my hands. “She could be going halfway across the country.” Away from me. The rest of the thought stays exactly where it belongs—buried, unspoken, mine alone to carry.

Cas is quiet for a moment. Then, “Xaden.” His voice has shifted. Careful now. Deliberate. “Do you want her to go?”

The question hits like a fist to the sternum.

It's not what I expected him to ask. I expected logistics, strategy, the practical dissection of a problem the way we've always handled things clinical, removed and safe. Not this. Not the question that cuts straight to the wound I've spent months pretending isn't there.

I don't answer. Not yet. I just sit with the weight of it, the terrible, inconvenient truth of it and stare at my hands.

The hands that couldn't make her stay.

CHAPTER FORTY

TOREN

]I had to hit rock bottom to finally understand where I stand.

Not just emotionally… completely. Every version of myself I'd been clinging to had to crumble before I could see clearly. And standing in the rubble of everything I thought I wanted, I finally understood what I actually needed.

Leaving him on that beach was one of the hardest things I have ever done. It felt like choosing to stop breathing, deliberate and painful and something my body fought against with everything it had. But I did it. I turned around and I walked away. I didn't let myself look back, because I knew if I did, I wouldn't be able to keep moving.

I'm choosing myself.

For the first time in my life, I am putting myself first, not out of selfishness, but out of survival. For me. For us. For the small, stubborn life growing inside me that deserves a mother who knows who she is.

But choosing myself doesn't feel the way I thought it would. It doesn't feel like freedom yet. It feels like grief wearing a brave face.

I stuff the last of my things into my duffle bag and pull it closed with a finality that settles in my chest like a stone.

I'm not the person I want to be. Somewhere between loving him and losing myself I became something I barely recognize, something with sharp edges and bloodstained hands. My father would be proud of who I've become and that thought alone is enough to make me sick.

I killed. The blood of my brother will forever live on my hands, embedded so deep no amount of washing will ever reach it.

I committed the worst sin a person can commit, and the fact that I did it to protect my child doesn't erase it. It doesn't absolve me. I made a choice, cold and irreversible. I will carry the weight of it every single day for the rest of my life. There is no version of this story where I come out clean.

“Are you sure I can't make you stay?”

I look up at the sound of Carn's voice. He and Harper are standing in the doorway together, wearing matching expressions of uncertainty. Worry and love they don't quite know how to put down. They're holding it out to me like an offering—stay, we've got you, you don't have to do this alone—and it takes everything I have not to take it.

But they don't understand. I can't stay here. I came back with a purpose, to stop a war, to do the right thing, to be someone I could be proud of. Instead I fell. I fell straight into the arms of my enemy and chose the boy who broke me over my own flesh and blood. And the part I truly cannot reconcile, the part that keeps me awake staring at the ceiling at three in the morning, is that I would do it again. Over and over and over. I would choose him every single time, and I don't know what that says about me, but I know it's not something I can sit with while I'm still standing in his shadow.

“I need to do this.” My voice comes out steadier than I feel.

Carn exhales slowly, the kind of exhale that carries more emotion than most people express in full sentences and nods. The sadness in his eyes is quiet and deep, the kind that belongs to someone who understands loss intimately. He stayed back a few extra days instead of returning to CHU with Tate and the others, and I haven't let myself think too hard about why, because thinking about it makes it harder to leave.

“Darlin’,” he says, his voice low and unhurried, “the world is a big place. You can get lost in it if you need to.”