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If they ever try to tell anyone about this I’ll deny it, but I burst into tears of relief. They’re alive! They’re okay!
For a moment there’s nothing but kissing and holding on, and I’m not sure which of the three I’m even doing it to at any given moment, I’m just so overcome. It’s relief like I’ve never known. I thought I was dead, I thought I would lose them, but instead we’re all alive and okay together. For a moment nothing else matters. Not Roanac or Donovan, not anything else in the world. So long as I have my mates with me, that’s all that I care about. That’s all I need to be happy.
It all becomes too much, and I start crying harder, so much so that I hiccup a little. I haven’t cried much at all since I lost my parents, and certainly not this hard in years. It’s overwhelming.
My mates seem to realize this, because they stop and circle around me, making soothing noises.
“Hey, hey,” North says immediately as the men’s joyful faces switch to concern. He pulls me into his chest and hugs me. “It’s okay. You’re okay.”
I cling to him. I’m so relieved that they’re all right. It’s like I can’t breathe fast enough to get all the air in.
“Slow down,” Cain advises, and I realize I’m close to hyperventilating. I slow down my breathing, forcing myself to hold it for a few seconds before releasing it.
Raven takes my hands and squeezes them tightly, then kisses my knuckles.
I’m so overwhelmed. “You guys are okay.”
“You were worried we weren’t?” Cain asks. He strokes my hair. “I think it should be the other way around. It was touch and go for a bit there.”
I look around and get a proper look at the room we’re in. It’s a bedroom of some kind. I don’t recognize it. It’s not the one I was in at the guys’ apartment where we had our first night, but it’s not our safe house, either. The walls are painted a dark, soothing blue, but that’s the only decoration.
“Where are we?”
“Another safe house,” Cain says, and then winces. “Well, safe-ish. For now.”
“We couldn’t go back to the old one since Donovan knows about it.” North growls like he’s frustrated with himself. “And since Donovan’s still at large…”
“We weren’t able to make him a priority,” Cain explains.
“You should have,” I argue. “I was already gone.”
“But you weren’t, and if youweregone, there’d be no point to taking out Donovan anyway,” North says. He sounds upset at the very idea of me suggesting he deal with something other than saving me, so I don’t argue further.
“We’ll have to find somewhere else soon but for now, this will work,” Cain finishes. “It’s out of the way but it’s fine. It’s someone’s old half-assed backyard bunker in upstate New York. I guess some rich people got paranoid during the Cold War. So we spruced it up just a little as a last-ditch resort.”
I reach up and brush his hair back out of his face. Cain attempts a smile, but I can see in his eyes that he’s still worried about me.
“How are you?” Raven asks. He gently feels along my chest. “Any of that hurt?”
“No. I feel fine, honestly, just a bit groggy. I think from the head injury.”
“Head injury?” North practically snarls.
I explain what happened when Roanac took me away from them and separated us. I falter when I get to the part about, well, the last thing I remember.
I thought I was dying. That I was dead. How do you tell your mates that?
The three men nod solemnly and don’t interrupt until I stumble and kind of let myself peter out.
“You were unconscious when we got to you,” Cain says quietly.
Raven looks away, his eyes closed like he’s trying to block out the memory of the image. North continues to growl softly in his chest. I’m not sure he even realizes that he’s doing it.
“And what about Roanac?” I ask. “How did you guys kill him?”
The men all look at each other, and I get a sinking feeling in my stomach.
Cain takes a deep breath. “We didn’t kill him.”
