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“Because he’s as much a part of this family as the rest of us.” Storm shrugs as he pours another whiskey and hands it to me.
I don’t drink often. I hate being out of control, and more than that, I can’t protect Wynter if I’m drunk. My sole purpose on this earth is keeping her safe, and I won’t risk that for a few hours of drunken fun. But considering I had to watch a man I considered a brother get married today from afar, and the people who were more my parents than the ones responsible for my birth were dead, I think I deserve a drink just as much as anyone else in the room.
“He stopped being a part of this family when he broke Wynter,” she snaps, pushing up from her seat and walking toward me in quick, clumsy steps.
Everyone underestimates the youngest Saint James, but I know better than that. She has a fire that I don’t think anyone will ever be able to tame. And more for them if they try.
“How dare you walk into this house after everything you did to Wynter. You have no idea what you did to her when you left.”
Her words are harsh, but she’s wrong. I know exactly what I did to her when I left. Wynter and I are two parts of the same whole, and when I left, I tore us both in half. I’ve been walking around for the last eight years without half of my heart, half of my soul, half of my very being, just the same as she has.
“Snow,” Storm warns. “You don’t have all the facts.”
She turns to her brother, staring at him incredulously as I glance at Wynter, staring at me with confusion. After all these years, she doesn’t know why I left her asleep in her bed one morning and never came back, but she’ll know soon enough. Once she’s past her grief, past the pain of losing her parents, she’ll know exactly why I couldn’t stay.
“He broke your sister’s heart!” Snow yells. “What other facts matter?”
“We’re not doing this right now, Snow. Everett has every right to be here. Mom and Dad always saw him as a son, even after what happened between him and Wynter. Just know that he didn’t leave because he wanted to or because he didn’t love Wynter. Let’s just leave it at that for tonight. It’s been an emotional day, and it’s late. Let’s go to bed, and we can start looking at funeral arrangements in the morning.”
As if my presence had made them forget what the next few days would look like for the family, Snow and Wynter both choke back a sob, and it takes everything in me not to reach for her, not to hold her through her pain. But I suspect if I reach for her, I might lose an arm.
My little dove is a spitfire. She doesn’t admit her pain easily, not since I broke her. She’s a queen in every way and accepting comfort from me is against her nature.
If nothing else, when I left, I made her stronger. A phoenix rising from the ashes of her broken heart.
Rayne helps Emerson from where she’s perched on the edge of the lounge, her movements still stiff from her healing injuries from when the Russos took her. She looks at me nervously before stepping forward and wrapping her arms around my body carefully. “I’m sorry for your loss. And thank you for all you did to save me. I didn’t get a chance to say it at the time,” she whispers, but I know the others can hear.
When shock crosses the girls’ faces, I realize they likely didn’t know I had any part in Emerson’s rescue, and a little bit of the ice they both feel toward me melts.
“You’re welcome. I never want them to know what it feels like to live without their heart as I have.” I don’t bother to whisper. What’s the point? Wynter will soon know everything that we’ve hidden from her over the years for her own safety. She’ll soon know that leaving her went against everything in my blood.
Rayne gives me a weak smile over her shoulder before tugging his new wife against him and disappearing up the stairs.
“Take your old room,” Storm says as I finally tear my attention from Wynter.
I want to talk to her, to pour all the broken pieces of my heart out and tell her exactly why I had to break us all those years ago. But there’s a lifetime ahead of us for that conversation, because I’ll never let her go again.
I stayed away. I did what was right. But I can’t do it anymore. Wynter is the other part of me, and I want to feel whole again, even if it means I have to spend the rest of my life protecting her.
I nod and head up the stairs, somehow dragging my gaze away from hers as I slip into the room I slept in more often than my own in my last years of high school. My eyes dart around the space that feels like I used a lifetime ago. Realistically, eight years isn’t that long, but I’m a completely different person than I was then.
I close the door behind me and wait for the click of doors and the house to go dark before finally laying my head on the pillow. Storm and Rayne aren’t ready to start thinking about this yet, but Russo started a war tonight. He hit the family where it hurt, and while we can take tonight to lick our wounds and mourn the only parents we had, tomorrow is a new day and as the sun rises, vengeance will come right along with the light it provides.
3
Wynter
Awareness comes to me slowly. The edge of consciousness beckoning me from my dreamless state and back into my sordid reality.
Somewhere in the back of my mind, I hoped it was all a dream, that I would wake up this morning and my mom would be in the kitchen with a cup of coffee in hand as she read the paper to Dad, which had been their morning ritual our whole lives. Long before we got out of bed in the morning, they coveted that time for themselves, and when we all moved out and started our own lives, they never stopped.
I reach to my bedside table, fumbling around for my phone until my fingers brush along the cool metal. The time flashes onto the screen and I groan. It isn’t morning. Not really at least. It’s five o’clock, and now the harsh reality of my day has settled on my chest. There’s no way I’m going to be able to go back to sleep.
I swing my legs out of bed and wrap myself in a robe I keep here. It’s not uncommon for me to spend the night here, not wanting to drive home in the dark after visiting my parents, so at least I have something to wear. Packing a bag was the last thing on my mind as I barreled out of my apartment after receiving the news that my parents were gone. All I could think about was telling my siblings. That was the hardest part, being the one to break their hearts, the one to tell them that our parents were dead.
I pad across the wooden floorboards, the old estate we moved into when I was too young to remember still has most of its original features. Fireplaces, crown moldings, a spiral staircase that leads to the attic. I spent some of my happiest memories in these halls, and now I’ll have to plan to lay the two people I loved more than anything to rest.
The stairs are cold under my bare feet as I make my way down to the kitchen. If I can’t sleep, I may as well make some breakfast for everyone for when they wake up.
