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I waited for him to explain what that meant.
He didn’t.
He didn’t need to. I heard it all in his tone, saw it in his frosty, faraway gaze. Whatever he did was something that helped turn an eighteen-year-old boy into the hardened man in front of me now.
“Lotta shit happened between then and now which we don’t have time for,” he ran a hand along his beard. “Suffice it to say, five years turned into more. My Mom died year five. Dad a decade in. Much too young.” He shook his head. “No one in my family was alive by the time I got out. Not that I would’ve been recognizable to them by them. Or that I would’ve recognized them. I was a different man. A bad one.”
His gaze shifted away from me, as if he couldn’t stand to look at me. I bit my lip and kept myself rooted to my spot even though I wanted to go to him. There was an energy around Elden right now that told me he couldn’t be touched. Not right now.
“The people who initially protected me were the people I later became in charge of. In prison, at least,” Elden swallowed hard, adjusting his stance. “The same people who offered me a place. Money. All that shit. But I was smart enough to know that if I stayed with them, I’d be back in prison or dead before long. Or maybe I wouldn’t. Maybe I’d turn into something significantly worse in order to work my way up. But I didn’t do that. I left. Drove across the country. Found myself here.” He jutted his chin toward the windows, to the darkened streets.
“I knew there was no fucking way I was going to go back to conventional society.” He rubbed his chin. “Knew I didn’t want to be with the sick fucks who’d kept me alive all those years. And I figured Sons of Templar was the lesser of two evils. I told myself I could control it. Control is very fucking important when you’ve had someone else making decisions about when and where you eat, when you see the sun, when you sleep, what you can and can’t read.” His lips formed a hard line.
I thought about the bookshelves in his room at the club. His reading glasses.
“Control is very fucking important since losing it was what landed me in prison in the first place,” Elden said softly.
I didn’t know how tears weren’t running down my cheeks. I felt them. On the inside, at least.
A lot of things clicked into place. That cold distance Elden created with everyone. It was a survival tactic. Him being dour, silent. Because he was holding it together. He was locked down that tight.
Because in his mind, if he didn’t, he’d be back there.
He didn’t like small spaces. He’d told me that. And now I knew why. Because he’d been locked in a small place, behind bars, for years.
“I’ve been very fucking successful at maintaining that control, Violet.” He took a step forward, erasing the distance between us. I was thankful for his warmth, his scent. He grasped my chin. “Until you.”
I groaned when my phone buzzed. I felt naked irritation at the real world for intruding on a sacred moment. I knew that if I didn’t leave right then, there would be a biker hammering on the door and finding us here.
“I have to leave,” I whispered.
Elden nodded. “I know.”
“This doesn’t change anything,” I told him, meaning every word.
“I know,” he echoed, face unreadable.
I reached up on my tiptoes to lay my lips against his. “I mean it,” I whispered against his mouth.
“I know,” he repeated again, against my lips, cupping my jaw.
Although I wanted to say more, do more, be more for him, my phone buzzed again. I sighed, knowing this was all we had.
We didn’t say a thing as he walked me all the way to Mom’s restaurant. Certainly not goodbye. Because we knew we were far from goodbyes.
I tried my best to be present at the goodbye dinner, the one that my mom put so much effort into putting together, even if my mom forgot to tell be about it. My mom who had rebuilt her life, who had just opened a successful restaurant while pregnant, who had given birth to a gorgeous baby boy, who had survived things I couldn’t even imagine. I also tried to be present in front of the very impressive women mom surrounded herself with. The women married to the Sons of Templar.
Caroline Hargrave, for fuck’s sake, was married to Jagger. She was one of the most influential and impressive conflict journalists in decades. And a female one at that.
Not that Macy and Freya weren’t impressive too. They really were. Macy was the matriarch of this chapter. She had young children. She held this club together, organized everything that the club did. I saw that.
Freya was married to possibly the scariest man I’d seen in real life. Yet she made that man melt. She had killer style. A really famous YouTube channel.
They all treated me like I was their friend, not their friend’s daughter. It was a wonderful night.
Or would’ve been if Elden’s voice wasn’t ringing in my ears.
His story haunted me. He carried so much guilt. Blame. Not just for the man he murdered but for his parents. He truly thought he was the reason his parents were dead. His whole life had changed because of the one moment he lost control.
