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“Sorry,” I mumble.
She glances back. “Was that a real apology?”
I roll my eyes. “It’s as real as an apology gets when it’s given to someone who at one point attempted to burn me and my pack alive.”
“I wasn’t really going to do that,” she starts, before sighing. “Fine. I was pissed off enough to do it at the time. Your mate humiliated me in front of everyone. She made me look like an idiot.”
“Because you took a picture…”
“Oh, so what?” she blurts. “She stole my mate, and she’s making him share with you and that sad sack Beta. It’s not fair. I love…” She takes a breath. “I loved Everett. He was supposed to love me back. I thought he did. Then she came along, and…”
“It was over between you two long before that,” I remind her.
She laughs. “It was always on and off with us. I thought that was just our thing. We were going to get back together.”
“It was never fated,” I say, kind of annoyed that I’m starting to feel sorry for her. “You two were never going to work. Breaking up and getting back together all the time isn’t romantic. It’s toxic.”
She sits down, gives me sad eyes that I know are real. She isn’t trying to look pretty while she’s miserable, she’s just feeling her emotions. This is why I kind of liked her for Everett at one point. She’s volatile, and a bitch, but every now and then I’d see hints of the real Bianca. The hurt little kid that lives under the snide comments and multitude of defence mechanisms she uses to keep people at a distance. I could connect with that kid. I could understand her.
“I know,” she finally admits. “I couldn’t see it when it was happening. I just saw him abandoning me. I saw all of you abandoning me. It felt like I was losing the only honest, true thing I’d ever had in my life.”
Her voice shakes a little, and I take her hand in mine.
“I know what it’s like to be abandoned,” I tell her, remembering how alone I felt when I realized my parents weren’t my birth parents. It didn’t matter how great they were, I spent a long time wondering why my real parents abandoned me, and I’ll never get answers on that one.
“Yeah, well, your pack all want you back,” she says. “That’s why I’m here. To make sure you don’t get damaged while they wait for the chance to challenge your new Alpha.”
“My parents aren’t my birth parents,” I tell her, seeing her eyes light up at the first hint of gossip on the way. “My birth parents abandoned me when I was young.”
She stares at me for a minute, and I’m ninety-per-cent sure she’s about to start asking questions as if she’s trying to get all of them out of her head in one breath, and then she sighs.
“That sucks. Do you have anything to remember them by?” she asks.
“I guess, my baby blanket,” I tell her, not believing I’m revealing my deepest darkest secret to a girl who was no more than a frenemy at the best of times. “My adoptive parents keep it in a box with my baby pictures and all that kind of stuff. I like to smell it sometimes. Even if I know it’s been washed a million times, I can’t help imagining it’s kept my mother’s scent.”
She smiles, her eyes glassy. “I still have the bear my dad gave me before he disappeared. I called him Fuzz. He’s kind of ugly, honestly, but I repair him every time his stitching comes loose…” She clears her throat. “At least I did, before I died.”
“I wish we’d talked about this before,” I tell her.
She shrugs. “You were always partying, and I was always pissed off. We didn’t get a chance to talk much about anything that mattered.”
Maybe if we had, she wouldn’t have done what she did, and Everett wouldn’t have felt the need to end her to keep us protected from her wrath.
“Talking about things that matter,” I start, making her raise an eyebrow. “Do you have any idea why the Alpha locked me in a closet?”
She shrugs. “Maybe you talked too much on the ride over.”
“Like I would.”
She snorts.
“Seriously, though?”
“You want me to go snoop around,” she deduces, not sounding very amused.
“It might be helpful. I’d kind of like to know why I’m here.”
“In the closet?”
