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He leaned hard against the dresser because he couldn’t hold himself upright anymore. And when his wallet was empty, he slapped the entire billfold down on the dresser and laid his head down on the pile and sobbed. Loud, gasping heaves that drowned out everything but the sound of his grief.
He tried to keep it muffled. He buried his head in his arm and pressed his forearm to his mouth, but it didn’t stop the pain. His friend was gone. And not just one friend but four.
He didn’t know how long he struggled. One minute? One thousand? Every breath was wretched; every exhale was ragged. And then he felt a hand on his shoulder.
He stiffened immediately, trying to cut off the display. It ended up choking him. He wanted to straighten up, but instead, someone shoved a T-shirt into his hand. He used it to wipe his face. And then he heard words spoken in a low brogue.
“Grief is an honorable emotion. There is no need to hide it.”
The Scottish asshole speaking some fortune-cookie platitude. Yordan wanted to dismiss it, but the words sank in anyway. And once inside, he felt the meaning of them soothe him. There was nothing shameful about mourning his friends, and fuck anyone who looked down on him because he was weeping like a child. He’d gotten the news the day before his pack had taken on an evil witch coven. There’d been no time to properly mourn then, and afterward, he and Gummy had gotten rip-roaring drunk. That had been more about burying the pain instead of feeling it.
Now, he’d somehow ended up sitting on Coffee’s unmade bed, and he couldn’t stop himself. The tears wouldn’t stop flowing.
“We’re alone,” The Scot said, his hand squeezing tighter. “No one will see.”
The Scot was seeing, but it was too late to prevent that. So Yordan let the grief flow. He knew it was an open wound that needed to bleed. He stopped fighting it and breathed into the cotton tee while the tears seeped into the fabric. McNabb remained at his side through it all, eventually sitting beside him and drawing him close with his large body, warm and comforting.
Yordan sobbed like a child for a very long time. It wasn’t just because he grieved Coffee and Mother and all the others who had died in the last two years. He grieved for himself, the survivor who had to go on somehow with a gaping hole in his life where his friends once stood.
He’d managed to do it for a while. For eighteen fucking months while he filled his life with postapocalypse cleanup and poking at his packmates. But here, now, he saw what was wrong with his life.
He missed his friends. He missed Coffee, who was more of a brother to him than anyone else. And he missed the innocent belief that as trained combat werewolves, they could face down anything and win.
Sometimes surviving sucked. And with that realization came a fresh wave of tears. Fortunately, these felt like cleansing tears. And in time, they faded to nothing. Eventually, he could breathe again without shuddering. And while he used the tee to mop up his face, The Scot finally asked a question that had obviously been weighing on his mind.
“How’d you get into the room?”
“What?”
“We’ve been trying from the beginning. Couldn’t get into his room or Cream’s.”
“I just opened it.”
“But—”
“There’s a trick to it. On both their doors.”
“Oh.” A long pause followed as the man leaned back against the wall. “What kind of trick?”
Yordan sighed, wondering why this was so fucking important. “It’s a way you lift and twist it. Takes half a second to learn.”
“And would this trick make the door unbreakable?”
“What? Of course not.” The doors on the bedrooms were plywood. A hard sneeze could break them. Unless… He frowned at The Scot. “You couldn’t get the doors open?”
McNabb pointed to the closed adjoining door to Cream’s room. “Neither one.”
“What did you try?”
“A locksmith. A chainsaw. A sledgehammer.”
What?
“Then it became—”
Yordan was smart enough to finish the sentence for him. “Another thing on the list.”
“Yup.”
