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My throat closes up again. A sob builds, and I shove my face further into her shoulder, soaking up the comforting touch, and let it rip out of me. "Shhhh, it's okay. Let it out," she soothes as I unleash months’ worth of heartache into her Hog's Head t-shirt.
"I just don't know what it is. If I knew wh-what I was doing to a-attract them, I'd stop."
"They were predators, Summer. There's nothing you could have done," she pauses and then leans away from me, so I pull back, too, to look at her. "But... babe... Pack Whitlock is not like your old pack."
I feel my eyebrows pull down, and my head shakes in denial. "Ava, Iheard them–"
She tilts her head and looks sympathetically at me. In a soft voice, she says, "Did you hear them admit to drugging you? Or that you are their mate?"
"To drugging me!" I growl back automatically, standing up and pacing her small office. The smell of burnt nutmeg surrounds us as my frustration and stress leak out of me in droves. But once I say the words out loud, I know they aren't true.
If she's ever going to believe she's our mate, it's now.
They never did say anything about drugs or tricking me into anything. But that doesn't mean anything. Their words were admission enough. Why else would I have developed these feelings so hard, so fast, for an entire pack of strangers? I mean, seriously. What would the odds be of me escaping a group of alphas that pretended to be my fated mates, only for me to run into the arms of my actual mates?
Slim to freaking none.
That's not my life. This isn't some fairytale. Good things don't happen to me. Not since my mom died, since I met Jade, and everything went to hell. It's much more likely that they're going to try to convince me I'm their mate, that they've poisoned me than it is that I actually am.
"Summer. They didn't drug you. I know that, and I know you do, too. They aregood.You deserve somethinggood.Look past your trauma and let yourself be loved."
Burning starts up again in my now dry eyes, and I shake my head in vehement denial.
Ava blows out a frustrated breath. "Oh, for fuck's sake. Come with me."
Two
Summer
Ava grabsmy hand and pulls me out of her office and deeper into the hallway—the opposite direction from the bar. At the end of the hall, just before we hit the wall, there's a thick black curtain to the right that I've never noticed before. She brushes it aside and pulls me across the threshold with her. Just beyond it is a set of stairs leading up to a door. Does she live here? Above the bar?
We trudge up the stairs, barely a creak beneath our feet. When we reach the top of the stairs, she pulls out a set of keys, ones I've seen her open the bar door with, but she fits a different one into this door. Yeah, she definitely lives here.
Ava tosses her keys on the tall decorative table to the left of the door as I look around. The space is a decent-sized studio apartment with the kitchen just ahead, and the whole bedroom slash living room off to the left. It's significantly larger than mine; that much is clear from the jump. But my eyes can't see anything past the crowded corner across from her bed, near her closet.
"It's..."A murder wall,I want to say, but hold my words back. But it's what it looks like to me. In every crime movie, there's one of these. It's a bulletin board with pictures, post-it notes with words scrawled messily on them, and different colored strings connecting each pinned item.
"My past," she murmurs. "It's my past. And my present. And my future.” She takes a big breath and lets it out. “It's everything I am."
Her words are so sad, soangry,that I pause on my way over to it to look at her. I've never seen her look like this. I've seen her calm when she kicks patrons out, boisterous when she's interacting with the regulars, and even pissed when she's having trouble with the books or on nights when everything seems to go wrong in the bar. This, though... whatever this is, hits deep for her. A fury unlike anything I've seen, including Jade before she backhanded me, lines every inch of her stunning face. A pain so deep in her eyes, I'm not sure how she's still standing. I'm almost afraid to move, to break the spell and wrap her in my arms so I can offer her any kind of comfort.
Before I can, she shakes out of the daze she's in and walks over to it, nodding for me to follow. When I get close enough, I stare into her eyes, seeking permission, and she nods; I inspect the board with more scrutiny.
There's a couple–a man and a woman–smack dab in the middle, with the names Kyle and Nora Ellis pinned beneath it. I can't put my finger on it, but they look familiar. Maybe I've seen them at a charity event somewhere when I was with Pack Monroe. Right as I'm about to spiral into the where of how I know them, my eyes lock on three words. Big and bold and angry. I say angry because there are several black splotches like the pen was pushed too hard when someone wrote them.
Passion Pack Drug.
With wide, incredulous eyes, I jerk back around to Ava, who is staring intensely at me. "How? I don't understand..."
But then I notice something. Her slightly upturned nose and silvery blonde hair is almost identical to the woman in the picture. Looking between her and the board, I notice she's also got the same piercing green eyes as the man. "My name is Ava Ellis."
Is that the ground I feel brushing up against my jaw?
It has to be, with the way it just dropped at her news. "Your parents?" I'm suddenly incapable of full sentences.
"Created the passion pack drug." Though her face is grim, her tone now holds an immense amount of guilt. Guilt she has no point in feeling unless she helped them make it. Which there is no way she did. Not the Ava I know and love. Words elude me at her confession. It stunned me speechless.
She doesn't need me to respond, though, because she continues. "Which is why Iknowthey didn't drug you, babe. I have devoted my entire adult life to stopping my parents. I know every symptom, every warning sign."
