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“They will,” Cian says, releasing me and taking a step away. I immediately miss having his arm around me, but it’s impossible to miss Mom’s soft sigh of relief when Cian and Rune move away from me.
I go to her, and as soon as I’m close, she takes my hand and tugs me back into her room. “Come inside with me, Everleigh. Where it’s safe.”
I want to tell her it’s safe with Cian, Rune, and Kylian, but I don’t know how. It took time, and it took patience for them to win my trust. Sloane stole over twenty years of Mom’s life from her. How can I convince her they would never hurt her?
I think of Resa, who believed all alphas were the kinds of pricks who deserved a pair of blunt, rusty pair of scissors. Mom must hate alphas even more than Resa does.
I give her a reassuring smile as Rune and Cian retreat even farther from the door—and me. And I hope I’ll find some way of reassuring Mom that Pack Ashe are alphas she can trust.
“Okay, Mom. Let’s get you packed up.”
Packing doesn’t take long. Or it wouldn’t if Mom didn’t stop to pull me into her arms and stare down at me with a soft smile in her eyes.
“Everleigh…” she breathes. “I can’t believe you’re really here.”
Neither can I.
In the end, it takes nearly thirty minutes to grab the only things Mom wants. Her sketchpad and pencil. Everything else would only remind her of this place, and she’d rather not wear white ever again.
I lead the way out of her room, Mom gripping my right hand tight as she holds on to her sketchpad with her other hand.
Rune, Cian, and Kylian are standing at the end of the hallway. Cian has his cell phone in his hand like he just finished up a phone call, though I can’t imagine who he was calling. Maybe their attorney?
“You ready to go, cher?” Rune asks.
Mom’s hand spasms in mine, and she falls back a step, dragging me with her. I’m not the only one to notice, having to dig deep for a smile. “Ready.”
Kylian pulls the door open. “Then, by all means, let’s get out of this shithole.”
I don’t know that I would call this probably very expensive private clinic a shithole. After what they did to my mom, maybe the name fits.
Mom and I follow Cian, Kylian, and Rune out of the building. If there are any other patients or guests here, I don’t hear them. The staff stay out of sight, so we don’t encounter a soul as our footsteps echo down the spotless, white floors of the clinic Sloane used to cage my mom.
We got here in one car. Rune’s car, a navy Mercedes. As we leave, I spot two more vehicles outside the clinic.
A sleek black limo with tinted windows, and a driver waiting beside the open back door. Cian calls out to him, “They’ll be right with you, Devin.”
I frown, confused about what’s going on.
The other car is a gray BMW, the driver having parked just behind the limo. Before I have time to wonder who it is, the driver’s side door swings open and Rune, who’s standing in front of Mom and me, orders us to stop.
Over Rune’s right shoulder, I see him.
A man in a gray suit with salt-and-pepper-gray hair and mint-green eyes.
Mom shrinks away.
I take in his eyes, identical to mine, and his nose… I’ve seen that same nose in my reflection almost every day to know why she would shrink away like that.
Thisman is the alpha who robbed Mom of her freedom and much of her future.
Alpha Sloane Eddiswood.
Chapter58
Everleigh
Sloane Eddiswood surges toward us.
