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“Ma doing okay?” I asked.
Dad shrugged a shoulder. “Same as ever.”
“And are you—”
“No updates,” Dad said quickly, echoing my own words. “Don’t worry about us right now. Go find your mate, kid. You two need each other. More than ever now.” He bowed his head over Ma’s body and pressed his lips to her wrist. “This world’s too brutal to go it alone.”
It hurt, that distance. My mating bond to Felicity was strong. Wolves mated for life. My love for her would never change.
But… I wasn’t sure the same could be said for her anymore. I’d broken too many promises. I hadn’t kept her safe.
I’d let that bitch steal our sons.
My dad was right.
I headed outside.
Chapter4
Felicity
Every person is a collection of their losses. You don’t realize it until you’ve lost something yourself, but it’s true.
By that logic, for most of my life I’d been made of hair ties and spelling bees, loose teeth, single socks that disappeared in the dryer, the twenty pounds of awkward baby fat I now carried on my sense of self-worth instead of my hips. The father I’d never had. The mother who was present, then not, depending on which rich man she was currently in love with and how much that man liked kids. A childhood wasted trying to parent my mother through her heartbreaks and divorces before she moved on to the next, all while trying to parent myself as well.
After Detective Moreno left, I drifted aimlessly through the gardens. I walked the path that Kingston and Gena must have taken with the boys that morning, before everything went to shit. Had they been flirting when it happened? Imagining how my sons would grow up? Smiling and laughing, making plans in the morning sun—all until Melony arrived to rip it all to shreds?
They’d lost each other for a little while. A failed fling between Xander’s oldest brother and my closest female friend. A love affair that had been doomed from the start. Kingston never had his moon dream about Gena, so it hadn’t mattered how she felt about him.
The babies had brought them back together again, this time as godparents. Together, they’d smiled at our boys, played peekaboo. Gena had laughed while Kingston pressed the boys’ tiny feet to his ear, pretending to take phone calls. For a perfect month, I’d been so certain that Kingston would wake up one morning and announce that he’d finally had his moon dream. That, like Xander, maybe his had just taken a while to set in.
But it wasn’t meant to be.
Thanks to Melony, Kingston had lost a leg. Gena was lucky to have gotten off with only a concussion, but she’d stopped answering my texts once she was discharged from the hospital.
In the end, being my friend had put a target on her back. Maybe I’d lost her for good.
I should have been used to loss by now, but grief wasn’t a muscle. You couldn’t just flex it, tear its tissues, let it repair itself with rest. Grief was the weight of a cruel world on tender shoulders. Mine were screaming for relief, but there was no way to lessen the load, no quick trick to set it aside. Bear enough of it and, eventually, it would kill you. But there was nowhere else to put it. It had nowhere else to go.
Maybe that was why it hurt so much.
“Cheeks?”
Xander emerged from behind a hedge, looking just as broken and exhausted as I knew I looked—as I was.
“You’re back.” Neither of us had been sleeping at night. Not really. For hours these past nights, I’d lain in the darkness of our room and felt him awake and silent next to me. When I finally did drift off last night, I awoke this morning to find the bed empty and Xander gone.
“I—” He licked his lips and nodded. His Adam’s apple bobbed. “Yeah. I am.”
I pressed my fingers against my thighs to stop them from trembling. “I wasn’t sure if you would be.”
His brow furrowed. “I’ll always come back for you.”
The gravel of the garden path crunched beneath his boots. His golden hair was dark at the roots, unwashed, and damp with sweat. Deep trenches ran between his waves like he’d dragged his fingers through the same channels over and over again. His stubble made his jaw look more rugged than ever. In the greens of his irises, I could see my refracted and warped reflection.
His eyes were the same shape as Rylan’s, and Ryder had Xander’s nose and lips.
I lowered my gaze. I couldn’t stand to look at him when all I could see were the twins.
