Prologue #2
We. I try not to laugh, mostly because I’m starting to feel bad for the kid and don’t want to keep laughing at him. But fuck off. Travis isn’t an imbecile. He’s not letting Roe make any decisions. Consequential ones, anyway.
“I think a week, maybe two, should be enough for you to get your head on straight,” Roe says, still smiling as he heads back to the door. “Remind you where your loyalties lie.”
The door closes and locks behind him, once again condemning me to the sporadic lights and drip drip drip from the pipe.
I don’t know how much time passes, but my upper back is almost entirely numb when I feel a familiar tug on the back of my neck.
Wren.
Relief washes over me. I immediately accept the telepathic link.
“Are you okay?” I ask her.
“Yes. We made it.”
Her voice fills my ears, unleashing a flood of emotion inside me that would have me keeling over if I weren’t strung up from the ceiling.
They made it through the Blacklands. But I didn’t doubt it for a second. Xavier knew what would happen if he allowed any harm to come to her.
For a second, I consider telling her I’m locked in the stockade with my arms above my head, but she has enough shit to deal with right now. Knowing Wren, she’d abandon her plan to join the Uprising and tear into Sanctum Point like a hellfucking hurricane to rescue me.
I don’t need rescuing. My brothers aren’t going to kill me. They need me too much. Besides, they do care about me, in their own fucked-up ways. Travis, certainly. Roe…I suppose it depends on how much jealousy he’s harboring on any particular day.
“I can’t talk,” she continues, “but I just wanted to say…” There’s a beat. “…to say I love you.”
At those three words, my heart expands three sizes.
She has no idea what that does to me. The raw, bone-deep emotion that closes around my throat at the knowledge that this woman loves me.
Goddamn fitting, right? I spent years running from anyone who even came close to voicing that sentiment.
The moment I thought a woman might be developing deeper feelings for me, I was out.
Gone. Wouldn’t indulge it, because I knew loving them back wasn’t even in the realm of possibility.
Not when my heart already belonged to someone else.
It’s one of the reasons I wasn’t against hooking up with Wren before I knew who she really was, at least after I got over the fact that she was my subordinate. She was so closed off, so emotionally unavailable to me—to anyone, really—I didn’t fear for one second that she might fall in love with me.
It threw me for a loop, how deep under my skin she burrowed, how much it bothered me that she wouldn’t let me in.
It made me determined to crack her shell, and in retrospect, I suspect a part of me must’ve sensed, on some subconscious level, that she was Daisy, the girl I’d been telepathically linked with my whole life.
“I love you, too, Dove,” I tell her, and nearly laugh because it’s such a fucking understatement.
Those simple, humble words don’t even come close to describing the depth of my feelings for her. What I feel for her is a force of nature. It makes it hard to breathe and impossible to stay in control.
This woman fucking owns me.
I’ve always been a master of control. My father and I are similar in that way.
But from the moment I met Wren, she unleashed chaos inside of me.
No one else in this world makes me feel so fucking helpless and so fucking alive at the same time.
She’s owned my heart since we were kids, and she’s going to own it until the day I die.
“Reach out when you can,” I add, and although I want nothing more than to hear her voice in my head for as long as I can, I don’t stop her when she breaks the telepathic connection.
If we speak any longer, she’s bound to pick up on the fact that something is wrong. Daisy always knew when to drop a subject, but I’m learning that Wren…not so much. Wren Darlington is too stubborn and too astute for her own good.
I’m still trying to reconcile the two parts of her that shape the complicated woman I love.
Daisy, my best friend and confidante from childhood, whose mind I spontaneously linked with years ago. The girl who showed me her vulnerabilities and knew all of mine.
And Wren, who’s fire and passion. The woman who, from the moment I saw her, drew me to her in a way that didn’t make a goddamn lick of sense to me.
As a wave of fatigue washes over me, I close my eyes and rest my head against my biceps. It’s twitching from the strain of being thrust over my head for hours.
I hope she’s okay.
I trust Xavier to keep her safe, I do. He would throw himself in front of a bullet for me or anyone I cared about, and I would do the same for him without hesitation.
But every fiber of my body screams for me to protect Wren, and the thought of outsourcing that task to anyone else, even my oldest friend, makes me want to slam my fist through a brick wall.
It killed me not to go with them after we got her out of the city, but I have pressing matters here. My mother. My power-hungry brothers. And we don’t yet know the extent of the damage done to my father’s mind.
Xavier will keep Wren safe while I get my house in order. I have to trust that.
But if even one hair on her head is harmed, I will burn this entire Continent to the ground.