Chapter 17
Torin
“Still playing the cynic with a hidden heart?” My mom asks, green eyes sparkling.
It’s two in the afternoon, and we’re in her silver and green living room.
I study her over the rim of my glass. “If there was a reason for this meeting, can we get it over with? I have trash to take out.”
The saccharine-sweet smile she flashes me instantly sets me on high alert. “Oh? I heard your little downtrodden omega decided she would be the one taking out the trash, and that trash was—” She points a fingernail at me. “—you.”
I drain the whiskey from my glass and set it on the coffee table between the two couches facing each other. She’s on one, and I’m on the other. “Provoking me stopped working when I was ten. Get to the point, Mother.”
Her eyebrow rises. “And here I thought it was when that friend of yours ran off with the girl you professed to love. Just like your little omega nearly ran off with the gardener.”
My jaw hardens, but I don’t say a word.
Her smile is full of impish delight. That’s nothing new.
This viper is never happier than when she’s lashing out at someone, and she’s happiest of all when she’s focused on ruining my life.
Her knowing my gardener is new though. If Mom knew about him, she was responsible for putting him under our roof and pointing him at Juniper.
“I need you to do something for me,” she says, bored now that I’m no longer reacting.
She doesn’t ask about the gardener. She likely doesn’t care. As soon as he made a move on Juniper, he was out the door the same day and told nothing good would happen to him if he ever showed his face again. And he hasn’t.
“No.” I get to my feet and turn to leave before I wind up like my father: rotting away in a prison cell.
“If you want to see little Charlotte again, you will do as I ask, Torin.” All sweetness evaporates. Something cold, hard and vengeful takes its place.
I stop, my back to her. “She’s sick.”
“And if you want to ensure she gets the medication that she needs to keep breathing, you won’t waste my time with your childish stubbornness.”
Paper rustles, and I turn to face the woman calmly flipping through a fashion magazine with an empty cocktail glass on the table beside her.
Most people have fond memories of their parents doing fun activities with them.
My childhood is full of memories of my father out fucking anything that moved while my mother drank herself stupid pretending he still loved her.
“What do you want, Mother?”
Pleased, she smiles and sets down the magazine she was probably only pretending to read. “I need you to look after something. People have been at the house looking for papers.”
Cops. I know because they interviewed me about what, if anything, I knew about Asylum, Dad’s private members' club. My relationship with my parents has never been good. I told the police that, and I guess they heard it from enough other people to know I wasn’t involved in the sick shit my father and his friends were.
“So give them to one of your friends.” I fake a gasp. “Oh, wait, aren’t they all in jail?”
The corners of her eyes tighten. “You can look after the papers, or I will find someone else to do so.” She lifts one hand and studies her long, cream-painted fingernails. “Though I’m not sure if little Charlotte—”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” I snap. “Give them to me.”
I don’t bother appealing to her motherly instincts. I’d be wasting my time. Holding a sick girl hostage takes a certain kind of person. My mom wants what she wants, and damn anyone who gets in her way.
She sets her glass down on the coffee table and picks up a medium-sized archive box from the floor beside her. She offers it to me. “Here. Bring it back when strangers have stopped invading my privacy.”
“Your husband went to prison for buying and selling omegas. They won’t stop until they get everyone responsible.” I give her a knowing look. “Even their complicit wives.”
Her eyes are flints of ice. “You think I don’t know who was responsible for putting him there? I don’t know how you did it, but I know it was you, and you will suffer right alongside him. Until my dying day, you will suffer, Torin.”
“So point the finger, Mother,” I taunt. “Go to the cops and tell them I was involved.”
Her lips flatten.
I widen my eyes. “Oh, wait, you need evidence.” Because I know the games she likes to play, I fish my cell phone out of my pocket and flip it so she can see the screen.
“It’s been recording since before I walked in here.
So if you’re thinking about telling the cops that all this incriminating evidence is mine… ”
She shoves the box at me, snarling, “Get out of my house.”
And I know I’ve won, this round at least.
I take the box from her and walk away. I’ve nearly reached the entryway when she calls out, “If you take those papers to the police, the first person who will pay for it is—”
“Yes,” I cut in, voice hard. “Please threaten to harm your deathly sick next-door neighbor. That never gets old,” I say sarcastically.
The servants are nowhere to be seen as I walk through the entryway and outside the house.
My phone rings as I slide behind the wheel of my BMW. I dump the box on the passenger seat, scrubbing my hands on the front of my jeans to wipe away the memory of having touched the disgusting thing. Mom could have burned it, but whatever nastiness that box contains probably belongs to my dad.
Slamming my door shut, I answer the call after glancing at the caller ID. “Yeah?”
“Just checking you’re still alive,” Archer says.
He always calls after I have a ‘request’ to visit my family. The first time was a joke. It stopped being a joke a long time ago.
I put my phone on the hands-free mount in my car and, with a sigh, study the house I just walked out of.
It’s one of the most beautiful homes in the city.
Twelve bedrooms. Nearly twenty acres. Upward of ten million dollars if Mom ever decided she wanted to sell it.
The Pearson Mansion is another in a long line of mansions in an exclusive, gated community that overlooks the city.
And a cage.
“She wants me to hold something for her. The police must think she’s involved for them to be sniffing so long.” I don’t bother looking through the box. I know what my parents are capable of, and I feel dirty having touched the thing.
“Give whatever it is to the cops,” is his response. From the frustration in his voice, he knows that dealing with my mom isn’t as easy as just going to the cops.
I snap on my seatbelt and turn away from the house, relieved to be away from it—and her. “She’s a gin-soaked black widow, Archer. It’s why the servants hide from her. Whatever we do, we have to get Lottie free first.”
And not just Lottie. Enough medication that she won’t die within days of us freeing her.
Once, we nearly got away. Now my mom and her friends use Lottie to control us. None of us wanted anything to do with Asylum, and because we know all their secrets, they can never let us go for fear of what we’ll say.
“I’m going out again,” he says.
I start the engine and pull away from the mansion. “You won’t find her.”
Juniper Harrington has disappeared.
The first place we went looking for her after security threw us out of the hospital when we tried to visit her was her parents' house.
“We don’t have a daughter called Juniper,” they said, and shut the door in our faces.
Later, we bribed a servant who admitted her parents had refused to visit her in the hospital or take any of her calls. Maybe someone who doesn’t have the toxic family I do would be horrified that parents could turn their back on their own daughter like that, but it hadn’t surprised me.
“She’s in the city,” Archer says firmly as I drive through the security gates when the barriers lift. “Her sister is important. The first thing she asked Garrison was if her sister was okay. She won’t leave the city until she finds her.”
“Do you know where her sister is?”
River was a student at Haven Academy, but it closed after people learned omegas weren’t given a choice in their mates.
“We’ll find her,” he says, his tone insistent.
I raise my eyebrow at that.
Tracking a missing person isn’t a skill any of us possesses.
Archer, at least, has some life skills outside of cold servants, boarding schools, and toxic manipulative parents, since he didn’t grow up the way Callum and I did.
Even with those life skills, we’re clueless, and hiring a private security company to do the searching for us isn’t an option.
We can’t risk trusting the wrong person. It won’t be us who pay the price. It will be Juniper and Lottie.
“Juniper might be safer if we forget about her,” I say.
Not eager to return to a house where a housekeeper skulks around with her ears to the door of whatever room we’re in, I drive aimlessly.
I spot a police station and force myself to keep driving.
If Lottie weren’t a hostage used to ensure good behavior, I’d walk this box of incriminating evidence sitting on my passenger seat inside and suffer the consequences.
“She’s not safe on her own,” Archer says. “The safest thing we can do for her is keep pretending we don’t care that she’s gone. I don’t think her parents visited her even once at the hospital.”
“Yeah.” I head toward downtown, just to be somewhere new.
“It’s cold.”
“It’s no worse than what we did to her,” I say.
What we did to Juniper—the way we treated her, spoke to her, and neglected her—was even worse. Her parents might be trying to protect their reputation, but we were just trying to protect ourselves, and sometimes not even that. We wanted to hurt her. Wanted her to suffer.
And we succeeded.
We made an innocent woman’s life hell for a year, and none of us thought to use our fucking brains to ask ourselves why she wasn’t lashing out at us the way we’d expected her to.
We treated her like shit, and she took it. She didn’t complain or cause a scene other than when she tried to get drunk at a ball. She took it until she didn’t have to take it anymore, and then she left us.
“What we did was worse.” I say it out loud so I never forget. Maybe I’ve already turned into my mom. Maybe it’s too late to try to be a better person. Who the fuck knows? I sure as hell don’t.
“Way fucking worse,” Archer softly agrees.
I want to find her to apologize and make things right, but I don’t know if there’s any coming back from what we did. She said we were dead to her before the bond-breaking ceremony, and I believed her. I still do.
“I better go,” I say, guilt twisting me up again.
We say our goodbyes, and I end the call.
The sooner we find her, the sooner we can make things right. And if we can’t make things right, we owe her a better life than the one we gave her. Maybe she doesn’t have somewhere to stay. Maybe she has no money. Maybe she’s in danger.
We all owe her that and more. We just have to find her.
As I drive through downtown, my mind swings back to nearly three weeks ago, the last time I saw Juniper.
She stopped breathing during the bond breaking, and we lost consciousness soon after.
As soon as we learned she was alive, we rushed right to the hospital.
My black eye, which I had fully deserved for trying to stop Juniper from leaving, had swollen completely shut.
But no one would let us in to see her. Garrison and Kylian probably told the hospital staff that Juniper wouldn’t want anything to do with us.
We don’t deserve to see her again. We don’t even deserve to breathe the same air as her, but I can’t forget her. Broken bond or not, she’s in my head, her scent a fragrance I can never forget. It—and Juniper—will haunt me forever.
How do you stop yourself from wanting someone you don’t deserve?
I drive for hours on an endless loop of side streets, my hands wrapped around the steering wheel, my mind in the past.
If I’d listened to Juniper back when she said she didn’t know Callum’s dad, none of it would have happened. I’d have convinced Callum and Archer that she was an innocent, dragged into a mess we’ve spent years trying to crawl out of.
Pack Wells. If anyone knew the name of our pack was just a joke….
A red light stops me, and I tap my fingers on the wheel as I wait for it to change, scanning this unfamiliar street. It must be lunchtime. Office workers in suits and jackets stand on the sidewalk, chatting, laughing, smoking, and eating.
The lights change to green, and I continue as a woman steps into a grocery store. She has long, wavy blonde hair and is wearing a white dress and sandals.
Juniper was wearing something like that the last day.
I wrench the wheel to the right. A car horn blares behind me. Ignoring it, I slam on the brakes, unsnap my seatbelt, and scramble out of the car.
I leave the door open and the engine running as I sprint into the store.
Where is…
She’s in the bread aisle, bending to grab a baguette.
“Juniper?” I yell.
She doesn’t turn around.
Makes sense; she hates us all.
I sprint over to her.
“Juniper!” I grasp her arm, and when she turns, I back up, releasing her. “Shit, sorry.”
The woman in her forties, definitely not Juniper, glares at me with hostile blue eyes. “What the fuck is your problem?”
I back up, shaking my head. “Sorry. I… I thought you were someone else.”
“Maybe confirm that first before you go around grabbing women,” she mutters. Rolling her eyes, she turns away. “Jackass.”
Dark glares and suspicious looks track my path out of the store. A traffic cop has just started writing me a ticket. I don’t even try to fight it. As I sit with my hands on the steering wheel, waiting for him to finish, I stare straight ahead, thinking.
I take the ticket the cop hands me without complaint, and continue to sit and think real fucking hard about how that could have been Juniper, and I fucked things up again.
The box my mom gave me is—luckily—still on the passenger seat. If someone had grabbed it and my mom had found out it was missing, Lottie would be dead.
“Jackass,” I mutter, tilting my head back and meeting my reflection in the rearview mirror. “Fucking jackass.”