Chapter 21
Archer
Sleep-deprived, I stare blearily at the headlights inches away from my face.
BEEP!
A man hangs out of a red Toyota Camry and screams at me. “What the fuck is wrong with you? Move!”
He’s not the only one staring. There’s a line of cars blaring their horns behind him, and people on the street are studying me, curious about why I’d stop in the middle of crossing a road.
The answer is, I don’t know.
Scrubbing a hand over my face, I step onto the sidewalk and return to scanning the streets as my cell phone vibrates in my back left pocket.
I fish it out.
“Tell me you’re not wandering the streets again, Archer.”
I don’t answer Torin’s question. He’d know I was lying about doing something I’ve spent the better part of two weeks doing on a near-daily basis. Not that he’s any better, but I’m worse.
Torin and Callum didn’t treat Juniper the way I did.
When I close my eyes, I remember practically threatening that if she left, someone would hurt her. And I remember how, when I saw the gardener with lust in his eyes, I dragged her into the house, fucked her against a bookcase, and left her on the floor.
I lied.
I know exactly why I stopped in the middle of the road. If I don’t keep my mind occupied, it yanks me back to the unforgivable things I did to my mate, and I relive it over and fucking over again, hating myself more each time.
A cop car shrieks as it speeds down the late afternoon downtown streets, the sound giving Torin all the proof he would ever need about what I’m doing and where I’m doing it.
Torin lets out a heavy sigh. “Juniper doesn’t want to be found.”
I know that. Why doesn’t he think I know that?
It’s been two weeks since we bribed a hospital porter into confirming that Juniper checked herself out of the hospital.
Two tireless weeks of prowling every goddamn street in the city. Two weeks of sticking my head into restaurants and coffee shops, of asking heat clinics if they’ve seen her, and all of it has amounted to absolutely fucking jack shit.
I’ve barely slept. There’s an itch inside of me that’s driving me crazy and has been since Juniper Harrington cut herself out of our lives.
I need to know that we didn’t chase her out of our lives with our cruelty, only to die on the streets. I need to know that she’s okay.
“She could be hurt.” I glance inside a woman’s hair salon as I pass the open door, the smell of perfume and hair products making my eyes water.
Redheads, brunettes, but no… is that her? My steps slow as my gaze lingers on a woman with blonde hair until she glances my way. Not Juniper.
I keep walking.
“Yes,” Torin says a little quieter, “she could.”
Juniper is a sheltered omega. She went from her house to Haven Academy, then to us, where we treated her so badly that she could be in an alley somewhere, determined to die in it alone instead of asking for help because she wants nothing to do with us.
“We have to fix this. We have to…” My fingers clench around my cell phone.
There are no words left to say.
No apology will come close to being good enough, but we have to try.
We have to make things right.
“I have to go.” I hang up before Torin can push me to go back to the house. He’ll remind me I’m wasting my time. Then he’ll say he’s going up to bed, and the next thing, I’ll hear his car starting up outside, and I know he’s out driving aimlessly, hoping to find her, just like Callum and me.
We don’t talk about what we did, how we made her feel. Talking about the unforgivable hurts too much, so we spend all our days and our nights out searching for a girl who doesn’t want to be found.
My gaze snags on a coffee shop, and I hesitate when the scent of sweet vanilla and hazelnut drifts toward me. My stomach grumbles, and my mouth is dry.
Muffling a yawn, I glance up at the darkening sky. Late-afternoon means it’s time to head back soon, but I’m not tired enough to end my search just yet.
I push open the coffee shop door, nodding a greeting at the male server as I walk in, and scan the blackboard over his head. Breakfast—the last time I ate—was hours ago, but none of the sandwiches appeals to me.
“Just a large black coffee.”
“We have latte or—”
“I’m good,” I cut in. “Two… uh, make that three shots. That’s it.” Just something hot and strong enough to keep me on my feet for the next couple of hours.
As he rings up my order, I fish out a couple of bills from my pocket, pay him, and pick up my drink from the end of the counter. Warming my icy fingers around the paper cup, I hold the door open for a pregnant woman walking in. I step outside as a bus pulls away across the street.
A yawning blonde woman in a maid’s uniform lifts a white canvas bag high on her arm. I tell myself it only looks like Juniper. It’s not her. It can’t possibly be her.
The woman lifts her head as if she feels me staring. She freezes. Large brown eyes widen in shock as her canvas bag—and whatever heavy thing is inside—drags her arm down.
It’s her.
It’s Juniper.
I drop my coffee, barely flinching when hot coffee splashes my ankle. “Juniper!”
Her face hardens, and she steps back.
Another bus pulls up to the sidewalk with a squeal as I’m sprinting around the back of a parked car. I get to the other side—
And she’s gone.
She’s fucking gone.
I whip around in a mad circle. “Juniper!”
People are staring at me, but I don’t fucking care about them.
I sprint one way, then the other, ducking into shops and demanding to know if anyone saw a blonde woman in a maid’s uniform.
“Have you seen her?” I yell at anyone who looks my way.
“Nah, man.”
“Who?”
“Dude, get the fuck out!”
Yanking my phone out of my pocket, I stab three, hit dial, tuck my phone against my ear, and keep looking. The phone stops ringing, and I’m shouting down it before Torin can say a word. “I found her!”
Thump.
I’ll never know what heavy thing Torin drops, and I don’t care enough to ask.
“What?”
“I fucking found her.”
“Where?”
Wheeling around, I shout out everything I see. As directions go, it’s about as shit as they go. But it seems to be good enough for Torin because footsteps thud down the phone line, and he says, “I’m coming. What did she say? Is she okay? How is—”
“She’s gone.”
Silence.
“What!” He growls.
“She was on the other side of the road, and I ran across it to get to her.” I drag my hand through my hair, frustrated and pissed. “But she bolted, Torin. She’s gone. She saw me and she fucking ran.”
I swear I hear his heartbeat thudding down the phone. He doesn’t say a word. Just breathes. And he thinks. He’s definitely thinking.
“Okay,” he says, voice low. I don’t know whether he’s talking to himself or to me. “Okay. So maybe this is shock. It was just shock, and she’s scared. She thinks maybe we want to hurt her again, so that’s why she ran. She doesn’t know we want to apologize.”
I don’t know who he’s trying to convince, but he sure as hell isn’t convincing me.
Calling Torin was a good decision. The best I could have made.
I wasn’t thinking straight before. Just reacting. It’s a wonder I didn’t run under the wheels of a car, bolting into the road without looking. Now I’ve stopped sprinting up and down the road like a madman. Which means I can think.
So think, Archer. Fucking think. Where could she have gone?
I turn in a slow circle, taking in exactly where I am.
Downtown. The shit end of downtown, where I never believed I’d ever find Juniper, but there’s nowhere else in the city I thought to look for her. I’ve wandered every street I could. Torin and Callum have covered areas I haven’t. We have looked everywhere.
This part of town was pure desperation. Now that I’m using my brain, it makes perfect sense she would come here. We would never have thought to look for her here, and she would know that we had tried to see her in the hospital.
“Archer?” Torin says.
I shake my head. He must have been talking all this time, and I wasn’t listening.
“Juniper must have gotten off a bus,” I say.
“It was pulling away when I was walking out of a coffee shop. She was struggling with a bag. They could have been groceries.” I spot a dented can of soup and a small jar of grape jelly on the ground.
“She had groceries she dropped when she ran. That means she must live around here. Maybe—”
“She had a maid’s uniform,” Torin interrupts. “What kind?”
I describe it: pale blue with a white collar and short sleeves.
He curses. “I don’t recognize it. But that’s something, right?”
It is something.
I try not to think about how our scent match spends her days cleaning hotel rooms.
Because of us.
We did this to her.
She should be relaxing in a nest. Comfortable. Content. Happy.
And we have her cleaning fucking toilets!
If I were a better man, I’d take the fact that she saw me and ran away as a sign to stay the fuck away. I’d give her the space she seems to want from me.
If she weren’t my scent match, maybe I’d get in my car, pretend I hadn’t seen her, and let her live the new life she’s created for herself.
But she’s mine.
So I hang up the phone, and as I wait for Torin to grab Callum, I start looking for her. I’m not fueled by the coffee I dropped on the other side of the road. I’m fueled by hope.
Hope we haven’t fucked up so utterly that there’s no coming back from it.
Hope that maybe, just maybe, we can find some way to convince her that we had reasons for believing she was the enemy. Good reasons.
She just has to hear them.
And maybe she can forgive the unforgivable.