Chapter 28
Torin
Ipull a blanket over Juniper, but she still shivers.
I feel the draught coming from the window next to the bed with a too-thin comforter, and it’s not good enough.
None of this is good enough for her.
“We can’t leave her here,” I say, studying her beautiful face, relaxed in sleep.
I want to think she fell asleep on her couch because she felt safe with us here, but she looked tired and scared when she opened the door to us an hour before.
Her fear and exhaustion had grown the longer we talked, and then later, when she told us what had happened with Wilkes Booth, AKA Oscar Michaels.
Her instincts had warned her she couldn’t trust him, so she called us.
“She listened,” Callum says. “That doesn’t mean she forgives us.”
“Her lock is a piece of shit,” Archer mutters from behind me. “One kick and that chain would come right off the door.”
I’m not surprised Archer picked up on it. I caught the way he kept glancing at her door and scowling, even if June missed it. Peering over my shoulder, I find him standing in front of it now, no longer leaning on the wall beside it.
“Her refrigerator is nearly empty,” Callum says.
I didn’t hear him cross the room, but he’s frowning into it. “Just milk, juice, and a chopped salad kit.”
We all look at each other, then at the sleeping woman curled up under a too-thin blanket in an apartment with so many problems I wouldn’t know where to start making it good enough for her.
Knock it down and start over, probably. That’s what a building like this needs. But Juniper has decided that this place is her home, so knocking it down and starting over isn’t an option.
The floral arrangement wasn’t good enough. The bouquet of roses was a pathetic attempt by a desperate man who didn’t know the first thing about showing he was sorry. I still don’t know how to do that, but I would do anything to prove to her that I will never hurt her again.
The pads of my fingers itch to touch her satiny cheek. Her blueberry and brown sugar scent wraps around me, and I keep wanting to pull her into my arms and keep her there. She cut the bond, but it’s still there, a living, breathing live wire inside of me.
I reach out to touch.
Archer’s hand is a vice around my wrist.
Growling softly so I don’t wake her, I turn to glare at him. “What?”
His eyes are on her, not me. “She wouldn’t want any of us to touch her if she were awake. Don’t touch her while she sleeps.”
I know that. He says that like I don’t know what I did to her. But he’s right to have grabbed me. I wasn’t thinking, and around her, I always need to be thinking so I don’t fuck up again.
“She’d be more comfortable in bed,” I say, still crouched beside her.
“Yes, she would,” Callum agrees. “But that doesn’t give us the right to put her there.”
“Let’s go,” I say with a sigh, my knees creaking as I stand and head for her apartment door. Archer and Callum get to the door before me as I look around one last time, cataloguing everything before I leave.
“Do you think he’ll try asking her out again?” Archer asks, pulling the door shut behind us.
If we hadn’t fucked things up so badly, one of us could have stayed and watched over her as she slept.
We lost that right. She wouldn’t want us to touch her, and she wouldn’t want us to stay.
Everywhere I look on our way down the four flights of stairs, I see a problem.
A broken elevator. Holes punched into the walls. Cracks.
I consider Archer’s question. She said she’d agreed to go on a date with Oscar, but she’d had a bad feeling that had kept on growing.
Enough for her to have canceled the date.
Her description of the silver car outside had set off alarm bells.
It had been the catalyst for her calling us.
She’d thought he was outside her apartment, and for him to have found out where she worked and been at a laundromat minutes from her home, I can’t help but think the same.
On our way out, we pass a nearly overflowing trash can near the building’s front entrance.
I share a glance with Callum, who shakes his head. Even the simplest things—jobs any building super should be on top of—are not being done. If he can’t even be bothered to empty the trash, what the fuck else isn’t he doing?
Outside, night is setting in, and the street down this downtown side road is quiet. I look for the silver car, but I don’t find it. June said the driver had left, but there’s no reason to think he won’t come back.
“She told him no, and she didn’t answer when he called her back. He probably knows we told her who he was. He won’t try again with her being so wary,” I say.
That doesn’t mean he won’t go back to my mom, or she won’t send someone else.
Callum leads the way to his car parked feet from her apartment door.
I’d panicked and shoved him off the couch to wake him up, thinking something was wrong with June.
He offered to drive here to wake himself up.
He gets in the front, Archer takes the passenger seat while I slide into the back, and we all shut our doors.
But Callum doesn’t start the engine.
We have a lot to talk about, and I don’t feel right doing it anywhere other than where I can see June’s apartment.
I’d heard the fear in her voice when she’d called, and I’d told her that our conversation was too long to have on the phone.
Part of that was the truth. Most of it was true.
But not all. She’d sounded scared, and I’d needed to know I wasn’t hearing what I thought I was.
The second she’d swung open her apartment door, dressed in gray sweatpants, a navy hoodie, and light brown socks, I’d known I was right to want to have our conversation face to face.
Archer sighs from the passenger seat, his head tipped back and his eyes on June’s apartment. “That was my fault. I shouldn’t have told her someone would hurt her if she left us.”
“She needed to hear it,” Callum says.
“Not like that,” Archer snaps. He takes a breath, massaging his forehead as he lets it out, and from his quieter tone, most of his anger. “Now she’s never going to feel safe again because of it.”
“You didn’t tell her about the gardener,” Callum says.
“Do you think it would have helped her to know that my mother paid the gardener to use her?” I ask him.
He doesn’t respond, but I’d expected that.
We’ve exposed Juniper to more than enough hurt. Too much. She doesn’t need to know this. Maybe one day I’ll tell her, but not now.
“So, what do we do about Juniper?” I ask.
“Make her feel safe,” Callum says quietly.
“Keep her safe,” Archer adds, his voice vibrating with intensity.
The problem with that is we can’t do it alone. I can only think of one person who wouldn’t immediately stab me in the back or betray Juniper.
“Who's watching her apartment tonight?” I ask.
Callum and Archer glance at each other, and Callum says, “Not me. I need to call someone about the state of that building tomorrow morning.”
“I’ll stay then,” Archer says and twists around to look at me. “Why can’t you do it?”
“I have someone I need to see.”
There’s a question in his eyes, but I shake my head. “There's no guarantee he will agree, but I have to try. I’ll take a cab.”
“I’ll go back to the house,” Callum says, meeting my gaze in the rearview mirror. “One of us is going to have to stay there to keep an eye on Veronica.”
“You laid me out for something that I rightfully deserved,” I say to the dark-haired alpha, who meets me at the front door of his mansion.
Kylian Sutton is barefoot, in a creased t-shirt and blue jeans, gray eyes narrowed in suspicion. He hates me, but it’s the hate I need. He would stab me in the front rather than the back, and he can help protect Juniper, because once, he protected her from me.
Getting the address of one of the three owners of Ever Safe, beta-guarded free heat clinics wasn’t difficult. They’re the safest free heat clinics for omegas in the city. I hadn’t recognized him before. I learned his name—and his reputation—after, and I’m lucky to be alive after our run-in.
We sent Juniper to one of his free heat clinics instead of taking care of her needs as we should have. It’s a decision I will never forgive myself for, even if Juniper somehow, impossibly, lets us back into her life.
I don’t deserve her forgiveness. None of us do. But I’d get on my knees and beg for the next five years for a second chance to prove I can be the mate she deserves.
Kylian crosses his arms and leans against a wall outside his mansion. He tilts his head to study me. “You gave Juniper an order.” From the flash of anger in his gaze, he’d like nothing more than to lay me out all over again.
“I was trying to stop her.”
“By giving her an order that she’d have no way to fight?” his eyes flare with anger, though his voice is soft.
Alphas have power over omegas. We’re dominant, and omegas are submissive. It’s how nature designed us. An alpha has more control over his mate. So when I ordered her to stop as she walked away, she stopped, even though it went against what she wanted.
I hold Kylian’s gaze. “I wasn’t thinking, and I should have been. She was leaving, and I… I panicked. I did the first thing that popped into my brain to stop her. What I did was unforgivable, and it’s one thing in a long list of wrongs.”
His slow blink makes me think I surprised him. “What do you want?”
“We brought her into our world, and now she’s in danger.”
“You went after her.” His voice is soft, but his eyes threaten deadly violence.
I once heard whispers about how he was responsible for a certain alpha winding up with a bullet in his brain for hurting his omega. One look into his eyes, and it’s clear those weren’t rumors at all.
Knowing what’s coming, I step back with my hands up and palms out. I keep talking, and I talk fast. “To apologize. I know we don’t have a right to her forgiveness. We all do.”
“Keep talking.” He snaps.
“Our parents were involved in Asylum. We thought she was a spy, which is why we weren’t good to her.”
“You’re a fucking idiot,” he snarls.
“I know.”
He studies me for a beat, head cocked. “What do you want? An award for finally seeing something you should have seen all along.”
“I came for your help. Not now. But there’s a chance that we might not be able to protect June.”
“Then walk away from her.”
“My family might hurt her anyway, if only to make me hurt. The second we met, she was in danger.”
“And the reason you’re here…”
“You laid me out without hesitation. That’s what I need. Something might happen to June, and I need someone who won’t hesitate to do what needs to be done.”
I hope I’ve read him right.
“This is your family you’re talking about,” he says, and there’s a warning in his voice. He knows what I’m asking him to do, and he wants to make sure I know it too. “There’s no walking some things back. Some actions are permanent.”
“They have never been my family. Callum and Archer are my family. And Juniper. If she wants to be. Even if she doesn’t want to be, I need to make sure she’s safe.”
He studies me for so long that I start to think I wasted my time.
I turn to walk away.
“Tell me about the people who would hurt Juniper,” he orders, leaning against the wall and crossing his arms.
I don’t like orders. Most alphas don't. But this is about Juniper. About making sure she’s safe. So I lean against the side of his house, and I tell him about my poisonous family's hold over us all and about the best friend my mom turned into my enemy.