Chapter 32
Music played from the CD player on the shelf by the sink. JJ was working on the internet and phone issue, and according to the word amongst the elders, someone would be coming at the end of the week to install the necessary hardware. He’d be able to get a new phone then.
Robbie didn’t know how to feel about that.
With internet and cell service came social media and connection with everyone back home.
He’d never had a chance to see if Nadja had a presence online, but once he had access to it, he knew he’d be scouring the web for any trace of it, just to see her face.
He dreaded that—it would reopen all of his barely healed wounds—but he also knew he wasn’t strong enough to avoid the lure.
Even though she was gone, taken back to Hell, he’d be able to look at her pictures, to grasp at the lingering fragments of her mortal life.
It was the most masochistic thing a person could do, and yet he knew he’d do it just the same.
Whit had found him a box fan that was set up on a crate across the kitchen to cool it off.
The large, industrial oven was heating up, and Robbie was rolling out pastry crust to top enough chicken pot pie to feed an army battalion.
He was making his grandma’s recipe. He’d been making more of her recipes lately, the muscle memory of cooking them a soothing balm to his ravaged heart.
Something about cooking her food now made him feel like she was with him, comforting him now when not much else could.
His life was so bittersweet. He loved his pack.
He loved the elders and the pups and everyone in between.
He loved cooking for them, feeding them, chatting with them over plates of food that he’d made.
He loved helping out when a packmate needed something.
He loved running with them. He’d had three full moon runs since Nadja had been taken away.
He was getting stronger, his body changing week by week, the muscles layering over one another in a way he’d never been able to get them to do before, no matter how much creatine he drank or protein he ate.
His hair was long, past his chin now, and he had to pull it up in the same sort of little topknot that Hank had had when Robbie had first seen him in the gas station a lifetime ago.
Most surprising of all, however, was the beard.
Robbie had never been able to grow a beard before.
His buddy Kev had called him Patches for a whole summer after he’d tried.
But since that first shift, his beard had grown in quickly.
He could have kept clean-shaven, but he would have had to shave in the morning and at night, and he couldn’t summon the energy for it.
Besides, what did it matter what he looked like or how big his beard got? There wasn’t anyone to complain.
That had been the hardest part, being so surrounded by people who loved him, who he loved as well, and yet being so completely alone at the same time.
Even though Rose tried to chase him out, Robbie always insisted on helping wash dishes and close up the kitchen at night because it delayed the inevitable.
Each night, he walked back to the cabin he’d shared with Nadja.
The first month, he’d paused at the threshold every night, hoping she’d be waiting for him on the couch.
The second month, he’d known she wouldn’t be but had allowed himself to imagine it anyway.
But after the third, he told himself that he couldn’t keep torturing himself.
He didn’t pause at the threshold anymore.
He opened the door and slipped inside the silent, empty cabin as quickly as he could.
Rose had tried to insist that he move to a different one, but he’d refused.
He didn’t want to leave the home they’d shared, even if they’d only lived there together for two weeks.
Occasionally, he would still catch a whiff of her scent. Those were the worst nights.
Sometimes, when he’d smell her, he’d immediately burst into tears, that hollow ache becoming so loud that it stole his breath.
Other times, he felt almost animal as he gripped his cock and groaned, his body reacting to the smell without his brain having time to stop him.
He’d change the sheets with a heavy heart or, if he was too tired for that, spend the rest of the night on the couch.
Last night had been the worst yet. He’d been looking for something under the bed and found a pair of her underwear that had fallen or been kicked under the dust ruffle.
He’d been almost rabid, an animal fully beyond control, as he’d dragged them to his nose and inhaled so deeply that his lungs hurt.
He’d come all over the panties wrapped around his hand but had still been painfully erect.
He’d come three more times before his body had finally called it quits, and he’d lain there on the hard wooden floor and howled his grief to the blackness of the moonless sky through the window.
Robbie paused in rolling the pastry to reach for his coffee with a heavy hand.
It was his third cup of the day, and it wouldn’t be his last. He planned to get these pot pies finished and then skip the family meal.
He needed to run. He needed to run so far and so hard that he was too exhausted to do anything but fall into his bed and sleep.
He had just taken a sip when JJ appeared in the doorway that led from the kitchen to the hallway where his office was.
“Phone call for you, bud,” JJ said, and Robbie froze, the mug still pressed to his lips.
Nobody would have known how to reach him. Nadja had told him that she’d told Magda where she was taking him, but that didn’t mean Magda knew the number to reach JJ’s satellite phone. Magda had a way of finding things, however. Maybe she’d figured out how to reach him.
Or maybe it was the IRS.
“Hang on,” he said, going to the utility sink to wash the flour off his hands.
“Take it in my office,” JJ said. Robbie nodded, following him to the new pack office, a full-sized room that was very official-looking, a far cry from the tiny office closet that JJ had insisted on using before.
JJ handed him the satellite phone and left, closing the door softly behind him. Robbie’s hand shook as he raised the phone to his ear.
“Hello?” he said, his voice cracking.
“Robbie? Fecking hell, Robbie is that you?”
Callum.
Robbie sat down heavily on the rolling desk chair and dropped his forehead to his other hand, his elbow braced on his knee. A sob escaped his lips before he could choke it back.
“Robbie, are you okay? Are you safe?”
He sucked in a quivering breath. “I’m safe. I’m okay, Callum.”
“I’ve been out of my mind worried about you. Nadja is impossible to nail down, and Magda wouldn’t give me her phone number. I finally had to make an appointment with her to get her to talk to me and tell me how to find you.”
As quickly as he’d sat down, Robbie found himself on his feet.
“Nadja,” he said, feeling his whole body practically vibrate.
“Hank’s therapist. The one who drove you north to that pack she told Magda about.”
“Nadja Stonebreaker,” Robbie repeated, unable to wrap his brain around what Callum was saying, feeling very much like he had the last time he’d taken a really hard punch to the face.
“Aye, Nadja Stonebreaker,” Callum said, exasperated. “I had to threaten her to give me this number.”
A snarl erupted from his mouth, loud and terrifying, even to him. He’d never made that sound before. His voice was a growl when he said through his teeth, “You threatened her?”
He’d met Callum when Callum had hired him to located Esther so that he could “deal” with her.
Callum hadn’t hurt a hair on Esther’s head, but he was a nine-hundred-year-old vampire.
He was ancient and powerful and, Robbie knew, far more loyal to his best friend than he was to the woman who had kept him from finding that friend.
Callum was quiet on the other end of the call. Robbie growled again. “Callum, you threatened to hurt her?”
“Jesus, Robbie, you know me better than that. I’m not a monster. I dinnae hurt innocent people. I threatened to write a bad review on her website profile.”
Even that was enough to have Robbie’s fists clenched.
But then his eyes flew open wide as he realized what he was saying.
“Wait. You saw her?” Robbie asked, feeling as if he might throw up.
“That’s what I just tried to tell you, Robbie. I made an appointment and convinced her to give me this number so I could talk to you. And then she insisted on asking me questions about my childhood. I have another appointment next week. I panicked and—”
Robbie didn’t hear anything else. Callum sounded like a drone in the background.
He’d seen Nadja. He talked to Nadja. In her office.
She hadn’t been taken back to Hell. Relief made his knees weak.
“How—” Robbie’s voice cracked, and he cleared his throat. “How was she?”
“She looked like hell,” Callum said. “I’d never met her before my session, but I overheard Hank and Esther talking about her. Hank said he was worried she was sick. At my session, she definitely looked like she had what we used to call wasting sickness back in the day.”
Those weak knees gave out, and Robbie collapsed onto the chair, nearly capsizing when the wheels sent it flying backwards.
Evidently, Callum heard the commotion from his end because Robbie heard him say, “Robbie, what the fuck is going on over there?”
“Nothing,” he blurted, righting himself in the chair. “I’m fine. I’m fine. It’s fine.”
Except it wasn’t fine. Because if Nadja hadn’t been dragged back to Hell, that meant that she’d left.
She’d left him.
And more than that, if she looked so bad that Callum was discussing antique wasting illnesses, it meant she wasn’t doing her Voyours work or, at least, not enough of it.
The shadowy cavern in his chest where his heart had been suddenly felt different than it had in months.
Where he’d felt only heartbreak and a devastating sense of loss, he now felt a tumult of new, terrifying, other things.
Hope, excitement, and sparkling through it all, an electric sort of rage.
Hot and bright like a neon sign, pulsing in his limbs and his chest and his brain.
His goddamn fated mate had left him, and he was almost certain that she had done it for some reason that felt perfectly reasonable to her and was meant to save him or someone else because Nadja was apparently incapable of not sacrificing herself for the sake of others.
And that somehow made the anger spark brighter.
Because she also deserved care. His mate deserved to think of herself, to care for herself, to let someone else take care of her, too.
“I’ll be back tonight,” he said, interrupting whatever Callum had been saying and hung up the phone, tossing it onto the desk.
Robbie stormed out of the office and into the kitchen, where JJ and Rose were sitting at the little corner table, drinking coffee in silence.
“I’ve got to go,” he said, his hands shaking.
JJ rose. “Where are you going?”
“Back to World’s End. I need to have a word with my mate.”
Rose’s eyes widened in shock. “But she’s—”
“Been there the whole time,” Robbie said.
He went to the prep table and unscrewed the top from his water bottle, draining the contents in one, leviathan swallow.
He crossed to the sink to refill it and, over his shoulder, said, “The pot pie filling is done, and the ovens are preheated. Put the filling in those pans and top them with the pastry. Egg wash the crust and bake them until the tops are brown.”
He turned and saw that Rose and JJ had come closer. JJ had his arms crossed over his chest, as he so often did. Rose was wringing the hem of her denim shirt between her hands.
“You’re coming back, right?” she said, her voice trembling and eyes bright with tears.
Robbie didn’t know what to say.
“You’re pack,” she went on, coming closer and reaching for his free hand with both of hers, clutching it tightly. “You’re pack, and you’re part of us. We don’t want to lose you.”
“Rose,” JJ said, his tone a warning and a comfort in one.
“He’s pack, JJ,” she insisted. “He’s—”
“I’ll call you,” Robbie said. “I’ll tell you where I’m going and—” He swallowed. “And when I’ll be back.”
Because as wrong as it had felt losing Nadja, it also felt wrong to leave them behind.
“Give me the number for your phone, JJ.”
Robbie grabbed a ballpoint pen from the junk drawer and wrote down the number JJ gave him on his forearm. JJ clapped a hand on his shoulder.
“I can’t stop you. I wouldn’t try. She’s—”
“She’s still here,” Robbie said, his mind still whirling with the wonder of that truth.
He was going to yell at her and kiss her and yell at her again and then fall to his knees and bury his face in her belly and beg her to let him stay if she wouldn’t come back with him.
He would beg her to let him feed her. He would feel his skin between her teeth and weep from the sheer joy of it all.
“I’ll call you. I promise,” he said, squeezing Rose’s hands before putting down his giant water bottle and wrapping her in a hug. “I won’t be gone long.”
With or without Nadja, he’d be back. He wouldn’t force her to stay with him if she didn’t want to.
He loved her too much to cage her. And if she didn’t want him, if he was wrong and she hadn’t left him for some self-sacrificing reason, but because she didn’t want to be with him, well, it would gut him, but he’d live.
He’d mourn her for the rest of his days, but he would be able to live knowing that somewhere in the world, she was alive and she was okay.
But he had to know, and to know, he had to leave.
“I love you,” he said to Rose, to them both, and she nodded against his chest, this woman who had been like a surrogate mother to him during his grief.
JJ squeezed Robbie’s shoulder again and nodded. “We’ll be here when you get back.”
Robbie released Rose, grabbed his water, and raced out the back door, jogging to where the cars were parked.
He slid behind the wheel of the car Callum had bought for him and put it in gear.
The engine hummed quietly and the air blew, and somewhere between the pack and World’s End, one of his mom’s favorite songs came on the radio.
It was a slow song, low and sad, but with a beat that persisted even though the melody dipped and lilted.
He tapped his foot to that beat, and to the beat of the next song, feeling the building rhythm.
Singing was beyond him, his heart too fragile, too full of hope and fear, but it beat in time to the music anyway as he drove toward an answer, toward her.