13. Chapter Thirteen #2
There is no bitterness in her voice yet, and somehow that frightens me more than anger would. Her composure is too precise, each word placed carefully between us while the faint scent of her grief thickens the air, sweet and bruised beneath the lingering salt of her tears.
“I understand why you chose them, Holden. I understand why the thought of losing them would have felt like being forced back into that lonely place where everyone cared more about what your future looked like than whether you were actually happy to live inside it.”
Her understanding should offer some kind of relief. It doesn’t. It settles like another stone inside my chest because I know there is something else coming, and whatever it is, I have earned it.
“But that’s what makes what you did to me so much worse. But a man admitting he is wrong? That is the day fucking pigs fly.”
The words are soft, a gentle joke, yet they strike harder than the punches she threw at me earlier.
Lennon shifts against the pillows, and the mattress dips beneath her weight as she turns more fully toward me, her exhausted body enclosed by the blankets she had once built to make herself feel safe from men like me and my pack.
“You knew what it was like to have other people decide your future without caring what you wanted. You knew how it felt to be treated as though your designation, your family name, and the money attached to it mattered more than the person you were beneath all of that.” Her fingers tighten around the edge of the blanket, but I can’t move my gaze from hers.
This is the most she’s given me. I mean, she’d given me a lot more once upon a time, but I’m not stupid enough to believe that’s going to happen anytime soon. And that’s not why I’m here. None of that matters at this moment. We’re just two broken people. Only one of us is broken because of me.
“You wanted a love that wasn’t arranged for you, but you never gave me the opportunity to choose mine.
Fate placed me in front of you, and instead of allowing me to decide whether I wanted the bond, whether I wanted your pack, or whether I trusted any of you enough to build something real, you turned me into an enemy inside a game I didn’t even know I was playing. ”
Each sentence strips another layer from the excuses I once wrapped around my choices, exposing the truth beneath them until there is nowhere left for me to hide.
“You talk about the connection you share with Sasha and Dominic like it saved you from a life that would have hollowed you out, yet when fate offered me that same possibility, you made it another thing I had to survive.”
Her voice fractures on the final word, the break so slight that another person might not notice it, but I hear it as clearly as the unevenness of her breathing and the faint tremor running through the hand clutching her blanket.
“I thought I was worthy of love too, Holden.”
She releases a small, brittle laugh that contains no humor, the sound like boiling water splashing against my skin.
Because everything she’s saying right now, every word…
is right. I was an idiot to think she’d ever forgive me.
Forgive us for what we did to her. If she was someone else, I’d tell them to leave.
To get the hell away from them and never look back.
Which is what I had done for myself. When did I become the very monster I spent my life despising?
The answer doesn’t matter anymore.
Knowing when it happened won’t undo the damage.
It won’t erase the nights she spent looking over her shoulder, wondering if another shadow belonged to us.
It won’t remove the mark Dominic left on her skin or the fear I painted inside a woman who should have found nothing but safety with her scent matches.
I can’t change any of it.
I can’t rewrite our beginning.
But maybe…
Maybe I don’t have to let it define our ending. Not because I deserve another chance. Because she deserves to know that the men standing before her tomorrow, willing to throw themselves at her feet, won’t be the same ones who destroyed her yesterday.
This isn’t about getting her back. It’s about becoming someone worthy of standing in the same room as her. Whether she ever chooses me again is no longer the point. I owe her better than the man she knows me to be. Even if I spend the rest of my life proving it.
“You have a lot of groveling to do before I even consider letting you back into my life, Holden.”
I think I’ve forgotten how to breathe.
The words echo through my mind, refusing to settle because they don’t sound even remotely real. She didn’t say never. She didn’t tell me to get out. She didn’t tell me she’d rather spend the rest of her life alone than ever look at me again.
She said…consider.
Which is a hell of a lot better than never.
A single word. One tiny impossibly fragile thread of hope that has me hanging on for dear life. It shouldn’t be enough to bring a man like me to my knees but fuck, it is.
Relief crashes into me with such force that every bone and muscle in my body hurts, lodging itself somewhere beneath my ribs until my eyes burn and my vision starts to blur.
I don’t mistake it for forgiveness. I don’t mistake it for love, fuck, I don’t even mistake it for trust. It’s simply the permission to earn what I should have treasured from the very beginning.
I’ll take every impossible condition she places in front of me.
Every wall she builds, every test she gives or any moment she decides to doubt me.
I’ll take it all on. Because this is the first time since she left there’s something to fight for besides my own guilt.
There’s a future.
Not one that’s guaranteed. Not one fate can hand to me simply because we’re scent matches. One I’ll have to build, piece by painstaking piece, until the foundation is strong enough to support the weight of everything I shattered.
And maybe the cracks we put inside her soul will always remain, no matter how carefully I try to mend them.
That’s not my decision to make. It never should have been.
All I can do is become the man she needs.
The man who would have questioned the people he loved instead of blindly following them into darkness.
I swallow hard against the knot tightening in my throat, unable to stop the small, disbelieving smile that threatens to pull at my lips. It isn’t born from victory. I haven’t won a damn thing. If anything, I’ve only just been handed the privilege of stepping onto the starting line.
And this time, I refuse to fail her.