28. Inconvenient Marriage
TWENTY-EIGHT
INCONVENIENT MARRIAGE
CONNOR
Ayear and a half ago, if Haven wasn't with me, I knew exactly where she was.
Before that, too, if I’m being honest.
I might’ve drawn the line at putting cameras in her apartment during those long years when I was gleefully stalking her, but I kept a tracker on her car and another in her purse.
It didn’t help me when Winter’s men nabbed her on her way into the animal shelter.
They tossed her purse and abandoned her car, and unless I had the chance to microchip her like one of the cats and dogs she loved so much, I never would’ve been able to find her without Adrian’s help.
Once she went from looking for an escape to being my reluctant roommate before finally realizing that I’m awesome and she’s loved me all along, I thought about chipping her in case someone targeted her again.
That way, she’d never be able to hide from me, and if anyone tried to separate us again, I’d be there with my boys and my knife before they could get far.
Seemed like a brilliant idea to me, but then I mentioned it to my wife. The look she gave me had me second-guessing everything I ate for the rest of the day in case she decided to get a little revenge by sending me to the toilet for the time being.
I’d much rather she threaten me with poisoning than react the way she did when I got the brilliant idea to cut her birth control implant out of her arm.
A year and a half later and I still haven’t lived that one down.
She likes to tell me that’s the moment she realized that I really am one crazy motherfucker.
I like to think of it as another adorable chapter in our romance.
So our relationship is unique. So some people—Adrian—like to say we’re codependent. He’s just jealous that I was able to marry my wife way before he had the chance to marry his.
It helps that, with the exception of the six weeks I’ll never forget, I always knew where to find my Haven.
It’s so much easier these days because, rather than stalk her, I’m usually sitting on the living room couch beside her, either watching a movie or reading a book or just existing together in the same space.
Lately, she’s been snuggling against my side with her phone in her hand, occasionally smiling at whatever message Loni sends her.
Every so often, she'll angle the screen toward me so I can see what they're talking about.
Most of the time, it's something ridiculous. A picture of one of Loni’s two fluffy orange-and-white cats.
A complaint about Adrian from his wife that Haven enthusiastically agrees with.
Once, it was a blurry photo of a burned dinner that apparently started an argument over whether smoke detectors should count as kitchen appliances which is amusing to me since I still happily cook all of the meals for Haven and me.
The important part isn't the phone, though, or even the friendship she’s rekindling with Loni Dougherty—I mean, Heller.
It's Haven herself.
When I first gave her the phone, it was a sign of trust between us.
She still wasn’t comfortable talking as much back then, but if she ever needed me and I wasn’t there, she could text me and I could answer as soon as possible.
Even if we were in the same room—whether it’s the finished basement, the living room, or our bedroom—she finds it easier to tap out a message than grab a pen and paper.
Now look at her. She doesn’t just text Loni. They have actual phone conversations, and I’m so thrilled that she has someone else to talk to, I even walk away to give her some privacy. Sure, the entire house is bugged just in case Haven needs me, but the thought’s there.
That’s why her recent relapse after Sebastien and Annaliese’s wedding is fucking with me so hard.
At first, I thought the problem was me. When Haven is having a bad day, that's usually a safe assumption. I inadvertently did something to trigger her, and though I would never do that on purpose, it happens. I’ve gotten better at figuring out what upsets her, what has the old nightmares coming back, but this one… I never saw this one coming.
It all started when Bas called and told me that we were invited to his wedding at St. Catherine’s.
That was a shock since I had no fucking clue that he was in a serious relationship, let alone ready to get hitched.
Of the five of us… four of us… the only one who ever thought about marriage was Adrian.
When it came to his Loni, he was determined she would be his wife the same way as I knew that Haven would one day be mine.
But Bas? After the way Julia broke his heart, Bas kept all of his relationships casual.
He visited the Used or met up with women outside of Harmony Heights.
Like the rest of us, he absolutely refused to Claim an Offering—until he called to let me know he’d changed his mind and he was marrying an Offering named Annaliese Crawford.
I needed more details than that, and after a quick call to Dallas, I found out the true story: Annaliese was an Offering who had an affair with one of the Owed.
He threatened to tell the King when she ended things, and fearing becoming one of the Used—a fate that the bastard Owed who ruined her said would extend to her younger sister—she went to the King’s Court, searching for an Owed who would be willing to enter a marriage of convenience with her.
She found Bas.
Normally, I wouldn’t think that Bas would be into that sort of thing. He does everything he can to act like he has no ties to the Order, but when Dallas mentions that Annaliese is the mystery woman that Bas once banged in a bar bathroom outside of town, it makes a whole lot more sense.
Turns out that Bas can zero in on one woman just like the rest of us, and he chose Annaliese.
She might think that it’s a marriage of convenience.
Yeah, right. If I know Bas, he’s playing for forever, and that’s one of the only reasons why I talked Haven into going to St. Catherine’s to watch my old buddy marry his new wife.
The other reason? He was there to help me rescue Haven that fateful night in Hamilton.
He supported me during those rough early months when I started to doubt that Haven would ever love me even a fraction of how much I love her.
He honors my relationship with my wife. No way in hell I wasn’t going to do the same for him.
I even had a couple of tips for the newlywed, and a gift in case his wife’s difficult past with some unknown Owed came back to bite them in the ass.
Like me, Bas will stop at nothing to make it so that his wife has nothing to fear.
He’ll find out who hurt Annaliese, and he’ll take care of him just like I did everything I could so that Haven felt safe.
I did, but as much as I wish otherwise, sometimes a trigger gets past me and I lose the Haven I have now to the Haven she was when I first found her in the warehouse.
In this case, it was a voice.
That’s all it took.
A man’s voice.
There were only a handful of us at St. Catherine’s for the ceremony.
If my wife was feeling up to it, we would attend the reception afterward, but no way were we missing the actual ceremony at the church; even Haven admitted she wanted to witness Sebastien Reynolds getting married with her own two eyes.
There was me and Haven, sitting in the back with Loni.
Adrian was there, too, of course. Dallas.
Mr. and Mrs. Reynolds. No Alexandre, but we expected Bas’s older brother to be a no-show.
Annaliese’s teenaged sister was there, accompanied by Mr. and Mrs. Crawford.
We were all milling around the front of the church before heading in. Mr. Crawford said something. I don’t know what. I wasn’t listening. It doesn’t matter, either. It was just the timbre of his voice that caught Haven’s attention.
My wife clung to me. She couldn’t speak the rest of the day, though the fact that she trembled through the ceremony, pleading with me with her eyes to go home the moment it was done and Bas kissed the bride… I knew right away that something was wrong.
Eventually, I got one word from her before the panic became so overwhelming, she grabbed a sedative from our stash and actually jabbed herself with it.
Winter, she told me. Mr. Crawford had a voice that sounded like Johnny Winter.
It wasn’t him, obviously. Johnny Winter is dead.
Adrian had confirmed that months ago after hearing through one of his contacts—a masked hitman named Hunter Reed—that the same assassin responsible for introducing him to the Reed twins in the first place eventually tracked Winter down and killed him.
As it turns out, we weren’t the only ones gunning for him, and though I had a moment of disappointment that I didn’t get to gut the man who traumatized my wife, I was just relieved to know he couldn’t hurt her again.
At the time, I believed that. The bastard was dead, and Haven survived.
She’s aware that Winter is gone. Logically, she doesn’t have to fear him any longer. But that’s logic.
Fear doesn’t give a shit about logic.
During her captivity, Haven only ever heard his voice. She never saw him. And that’s why, when Mr. Crawford spoke, sounding similar enough to the voice that tormented her with its cruel indifference to her ordeal… that was enough to send her spiraling.
Fear isn’t a rational thing. It’s a consuming thing. Unfortunately for my wife, it’s been consuming her ever since the wedding.
She has her good days and her bad days. When the nightmares come, when she dreams that she’s back in the cell and that I never came for her, I never rescued her, I never married her… sometimes, when she wakes up, it’s like those early days all over again.