10. Crow
Chapter ten
Crow
“What did we do?” I whisper and bite my thumbnail. My knee is bouncing, and I have this insane feeling that someone is watching me, even though no one is there.
I haven’t been this bad in years.
But it all comes back to what did we do?
“We did the right thing,” Saint assures me. “Love is nothing but a weapon. We swore we would never have any other bonds, no one else coming into the pack. We have protected that. There is nothing wrong with protecting ourselves.”
“What if she needs us? What if she’s hurt? Where’s she going to sleep? What if-”
“Stop, Crow!” Saint thunders. “We can’t control her actions. She had a choice and a bed to stay in, and she chose to leave. We have ensured that she has a significant amount of money and a car. She will be fine.”
Hunter is silent. He’s standing behind the bar, leaning with his hip on it, staring at the floor like he’s willing it to open up and swallow him whole.
“Hunter? A little help?” I snap at him.
Hunter looks up and shakes his head. “I don’t understand why she left.”
Saint heaves an exasperated sigh and throws his hands in the air.
“Pride!” I snap. “We hurt her pride. The more I look at our actions, the more it looks like courting rather than making an omega feel comfortable with a strange pack. We hurt her, and we rejected her. Why would she stay? I wouldn’t.” My bitter words poison the air around us.
My rant has me feeling sick and like my skin is crawling.
Hunter nods slowly. “The cameras haven’t picked up anything else. She’s not going back to the house. Where has she gone?”
“If only we put a tracking device in our car!” I snarl, glaring at Saint.
“I’m not putting tracking equipment on our belongings for just in case!” Saint snarls and stalks into the employees only section.
“I’m going to look for her!” I say to Hunter.
He lifts his head and looks at me. The same look that tells me to stop and think. “And say what? Sorry I don’t believe in love, and you clearly do, and even though you told me all of that beforehand, I still knotted your brains out just because.”
I stare at him, rendered mute by the awful way he’s painted the situation. “If we explain, she will understand,” I say with very little confidence, though.
Hunter shakes his head. “Understand what? Most people think we are the crazy ones. They believe in love and romance. They believe in scent matches and fated mates. Soulmates. Twin flames.”
I shake my head because the idea of being that to someone is terrifying. What happens when you fail? I would fail, and when I did, it will hurt when they destroy me by walking away. I can’t give that part of myself up. Not to anyone else.
Even my scent-matched omega?
I lean on the bar, resting my forehead on it while I let out a rumbling growl.
“Go and rest up. I’ll open.”’
I shove off the bar and glare at him. “How can you be so cold about this? She had no one and nothing. She needed us.”
“What can I do, Oli?” Hunter thunders. “What can I possibly do? She’s gone.”
“We can find her. We can make sure nothing happens to her. Hell, we can try something, anything. I just have this feeling in my chest, this weight, and this damn instinct screaming at me that we can’t leave it like this. We have to find her. Please, I can’t breathe properly, Hunter. I can’t think about anything except the devastation on her face.” I clutch at my aching chest and close my eyes. “Making her happy, seeing her smile, was the happiest I’ve been in forever. Not because it was her but because it was all of us. It seems unimaginable that I can be happy again without her.” I lower my voice to a whisper. “I just want to be next to her.”
Hunter just stares at me.
A throat clears, and I turn to find Saint standing in the doorway. “We’ll go look for her, then.”
“What?” I say, sure I'm hearing things.
“You’re better with putting into words how we feel. You might not feel the bonds as well as us, but I can feel everything you and Hunter are feeling, and I’m telling you now, we are all feeling the same. So, let’s close the bar and go see if we can find her.”
“Do we even know where to start?” Hunter asks.
“No, but at least we can try. Ring the shelters, the hospitals, the police. Ask everyone who owes us favours. Let’s find her first, and then, after that, we can decide what to do.”
I exhale loudly; the relief makes my head spin. “Thank you, Saint.”
He shoves his hands in this black trench coat and walks to the exit. I jog towards him, feeling a lightness in my chest. Hunter isn’t a moment behind me.
We’re going to find her.
We couldn’t find her.
It’s been hours. All night scouring the city, sitting in this car, wishing the next stop would be the one. The dawn is rising in the sky, bringing golden highlights to fluffy clouds, and somewhere out there, the omega that should be ours is missing.
She’s just gone.
How is that even possible?
I rip at my shirt, buttons popping off as I struggle to breathe. A low, threatening growl has been growing in my chest for that last couple of hours.
We checked everywhere. She’s not in a hotel or a shelter. Not in a hospital or a police station. She’s not in any of the parks or parking areas where people with cars sleep.
She is just gone.
“What if she left town?” I snarl.
“She won’t.”
“How do you know?” I ask Saint.
“Because she believes in love too much to give up on us just yet. She’s here. She’s just licking her wounds.”
Saints shoves his hands in his hoodie pocket and stares at the dawn.
“As long as we can see the sunrise, she can, too, and we can be happy with that. We will find her.”
“What if we hurt her too badly, and she decides we’re not worth it, and she just leaves?”
“Crow, you need to calm down and breathe. Relax. We will find her. Maybe we don’t find her tonight. Maybe tomorrow.”
“Maybe she’ll be hurt or dead by then. It would serve us right.”
Hunter hits me hard in the ribs. I wheeze and gape at him as I try to sort through the pain.
“What was that for?”
“Don’t wish ill on her. Nothing is going to happen. She’s smart, and she knows how to survive. She’s been on her own since she was sixteen. Bethany will be fine.”
The pain helps to bring my paranoid thinking back under control, but then I’ve moved on to the next awful image in my mind. Her living in a cardboard box. We pass her multiple times a day but don’t recoginse her, and she never calls out because-
Hunter grabs my jaw and drags me across the backseat and into his lap. “Enough, Oli Crow. You are catastrophizing. You are letting your thoughts run, and it’s not helping things.”
I breathe in his air and snuggle closer, needing the comfort of his touch. Hunter holds me tight, pulling me close, his arms locking around me almost painfully, but giving me exactly what we need.
“We need to sleep. So we’re going home, and we will regroup. Maybe one or two of us goes out and searches each night. Perhaps we can hire a PI. I don’t know, but we can talk about it after.”
We pull up into the driveway, and even though I know she’s not here. I’m convinced that I’ll find her here. So I spring from the car and race around, checking to see if the car is back. It’s not, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t get here another way. Saint opens the house, and I vaguely recall she doesn’t have keys or access, but that doesn’t stop the hope.
The hope only dies when I’ve searched the entire house and find the nest empty. I walk back to the front door, hearing the horrible words that we said to her yesterday morning.
Was it only yesterday? Less than twenty-four hours to completely derail everything.
I sit down where I can watch the front door. Right on the floor, my arms locked around my knees.
“She has to come back, right?”
“Crow, you need to come to bed and sleep.”
I shake my head. “When she comes back.”
Saint picks me up, and though I fight him, he drags me to the bedroom and starts unbuttoning my shirt. Hunter holds me while Saint strips, and then they get into bed with me sandwiched between them, unable to move or escape.
“We have to find her,” I plead over and over. I look between them and clutch at first Saint and then Hunter, trying to get them to understand the urgency, the panic that is throbbing inside me.
“We will,” Saint promises, he soothes. His hands run all over me, trying to calm me down, but I push them off, fighting as they whisper in my ear and tell me that it will be okay.
It’s not going to be okay, nothing is going to be okay.
“What did we do?” I howl.
My instincts are roaring, screaming at me. I need to go and find her. I need to fix it. Just to know she’s okay. Every moment of inaction is painful and sends spikes of agony through me.
The alpha inside rises, roaring its rage at the denial. Fighting Saint and Hunter. Fighting for her. I’m being torn apart from the inside out.
Hunter moves closer, throwing a thigh over mine, and whispers in my ear. Saint strokes my back and exchanges silent conversations with Hunter. I ignore them both. My past rises up with this new fatal wound, slamming into my head with painful clarity. A woman who smiles, with flowers in her hair, tells me she loves me, then locks me in a room with seven other starving children. A couple professes their adoration and takes me away, only to bring me back two months later. I’m hungry and cold and alone. And they take Saint and bring him back more feral than he was when he left.
Hunter vanishes and is brought back with demons in his nightmares and shadows in his eyes. We’re so small, and the world is so big and painful, and we can’t fight them.
And love is the reason it hurts so much.
I scream as the blows fall down on us. I cry when Saint’s arm is broken. I howl when Hunter is thrown into a closet.
And then, in the dark, where the memories are the worst…she appears, this shining light, but I’m so ruined. She won’t want to keep me. She will reject me, and when she does that, it will destroy me. We did the right thing.
My alpha instincts howl with rage, denial.
And the war continues. My past versus my nature.
My howls keep us up for hours. Until my throat hurts so much I can barely talk, until bruises start to show on my skin from fighting Saint and Hunter. It’s only when I can barely open my eyes that Saint forces my mouth open and slams a tablet down my throat. I’m grateful. Because I know what it is, and it will send me to oblivion, and for the first time, I welcome it. I want everything to go away.
But when I wake up in time to go to work, I feel dead inside. There is no hope left. No joy. Nothing but an infected wound throbbing in agony that feels like it might be the thing that finally kills me.
She’s gone.
And nothing I can do is going to fix it. She left me. Just like everyone else did. But that’s my fault, too.