Chapter 15
Mags
“What crawled up his butt and died?”
Kaden rolls his eyes at me. “Are you dense, Mags? Kip is totally in love with you, and you just suggested bonding for the sake of a fucking scam.”
Kip isn’t in love with me. Kaden’s twin bond must be on the fritz. “Kip’s my best friend.”
“And he loves you.”
That doesn’t make any sense. I’ve been grifting other packs for years. I know how to read people, and I think I’d know if my best friend was in love with me. “He loves me like he loves you, Kaden. Like a sibling.”
“If Kip loved me like he loves you, there would be banjos playing right about now.”
I give up. “You guys are impossible!”
He stands up and stretches. “On that note, I’m going back to bed.”
“You’re not going to bond with me, either?”
“Nope.”
Alone again, I sit on the couch and fume. It’s like nobody cares about putting food on the table or keeping the roof over our heads anymore. Everything is all “love” this and “feelings” that. Everyone but me has lost their fucking minds.
A few minutes later, Nik comes in. I tense, waiting for the bond to tell me what kind of mood he’s in.
“I’m just as pissed off as you, though for different reasons,” he says. “Breakfast?”
I kind of miss needing to ask a question before it got answered. “I’d love some.”
I wince in sync with Nik as the word pops out of my mouth and hits him like a knife to the heart.
While he fries up some eggs, I sit at the dining table and scroll through my phone. Kip and Kaden fouled my mood, and I double-fouled it by mentioning love in front of Nik. Now I hate myself as well as my best friends, only I don’t hate myself because Nik loves me too damn much for that.
The plate clatters on the table in front of me as Nik sits down with our food.
I take a few quick bites, then slow down once I realize what my hunger is doing to him.
He’s watching my mouth, watching me lick my lips and devour the food.
Normally, I wouldn’t think anything of it, but with the bond …
God, how do I make scrambled eggs so fucking sexy?
I put my fork down and push the plate away. “Is that what it’s always like for you?” I ask.
“Watching you eat? Yeah.” He gives me an impish grin, then turns to his own plate like I didn’t just feel his arousal through the bond.
To his credit, aside from the sensations the bond is giving me, nothing in his expression or mannerisms revealed his desire.
I could have given him an O just by scarfing my breakfast, and I never would have guessed.
Either Nik has the perfect poker face, or I’m not as good at reading people as I thought.
“What do we do now?”
Nik surprises me with a sad smile. “We learn to deal with it. Now, where are the twins?”
My cheeks heat up as I remember my dumb bonding idea. “Um … They might be mad at me. Like, really mad.”
“How mad?”
“Kip walked out.”
He groans and scrubs his face with his hands. “What the fuck did you do to make that happen? Kip would stroll right into Hell at your side if you asked him to.”
“It’s, um, not important right now.” I’d better change the subject before I end up inserting my foot even further into my mouth.
I tap my phone with my fingertip instead, redirecting Nik’s attention.
“We need money. Since Dave found me out and we had to skip, we know we won’t be getting anything from the Donnellys. ”
“We’ll be lucky if they don’t sue.”
I slam my fist on the table. “I should fucking sue them! Drugging me, planning who-knows-what for me …” A light bulb goes off in my head. “Wait, can we sue Dave? He’s not as loaded as the parents, but maybe he left some fingerprints on one of my vials or something.”
Nik places his hand over mine. “We’re not opening that can of worms. I don’t want to risk it.”
Ugh. Can’t even squeeze them for some compensation fees. “This sucks.”
“What part of this is sucky?”
That sounds like a trap. If I say it’s the bond, he’ll think I regret last night.
Hell, what am I saying? He probably already thinks that because I think that.
But it’s not regretting the bond so much as regretting the consequences of said bond.
I might have lost Kip over my enthusiasm for finding more work through pack bonding, and even Kaden is butthurt about it.
If Nik rejects me, too … God, might I really end up alone because of this?
“Please stop thinking, Mags.”
I look into Nik’s green eyes, and a bolt of pain lances through my heart. The bond isn’t the telepathic kind—I can’t hear his thoughts—but this new empathy, this strength of emotion, can cut like a fucking knife sometimes.
“Sorry.”
He leans over and kisses my cheek. “You don’t have to apologize. I know it’s new for you, same as me. We’ll just have to adjust, and that’s going to take time.”
Who has time to adjust to a mate bond when life is imploding all around me?
Groaning in frustration, I put my elbows on the table and cover my head with my arms. I just want to hide from everything for a while, until things settle down.
Maybe if I vanish for a few days, I can come back to a normal house.
Kip will be back, Kaden will forgive me, and it’ll put enough distance on the mate bond to let Nik enjoy it without my own insecurities fucking things up.
“You’re not going anywhere.”
“Spoilsport.”
“Yep.”
I spend the next four hours moping about the house, trying to distract myself from feeling anything personal and failing miserably.
Nik gives me the space for it, which I appreciate, but it’s got to be hard on him.
I don’t know if my self-hate is making him hate himself or hate me or what. How does that work, anyway?
Kaden reemerges at a quarter to nine. His hair sticks up on one side, and he’s got enormous dark circles under his eyes, so I’m guessing he never got back to sleep.
He strolls through the living room as usual, except for the conspicuous lack of eye contact. I watch him enter and leave like a sick puppy hoping for some ear scritches at the pet store.
No ear scritches to be had. Not even a little pat on the head.
“I’ll pat your head.”
I shriek and jump half off the couch. I was so preoccupied with whether or not Kaden still hates me, that I didn’t even sense Nik approach. “Jerk.”
Nik sits next to me, staring me down. I squirm under his scrutinous gaze.
“Oh, I’m the jerk? You’ve done something so fucked up to Kaden that you’re drowning in self-loathing when he walks by, but I’m the jerk?”
Pulling my knees up to my chest, I bite back tears. I don’t want to tell Nik what I did. I’d rather just rewind the morning and undo that weird conversation with the twins, but I know that’s impossible. Sooner or later, I’ll have to face the music.
“I might have suggested a full pack bond.”
Rage. Confusion. Exasperation. Pain. Heartache.
My short sentence sets off a cascade of emotions in Nik, one so dizzying I find it hard to think straight.
The heartache is the worst part. I get a strong sense that I’m not good enough, but once I separate his feelings from my own, I realize that Nik’s the one who’s insecure.
He reaches out, and I instinctively flinch, bracing myself for the smack across the face that I so obviously deserve.
The smack never comes. Instead, Nik pulls me close and holds me while rocking me back and forth. Kaden walks back in and stops, half a sandwich hanging from his mouth, looking slightly panicked.
“What happened?” he asks around his mouthful of food.
“We all need to have a talk, I think.” Nik strokes my hair and kisses the top of my head, which is even better than ear scritches. “Do you know where Kip is right now?”
Kaden’s eyes lose focus for a second as he swallows his bite, then zones back in. “Roughly three miles north of here and about six pints under.”
Nik gestures to the car keys on the coffee table. “Go get him, please.”
“Nik, did she tell you everything yet? Because you might not be so chivalrous and understanding if—”
“Just get him. We all need to talk, and we need level heads for it. I’ll calm Mags down, so if you could maybe find a way to sober up your brother, that would be appreciated.”
I watch Kaden’s feet walk out the door, unable to bring myself to look any closer.
“You’re going to hate me, too, you know.”
“No, I won’t, Mags. You’ve got to stop catastrophising everything.
The melodramatics are killing me.” He kisses my lips, and a flood of love and affection flows through me.
My muscles instantly relax, but I don’t feel as lost in the emotions this time.
Either he’s getting better at filtering what he sends through the mate bond, or I’m getting better at sorting who’s who in all this.
“I might get mad, though. It sounds like you were just being classic Mags, and sometimes, yeah, classic Mags pisses me off.”
Fair point. I guess we just have to wait for the twins to get back before we find out if we have a pack of four here, a pack of two, or …
… A pack of one.