Chapter 5 #2
Elle squeezes my hand across the table. Madi does the same on my other side.
“The night I escaped,” I continue, even as flashbacks claw at my mind.
“You have to go, Honeybee.” Valen’s voice is desperate, pleading, scared. “Terra’s planning the exchange. A transfer because she thinks we’re too close.”
Tugging my hands free, I clasp them in my lap and press my nails into my palms, giving me a new pain point to focus on.
“Valen helped me. He planned it all out. For years, he was too scared to tell his aunt what was happening because Terra showed him, every summer, what she could do to me if he said anything, but that summer—that summer, he knew our fear for the future was the lesser of two evils, and he confided in his aunt.”
I close my eyes. Reliving it in the dark feels safer than facing it in the light.
“We were supposed to stall. To give his aunt time to get us out of there, but things…happened. When I ran, h-he was supposed to go back to the grounds, to throw everyone off and ensure no one could track me. He was supposed to meet me at Miriam’s house—she hid me in a secret room. ”
My eyes flutter open. They have no context for this story, and my author brain scrambles to make it make sense.
“Vivian, she was Valen’s aunt on his dad’s side.
Miriam is his aunt on his mother’s side—she’s Terra’s twin.
She always looked after me, and she was helping us. But Valen never came back.”
“He abandoned you?” Madi asks, anger making her tone sharp.
“No.” I shake my head. “All these years, I thought he did. I thought that he chose his mother, the cult, that life, over me.” The admission burns. I never wanted to believe it was true, but that intrusive thought has lived rent-free in my mind for years.
Curling my fingers, I allow each nail to dig a little deeper into my palm.
“Last night he told me—” My voice breaks, and I focus all my attention on my hands. “Someone hurt him. They almost killed him. He—he lost all his memories. He doesn’t remember me. He doesn’t remember any of it.”
“Oh, Clover.” Elle’s tears knock over the dam on mine.
“But he called you Honeybee.” Madi frowns. “Is that what he called you when you were kids?”
“Yes,” I whisper, reaching into my pocket, allowing my thumb to trace the tiny wooden bee carving I always have close by.
“Some part of him must remember me, but he said he doesn’t recall anything, not even me, and I believe him.
I saw it in his eyes. The way he…the way he stared straight through me.
” I drop my gaze to my lap. “I— I’m a stranger to him. ”
I wipe my eyes with the blanket. “And now he’s here, thanks in part to Roman, I think, and I don’t know what to do with that. I’ve been in love with a ghost, and the real version doesn’t even know who I am.”
The words hang in the air like a confession.
Because that’s what it is.
I’ve been in love with Valen Stone since I was six years old. Through the abuse. Through the escape. Through foster care and college and every failed attempt at dating that never went anywhere because no one was…him.
And now he’s here.
And he’s a stranger.
“Well.” Madi gathers herself, sitting up taller. “That’s incredibly romantic and also the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.”
For a moment, no one speaks. We just sit with it—the weight of years lost, the impossibility of what comes next. Then Elle scooches her chair closer to me and rests her head on my shoulder, and I let myself breathe.
I don’t picture boxes or count for survival. I simply inhale for the first time in hours.
As soon as my nervous system regulates to something resembling normal, I laugh.
It comes out wet and broken, but it’s a laugh.
“What are you going to do?” Elle asks, eyeing me like I might need another intervention.
“I don’t know. He wants to know about our past. About who I am to him. But—” I look at two of my best friends. “What if I tell him and he regrets it? Regrets protecting me? What happens when he realizes I’m the reason he lost everything?”
“Stop.” Madi’s voice cuts through the room, sharp and insistent. “You’re not responsible for what happened to him. Some asshole hurt a teenage boy for doing the right thing. That’s on them, not you.”
She grasps my shoulders with so much strength I wince.
“You were both children, Clove. Children who needed help, and love, and care. He made the choice to save you. It was a beautifully brave, possibly stupid choice that cost him everything.” Her eyes are fierce.
“But it was still his choice. And I guarantee you—memory or not—he’d make it again. ”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do. I saw how he was looking at you.” Her smile is sad. “He stared at you like you’re the answer to a question he’s been asking his whole life. Memory loss didn’t erase your connection, Clover. You’re in his bones. You’re a piece of his soul.”
I want to believe her.
I want to believe that love can survive amnesia, a decade, and all the trauma in between.
But I’m terrified.
Terrified of hoping.
Terrified of losing him again.
Terrified that I’m not worth the chaos my presence seems to bring to his life.
A knock on the back door makes us all jump—it’s always nice when it’s not just me overreacting, but I hate seeing fear on the faces of my friends.
“Are you expecting someone?” Madi asks.
“No.”
We stare at the door as though it might explode.
Another knock. “Clover? It’s Chief. Got someone for ya.”
I exhale, and Elle curses.
“Freaking Chief,” Madi mutters while moving to the back door. “Why wouldn’t he come to the front like a normal human being?”
She opens the door to reveal Chief standing on my back porch, with Wrecks growling on one side of him and Valen standing on the other.
But it’s the package at their feet that makes my stomach drop dramatically to my toes. My legs carry me closer even as my mind screams at me to run.
White paper. Twine. My name written in an eerily elegant script across the front.
“We came this way ’cause it was time for a perimeter check and found this,” Chief says, his voice suspiciously careful. “Thought we should check it out before I called it in.”
The air slices my lungs like shards of ice as the panic seeps in. I’ve been in this kitchen since Valen left in the middle of the night. Someone was…they were right there, ten feet away from me, and I had no idea.
Wrecks whines before propelling himself forward and lying across my feet.
“Good boy,” Elle coos.
“Clover.” Valen’s voice shifts the panic to the back of my mind. There’s something in the blue depths of his eyes, a determination, a fearlessness I’ve never known that silently helps me regulate my breathing, my pulse, my mind.
Madi is beside me in an instant. “Is that—”
“Another package.” The words taste bitter. She’d be pissed if she knew how regularly they were coming.
Chief steps aside as Valen circles the package with the eye of someone trained to disarm bombs—maybe he is. It hurts to realize there’s so much I don’t know about him now.
“There’s more,” Valen says, looking like he hasn’t slept in days. His dark hair is disheveled, his jaw shadowed with stubble, his shirt wrinkled as though he slept in his car.
I’ve never seen a more beautiful man.
“Go ahead and tell her, son,” Chief says, entering the kitchen and helping himself to my leftover burrito.
Valen holds up his phone. “Security footage from the camera feed in Rip’s car.
” He steps closer, and suddenly my small kitchen feels microscopic.
“Someone bypassed the cameras last night at 3:15 a.m. They were disabled for exactly seventeen minutes, but someone ran a recording through our system on a loop so we wouldn’t detect it immediately. ”
His jaw is locked hard.
He— Oh shit. He was here with Roman at that time.
“Riley was in custody well before that,” Elle says.
“Exactly.” Valen looks at Chief. “Which means whoever’s been stalking Clover is not Savvy’s ex.”
The words settle over us like a shroud of dread.
“Then who?” Madi asks.
“That,” Chief says slowly, “is the question.”
“How long have you been getting these?” Valen asks.
Dammit. My friends will hate what I say next. “Um, about a…month. Maybe two.”
“A month?” Elle blurts. “But you said…”
I wince.
“You were getting packages and not telling us.” Madi surmises.
“The poems started six months ago. The packages are…newish.” Shame makes the words thick and uneven.
Valen’s phone buzzes in his hand. He glances down, then back to me.
“It’s Roman. He’s bringing something over.
A—” Is he struggling with his words? “A military-grade vehicle. It’s a security system with reinforced walls that he had one of our guys drive down from Charlotte.
” His cheeks are totally flushed. “It’s basically a mobile panic room. ”
Oh, Mylanta. Valen’s embarrassed, and it’s sexy as hell.
He’s staring at me expectantly, and I snap out of my drool-fest. “Um, why is he bringing that here?”
“Because I’m not leaving you unprotected.” His voice is firm. Final. “And since you’re barely leaving your house, I’m bringing the protection to you.”
“What are you going to do? Sleep in her driveway?” Madi’s smirk is annoying. She’s having way too much fun with this whole…debacle.
“Yes.” My gaze snaps to Valen so fast my hair gets stuck in my wide-open mouth.
“That’s—” Intense. Overprotective. Completely overbearing. “You don’t have to do that.” Even as I say it, the fear swirling in my stomach heats with something much, much more dangerous. Freaking hope.
“I do though.” Something flickers in his expression that looks like the boy I knew.
“We have secrets to uncover, Clover. Wounds that scarred both our lives. I may not remember—yet—what they are, but I feel them, and I’m here now.
I need you to help me remember my past, and I’ll help protect your future.
I won’t let anything happen to you—not this time. ”