Chapter 27
RYLAND
Rowan is yelling.
He won’t stop yelling.
“You left her there? You just let her go?!” he snarls in Travis’ face. My pack leader has grown still as stone as my brother screams at him. “What kind of man are you?”
“The kind that knows the harder we try to keep her, the worse it will be,” he says, his voice devoid of emotion.
“So, you’re just giving up, then.” Rowan barks out a hysterical laugh. “Just letting her reject us. You’re a fucking idiot, Travis. You’ve fucked this up from day one!”
“Hey,” Travis growls, stepping closer into my brother’s face. “Would you rather me drag her here, so she can hate us? Because if that’s the case, you don’t know her as well as you think.”
With Rowan spiraling and Travis coming back to the packhouse in ruins, I haven’t even had time to process what I’m feeling during this mess.
Blair left us.
She left us, thinking she wasn’t good for us.
Which is insane—besides being our scent matches, she’s a wonderful person.
She’s everything I could have hoped for, and more.
Rowan is still shouting, and before I can stop him, he shoves Travis. Travis gets into his face, and I have to pull my brother back from swinging.
Again, there’s no time to process how I’m feeling.
“Knock that shit off,” I hiss at Rowan. “None of this is helping.”
“So, you’re giving up on her, too,” he laughs. “Just letting her run away from us without a fight.”
“It’s not about letting her run away. If she needs space, we respect it.”
“Right, and letting her know she’s not worth fighting for,” he snaps, his icy eyes blazing. “You two are fucking idiots. You kept me away from her, you didn’t want me to meet her, and now she’s gone. She’s fucking gone, because you two aren’t brave enough to fight for what you want!”
“Brave?” I snarl, grabbing him by his black shirt collar, catching him by surprise.
“How about we talk about who’s brave here.
” Built up anger bubbles up inside me, spilling from my mouth like poison.
“Who’s the one that pushes everything aside for you?
Who has patience just to keep you out of trouble?
Who has to reign you in, because you’re too fucking much all the goddamn time? ”
Rowan stares at me, his mouth open in shock.
“Do you know why Travis and I wanted you to stay away from Blair at first? So, you didn’t pull this shit on her. Only thinking about yourself and not how she feels.”
“What the fuck, Ryland,” Rowan whispers.
“It’s not always about you,” I spit. “It’s not always Rowan, Rowan, Rowan. We’re a pack. And we don’t dictate our actions based only on what you think is right.”
My brother stares at me, his breathing heavy as he pulls himself out of my grip. “Get the fuck off me,” he hisses.
I haven’t talked to my brother like that for as long as I can remember. But it comes spilling out of me, every word making Rowan’s face crumple.
“Not everything is about you,” I hiss. “How about you give a shit about what I’m feeling for the first time in your life. I’m sick of being the one to have to hold you back or clean up your shit.”
“I’ve never asked you to do that. Asshole.”
“You didn’t have to. It needed to happen.”
Rowan looks between Travis and me, his face hard as stone. “Fuck you guys,” he spits. Then, he turns and heads out the front door, slamming it behind him.
I turn to Travis. “Was I too harsh?”
He shakes his head, his lips pulled into a thin line. “No.”
“Do you think he’s going to try and go after her?”
“He doesn’t know where she went.”
“Fuck.” I run a hand through my hair. “I don’t know how to do this. Usually, I have the answers when it comes to my brother, but this is uncharted territory.”
“Nothing you said was wrong, though,” Travis adds. “Just because Rowan is louder with his problems, doesn’t mean your shit isn’t valid, too.”
I huff. “Didn’t know you were that emotionally mature.”
“You never asked.”
“What the fuck are we going to do?” I groan. “How the fuck are we supposed to live without her?”
“We’ll get her back,” Travis says. “We will.”
It doesn’t sound like he believes it, though.
“How, though? By letting her believe that she’s not good for us?”
Is Rowan right?
Are we just sitting on our asses letting her believe the lie in her head, or is giving her time the right thing to do?
Travis had relayed the conversation he had with Blair in her apartment and everything she believed about herself.
“No. We show her that she makes us better,” Travis says slowly, as if the idea just came to him.
“She makes me better, at least. Has me taking cat pictures all the time.”
“And what about your…other hobby?” I ask him. “Have you been doing that more?”
He nods. “She doesn’t know about it yet, though. Or that any of it comes from me.”
“You should tell her about it.”
He shrugs. “I should tell her a lot of things,” he murmurs. “If I could go back and change it, I would. Maybe then she would have stayed.”
I’ve been patient a lot in my life.
I’ve been patient growing up, when Rowan needed all the attention from our parents while I quietly played in my room.
I was patient when I presented as an Alpha along with my brother, who was experiencing intense reactions to the changing hormones in his body.
I’m always patient. Always understanding.
But Blair’s departure has broken something in me.
Every time I pushed my own feelings aside for the sake of my family or friends, I told myself it was all worth it.
I’m an Alpha.
I would find my scent match, and life would just be…better.
For a few weeks, it was.
Seeing Rowan happy brought me joy as well.
It was all working out, and we had finally found her.
But just like I can’t change how Rowan’s mind works, I can’t change Blair’s, no matter how much I may want to.
I can only show her that she’s good for me and my pack.
Rowan disappears for the next day—and instead of checking in with him, I allow him to sort himself out.
I throw myself into work, instead. Our newest horror game has to do with haunted animatronics, which includes a possessed cat character that comes to life. I take over part of Rowan’s portion, happy to busy myself instead of wallowing in the ache that comes with being apart from Blair.
I knew it would hurt. I knew I would ache, but I didn’t realize how terrible it would feel to be separated from my scent match.
And if I’m feeling this way, I know Rowan is experiencing it tenfold.
Which makes me worry about how Blair is holding up, if we’re all suffering like this.
Ash trots into the room and perches on the cat tree above my desk, settling into a loaf form and slow blinking at me.
Blair says a slow blink is a sign of love.
Too bad I didn’t slow blink at her enough.
“Hey.”
I didn’t even realize my brother had entered the room, lost in thought about Blair. He carries Josie, Posie, and Rosie in his arms and places them down on top of a crocheted fish pattern blanket, then stares at my computer screen.
“Hey,” I reply, swiveling my chair to face him. “I started working on the creepy animatronic one. There are some pixelation issues, especially with the haunted cat.”
He nods, his face paler than usual with dark circles under his eyes. “Am I really like that?” he asks me suddenly.
“Like what?”
“Like you said yesterday. Always demanding attention. Making it so that you can never focus on yourself and only about me.”
I shrug. “We’re adults, Rowan. I said that shit out of anger and annoyance. You don’t make me do anything.”
“But you meant it,” he presses. “Didn’t you?”
I chew my lip. “I shouldn’t have said it.”
His jaw clenches as he looks at me. “I care about how you feel,” he mumbles, swallowing. “I’m not trying to be selfish all the time.”
“I don’t think you’re trying to be selfish all the time, Row.”
“Yeah, well, I was an asshole yesterday,” he says, rubbing the back of his neck. “And I’m sorry. You shouldn’t have to worry about me all the time or be forced to hold me back. I’m sorry.”
My brother rarely apologizes, so his words startle me.
“I know. I’m sorry for what I said to you, too,” I say.
“I…want to be better. For her.”
“You just need to be yourself,” I tell him gently. “She makes you better. She makes us better. She just needs to know that, somehow. We need to find a way to make her understand.”
“I just went out to be by myself and think.” Rowan hesitates, then crouches to pet the kittens.
“I didn’t even get to say goodbye to her, and…
” he huffs out a breath, cradling Josie to his chest, “it feels like I’m dying.
Like I have the worst flu of my life. Now that I’ve had a taste of her, I don’t know how I’m supposed to go on without her. ”
“We won’t have to,” I promise him, even though I’m not sure if that’s true.
“Her smell is torturing me. You can still scent her, can’t you? She’s in the walls. She’s everywhere, Ryland, like a damn ghost that’s haunting us. Worse than any of this shit.” He gestures to the game on my monitor.
“Being away from her can make us sick,” I say. “If the scent match and connection are strong enough, we can end up with something like the flu.”
“Which means she could be sick,” Rowan groans. He sits on the floor with the kittens, allowing them to crawl all over his lap. “These cats are the only creatures that make me feel even a little bit better. No wonder she loves them so much,” he mutters.
I glance up at Ash, who has now fallen asleep in loaf form, eyes closed and at ease.
“We’re going to get through this,” I say, as much to my brother as to myself. “We will.”
“She makes me better, Ryland. She grounds me. Better than any breathing exercise. Just being around her quiets the thoughts.”
I smile sadly at Rowan. “The benefits of a scent match,” I mutter.
Blair makes me better, too.
Before her, I was content with my video game company and waiting for my scent match.
But now, I want more from life, but only if she’s in it.
“Hey,” Rowan says after a few minutes of silence. “So, I had an idea, and it may be crazy.”
“That wouldn’t surprise me.”
He huffs. “Yeah, well…” he pulls out a small notebook from his hoodie pocket. “I worked on this yesterday and wanted to run it by you. It would be for Blair, if she ever wanted it.”
He tosses the black notebook to me, and I flip it open. I haven’t seen him use one of these notebooks in years to scribble down his thoughts, and I dread what new horrors I’ll find, especially after Blair’s absence.
But I smile softly when I see what he’s written and sketched.
“Do you think it could work?” he says. “It would be rough, and very basic, but I think she might like it.”
“We have energy drinks in the fridge,” I tell him. “Let’s get to work. I wasn’t planning on sleeping much, anyway.”
Rowan nods, and when he stands, Josie, Posie, and Rosie trail behind him.
“Rowan?”
He stops at the doorway.
“This is a really good idea,” I tell him.
He quirks the corner of his lip.
It’s the closest to a smile I’ll get until Blair returns to us.
But Rowan’s idea shows exactly what Blair needs to understand.
She brings out the best in us.