Chapter 21 Soren
Soren
Soren yanks the wheel too hard and narrowly misses side-swiping a parked car.
The big truck is certainly harder to drive than his bike.
He slams to a stop at a red light. When it turns green, he pulls away with too much acceleration, cutting the shoulder too close.
The speedometer hits sixty before he even merges onto the freeway.
“Fuck. Have you had your license long?” Quinn mutters. He braces a hand on the dashboard and throws the other arm across Kaian’s chest, who is wedged tight between them, his warmth heating Soren’s side.
“Don’t have one.” Soren merges into the light traffic, with a horn blaring behind them.
He’d never found the time it took to go and take the test at the DMV when he’d been younger and more carefree.
After that…well, he’d been too busy trying to survive the crippling agony of a rejected bond and keep his alpha safe from his psychopathic employer to bother.
“Holy shit. You’d better slow down—I am not dying at a hundred miles an hour in this pile of shit,” Quinn snaps. He’s not truly angry, Soren has known his mate long enough for that, but perhaps it’s that Kaian is swaying in his seat, hands clenched nervously in his lap.
Soren lets off the gas a little. Their pretty little angel is still just Human, and no matter that he has kickass magic, he wouldn’t heal from a collision like he and Quinn.
That’s why he’d chosen the sturdy F150 rather than something sleeker and faster. A bigger vehicle performs better in collisions and is more intimidating if Vincenzo’s goons managed to find them out here in the open.
Connall’s showroom had lots to choose from, but the big white truck was Soren’s favorite. It smelled nothing like Patrick Carnell and had, despite its bullet-ridden frame, served its purpose as shelter on nights when he was too tired to crawl home to his studio apartment.
The title had someone else’s name on it, and when Soren had looked the guy up, he’d been a detective who’d been publicly shamed into throwing himself off the roof after his partner died in a shootout.
No doubt Carnell orchestrated both. It had proved to be both a psychopath’s trophy and the safest place Soren had slept in over a year.
Besides Quinn’s bed, that is.
The dense city lights disappear in the truck’s rearview mirror, giving way to smaller pockets of light: settlements, roadside convenience stores, and the occasional truck stop.
While he hadn’t been on this road in years, the way to Connall’s safe house was burned into his memory.
“It’s about forty minutes outside of town. ”
“What is?” Kaian asks, his words slurred with fatigue. He’s dropped his head on Quinn’s broad shoulder with a deep inhale and then a contented sigh. His sweet coconut scent is lush with fatigue.
“Safe place in Goodlettsville.”
Kaian doesn’t respond, and when Soren looks over, he can see he’s asleep, soft lips parted, and his long black lashes resting on his cheeks. So pretty. So soft and so, so fragile.
“Are you okay?” Quinn whispers. His dark eyebrows are low over his whiskey-colored eyes, and his full mouth is narrowed with concern.
He holds Kaian to him with an arm around his shoulders.
He runs a soft hand over Kaian’s shaggy head and slips his fingers beneath the fall of hair, letting the inside of his wrist drag slowly across the vulnerable nape of his neck.
It’s a claiming gesture—one Soren isn’t sure Quinn knows he’s even doing.
Soren wants to scoff at Quinn scenting the boy—man—without his consent, but Soren is no hypocrite.
He gives in to the pressing urge to touch, rubbing a single finger over Kaian’s hand where it rests on his thigh.
He wants to do the same to Quinn’s hand so near his own shoulder, but isn’t sure he’d be welcome—not even after the kisses they’d shared with Kaian between them in that alley, hot and hungry and far too easy to want more from.
Quinn flinches when Soren gets too close to the tractor-trailer in front of them in his distraction, but he holds his tongue about it. It doesn’t stop his next comment, however. “You’re acting weird.”
He hesitates as if he’d like to add more, leaving Soren to figure out what exactly is weird about his behavior. The list of things would be long, and maybe Soren isn’t hiding his inner workings as easily as he’d thought.
Deciding deflection is easier than honesty, he shoots back, “I’m acting weird? Me?”
Because it hadn’t just been Soren acting out of character. Quinn had been strange too, ever since Soren had woken up to find a literal baby angel in Quinn’s fortress of solitude.
Wait. Does that make Quinn Superman to Soren’s Batman? Ooh, he’d watch that.
Quinn smacks his shoulder to get him back on track. “Ren? You’re worrying me? You’re zoning out every five seconds.”
“I’m peachy.” He’s so far from peachy, but until he can find more than those zoned out five seconds to think about it, the less said the better.
Quinn’s cherry scent gets sour with concern before he locks it down. It burns Soren’s nose but also warms a place in the vicinity of his heart. “Maybe we should have taken you to the ER just to be sure.”
“I said I’m good. Can you just—”
“I would, but you haven’t checked your phone once since you woke up.”
The reminder sends a jolt through him—as much for realizing he hadn’t checked Connall’s flashing dot on his surveillance app even once, as for the fact that Quinn noticed.
It wasn’t like he hadn’t thought about it.
He’d seen his phone on the nightstand at Quinn’s place, and he’d thought about it again when he saw Vinnie, Jimmy, and Alfonso at the door.
He even thought about it when he’d been revving the shit out of the truck in the warehouse.
He was thinking about it now, as he rolled into Goodlettsville at three in the morning.
But he didn’t need to check it. For once, his wolf isn’t pacing when Connall isn’t within a one-mile radius.
It’s almost content knowing that Connall is probably safe in his shithole of an apartment by this time, or asleep on the couch in his office.
Besides, aside from the beating from Klein, today would have taken as much out of Connall as it had Soren, and unlike Soren, his Alpha isn’t being bolstered by their mates.
He wants to close his eyes and picture Connall asleep in his twin bed, pristine white sheets pulled up over his naked chest, just to ease the residual flash of anxiety.
In the end, he goes with the least revealing explanation he can: “Yeah, well, Johnson has it covered.”
“He’s probably licking his wounds somewhere expensive,” Quinn grits out. “Running away takes a lot from a person.”
Soren wants to defend Connall—to say he’s not like that—that he’d chosen the mafia life as a sacrifice for a man who’s living the life Soren should have had.
Sure, Connall ran away, but he and Quinn do, too.
Every time Soren gets up from Quinn’s bed smelling like mate but without a bond bite, or Quinn reminds him he’s on the bus out of Nashville any day now.
He wants to say: “You should know.”
Instead, he says nothing and turns into a small suburban neighborhood with short green lawns shaved close, and mailboxes leaning like they’ve been telling the same gossip for years.
Suburbia at its finest, with houses sitting a breath apart.
Near enough for a wave when you’re washing your car, but far enough that no one knows your business unless they want to—which they often do.
Streetlights glow in the dark, illuminating a kid’s plastic slide, sun-faded, sitting in one home’s yard, and someone’s grill parked in the driveway of another. Middle-class and comfortable, it’s the kind of place Connall would choose precisely because it doesn’t say anything at all.
The sights of happy, normal lives hurt more than Soren’s heart, making the pain in his head sting.
He cuts the engine, coasting to a stop behind another truck parked on the side of the road, two houses down.
He’s grateful that he can angle the bullet-ridden side toward the bushes alongside the road.
The safe house itself is a low brick ranch with a two-car garage and a driveway long enough for kids to play basketball or ride their bikes around and around. The shrubs along the outside of the lot are trimmed to regulation height to please a militant HOA.
The roofline makes a neat, modest V against the trees that crowd the lot line, and those trees are what Soren remembers most: the deep shade at the side yard where he once nosed his bike into the overgrown cedar hedge, killing the engine two houses early and walking it over the gravel, heartbeat loud in his ears.
He waited there while Connall went inside. Five minutes. Ten. It had felt like an eternity in a place more foreign to Soren than some of the more dangerous places he’d followed his alpha.
There’s a camera at the front corner looking down the street, not where he’d expect the average homeowner to mount it, which is exactly why Connall chose that spot.
The feed doesn’t go anywhere except a little command station inside the kitchen cupboard alongside the canned goods and non-perishables.
It’s meant to protect the occupants, not keep anyone out while it’s empty.
It had taken Soren a while to understand that for Connall, it would always be about the people, not the property.
And the idea that there would never be people to make this house a home isn’t something Soren can make room for—not when his mates are out here, where they could be memorable for the neighbors should anyone come looking.
“Come on.”
He steps out into the hum of cicadas and the scent of cut grass, gravel grinding under his boots. The air smells like damp wood from the treeline, faint oil from the truck, the metallic tang of coming rain.