Chapter 25 Connall #2
He’s still replaying the interaction with Beau over in his mind when the glass door slides open and then closes.
Soren’s white-blond hair is damp, and he smells less like sweet heliotropes and cherry smoke, and more like soap. There’s a dark bruise on the side of his face that Connall hadn’t noticed before, and it has blackened under one eye.
“Hey,” Connall says inanely.
What do you say to the person you abandoned to suffer seventeen years, Goddess-knows-where while you mourned them as an indentured servant to a psychopath? Where does he even start?
“Hey.” Apparently, Soren didn’t know where to start either.
“How are you here?” The words are out before Connall knows he’s going to say them. It is definitely the biggest surprise of the last twenty-four hours. “You’re surprised to see me, too, right?”
“No.” Soren comes closer, but stops outside of touching distance as if he, too, can hardly hold back his wolf from tackling Connall to the warm wooden boards of the rotting deck. “I don’t know…I can’t…shit.”
He runs a hand over the top of his head, and Connall hears the audible grinding of teeth over the buzz of the cicadas.
“What—”
“Fuck, Con. Just let me get it out all at once, and then you can ask me questions or hit me or whatever.”
“Hit you? What are you talking about? I would never—”
Soren tilts his head and raises a single fair eyebrow.
“Yeah, okay. You have your say, and then I can have mine. I want to know what you’ve been doing since…er…I saw you last.” It’s so lame, Connall feels his ears heat, and the embarrassment he never feels settles like a stone in his already churning stomach.
“You’d be surprised,” Soren mutters under his breath. He takes up a position leaning against the brick wall beside the patio door. He hesitates, and for a minute Connall thinks he looks like he’s going to bolt. “Can you not look…right at me? I’m not used to it yet.”
Not look at him? It’s all Connall has wanted to do since he was twenty years old.
Tall and powerful, his mate is stunning.
With a scar on his cheek and that bruise, it speaks to a banked violence and power.
Connall is torn between being so fucking turned on he’s sweating, and angry that someone dared hurt his mate.
“Fuck that,” Connall says with a snort. “I don’t think I’ll be able to stop looking at you for the next hundred years.” It’s out of his mouth before he thinks it through, and despite his own embarrassment, it’s worth it to see Soren flush with pleasure, too.
“Don’t you want to look at me too?” Connall has taken a single step toward him, but the embarrassing words stop him cold. “Fuck me. Don’t answer that. Jesus.”
Soren laughs this time, a genuine smile that lights up his face and sets Connall’s heart pounding in his chest. Yes. His wolf needs more of that. Who knew Connall’s stupid, cringeworthy train of thought could be so amusing?
“Yes. I want to,” Soren says, his smile smaller now but no less genuine before it falls away completely. His green eyes are dark and serious. “Like I do every day.”
The words settle between them, and Connall’s brain struggles to keep up. “What…what…what do you mean?”
“Fuck. Exactly what I said. There has not been one day that I haven’t seen your face since you left me on that train.”
Connall locks his knees, flings a clawed hand out to grapple for purchase on the railing.
“When you walked away, I…I couldn’t just let you go. You’re my alpha, and I thought I could change your mind. I didn’t know then that you were afraid.”
He had been. So fucking afraid—for himself, and for Soren.
Connall already knew what Patrick Carnell did to people Connall loved.
Soren would not be more collateral damage or used as leverage in Patrick’s twisted game.
So he’d licked the last of Soren’s kiss from his lips, and said the words he hears in his nightmares when he’s been drinking too much or lets his guard down.
“It didn’t take me long to figure out why.”
“Then you…what? You followed me to New York? You were seventeen! A student, right?” Connall is filled with shame that he doesn’t know. What he didn’t know about Soren then, and now, could fill volumes.
“Fuck, no.”
“Then what? Where were you going? Where were your parents? Your pack?”
Soren laughs out loud. “I haven’t had parents since they dumped me at a rest stop.”
The pain in Connall’s gut surges at the thought of a child abandoned at the side of the road. Wondering when the people who loved him most would be back for him. How long did he wait before someone came for him and fed him? Kept him warm? Loved him?
“It wasn’t hard to follow you.” Soren shrugs, eyes burning into Connall’s. “You didn’t look like you were…missing me, but I did okay. It was easy to get work.”
Patrick Carnell had kept Connall busy—but the thought tasted bitter. No duty, no threat, no enemy should have outweighed caring for his young mate. His chest tightens with the knowledge that he let it happen anyway.
“Not missing you? Jesus fuck, Soren, I wanted to die.” It’s the truth.
He’d been only half a man right after, the weight of grief stronger than anything he could have imagined.
Only Beau had kept him from the worst of his mistakes.
That, and the occasional scent of heliotropes and the smallest hope that Soren was out there living a life free of Connall’s albatross.
“You did?” Soren whispers.
Connall lets out a breath that feels like it’s been trapped in his lungs for years.
“Every day,” he says. No qualifiers. Just the truth, laid bare between them.
“I thought if I didn’t look for you, if I didn’t turn around, you’d be…
free. Safe. Living something better than whatever the hell I was drowning in. ”
Finding out it was wrong—finding out it had always been wrong—leaves him unmoored in a way he doesn’t have words for yet.
Soren’s jaw tightens. There’s anger there under the resignation. “You never once thought I might want to choose that risk myself?”
Connall falters, the question landing harder than any accusation. “I didn’t think I was something you should have to survive.”
That does it. Soren huffs a quiet, humorless laugh and scrubs a hand over his face. “Christ. And here I was thinking you didn’t think about me at all.”
Connall swallows past the lump in his throat.
“I thought about you every damn day.” Eventually, it was not every minute, or he’d have been in the morgue.
But in his dreams. When he saw happy couples or, recently, when he met Gideon and his mates, and saw what a pack could be like.
Soren’s name had always been right there on the tip of his tongue.
The center of a happiness that Connall thought he could never have.
Soren sags back against the wall, eyes on Connall like he’s truly allowed to be looking for the first time. “Okay.” Connall can see the wheels turning behind his eyes as he struggles to rearrange what he’d thought all this time.
“You said you found work?” Dread skitters down Connall’s spine, and his scent explodes between them. Winter frost and burning bitter anger—at himself. New York could eat you up and spit you out, especially for an unhoused teen without support. “What kind of work?”
Soren laughs bitterly. “All kinds of work.” He seems to clock Connall’s distress because he drops the faux humor. “It worked out. I learned a lot. Carnell paid well.”
Soren had worked for Patrick Carnell? A tide of pain nearly buckles his knees. Connall had sacrificed nearly twenty years with Soren to keep him out of Patrick’s radar, only to find that he’d dragged Soren along in his wake, delivering him—no matter how unknowingly—straight into his clutches.
“Why Carnell?”
“It was as close to you as I could get.”
“What kind of work?” He knew the kind of work Carnell paid others for, and none of it was good.
Soren shrugs, absently fingering the scar on his cheek.
“What. Kind. Of. Work?” Connall grits out. He doesn’t know why he’s asking again. He’s not entitled to know what Soren had to do to feed himself or keep a roof over his head, but the need is driving him so hard, he can feel his fangs drop down. He hates more that he’s asking years too late.
“Mostly collections. That kind of shit.” When Connall doesn’t relax, he adds. “Hey, it’s okay. I’m good at it. And I didn’t do anything I didn’t want or wouldn’t do again for y—”
“For me? You’re doing this for me, too?” Connall turns and slams a fist down on the railing. Having finally taken enough of Connall’s overflowing, out-of-control emotions, it cracks, and the whole long stretch tips over onto the grass.
He’d only wanted to protect Soren—to leave him standing safely on the shore. But he’d dragged him along in his wake, barely keeping his head above water. And he’d had to use his fists and his body to do it.
There’s a gentle hand on his shoulder, and the touch grounds him for a moment. Connall’s wolf still wants to howl, but he doesn’t know everything yet.
“Look. I made choices. I was where I needed—wanted—to be. It wasn’t all bad.”
Not all bad? Connall doesn’t want to think about the parts that were. His mind skitters away from the thought. “That’s not all, though, right? You said you saw me every day. How?”
“I’m not saying it was easy. But Carnell kept you distracted. There were a few times when I thought maybe you saw me or scented me, but…I guess you wouldn’t know my scent like I know yours.” He sounds wistful and surprisingly uncertain. It’s a loneliness Connall knows intimately.
He cups Soren’s jaw, runs a thumb over his bottom lip, and, without blinking, he says, “I will remember your sweet heliotrope scent until the day I die. Not just from today, but from the very beginning. They’re my favorite flowers.”
Connall’s shocked realization must be reflected on his face, because Soren grabs his wrist to prevent him from moving his hand from his face.