Chapter 18 #3
He stands there a moment longer. I keep my eyes on his boot.
"The heart thing isn't a joke," he says. "That's all."
Not I'm sorry. Not this isn't what I wanted. Not one single word about any of it.
Just the dosage, and a warning, and then his boots turn and he walks away down the hall.
Not even a goodbye.
Nothing.
I sit there until my legs go numb, and then I sit there some more, and at five to nine I hear tires on the gravel.
I pick the bag up. It weighs almost nothing, which tracks, because almost nothing in this house was mine to begin with.
Vincent's in the foyer. He opens the front door and cold air surges in. There's a black car idling at the bottom of the steps with a man I've never seen standing beside it.
"He'll take you the whole way," Vincent says. "There's money in the front pocket of the bag. Don't argue about it."
I look down at the bag and nod, my entire body on autopilot. "I wasn't going to."
He reaches into the stand by the door and holds an umbrella out to me.
I look at it.
Black, folded, perfectly ordinary. His hand is steady. And it's such a small, decent, useless thing to offer somebody you're putting in a car that something in me finally goes hard.
This act like he cares about me is getting old.
"No, thanks," I say.
"Sonny. It's coming down—"
"I said no thanks."
I take my bag and I go down the steps.
The rain hits me the second I'm off the porch and it's freezing and within four strides Calder's shirt is stuck to my back. Water in my eyes. Water running down inside my collar, over the bite, over the mark. I don't hurry and I don't put my head down.
It almost feels right–the sky opening up and pouring down on me the way I wish I could pour out all this hurt inside me.
The man by the car takes my bag and puts it in the trunk. I get to the open door and put my hand on the wet roof of it before turning around.
I see Vincent in the doorway with his hand on the frame, the way he stood in his room five days ago when he wouldn't sit down.
I see Calder further back in the hall, half in shadow, not moving.
And I see Killian at the front window with one hand flat against the glass, but he isn't scowling anymore. From here I can't read his face at all.
Nobody waves. Nobody says anything.
I look at them and I do the only thing I've got left, which is say it in my head where nobody can use it against me.
I was coming down to say yes. To choose you.
To all three of you.
And standing there in the rain, I finally let myself finish the thought I've been walking around for a week.
I love them.
All of them. The one who bit me and the one who scares me and the one who cleaned the blood off my throat and won't look at me. I didn't mean to and I knew better than to fall in love and I did it anyway. But now I'm about to get in a car and leave every piece of my heart standing on that porch.
Goodbye, I think. Goodbye. Goodbye.
The cold is getting into my chest. The thing under my sternum is pulling so hard I can barely stand straight.
I practically collapse into the car and yank the door shut.
I sit very still.
Hands in my lap. Eyes forward. Chin up, the way you do when somebody might still be watching, because somebody might still be watching and I won’t let them see me upset.
The house goes past the window. The porch. The driveway.
The tires find the road and the driveway runs out behind us and I keep my eyes forward. I don't turn around, not once, not even a little.
Down the hill. Around the bend past the treeline.
The man in the front seat says something about the heater.
"That's fine," I say. "Thank you."
My voice comes out perfectly normal.
I wait until the trees close up behind us. Until there's no possible angle, no window, no gap in the branches where anybody standing on that porch could see a single thing.
Then I lie down across the back seat, unable to stay upright any longer.
I curl up on my side with my wet cheek against the leather and my knees pulled into my chest. The pain in my chest grows and grows until it swallows me and all I can do is put both hands over my mouth. I muffle the sound, but the sobs come out anyway.
Having your heart ripped from your body isn’t something I thought I’d ever experience, but it’s worse than anything my illness has thrown my way.
Nothing is as painful as this.
The debt was never Sonny's to pay.
But three alphas already decided who collects.
Cast out into the rain with a half-finished bond clawing at his chest and nowhere left to belong, Sonny thinks the worst thing that's happened to him is losing the family he was never allowed to want.
He's wrong.
Because somewhere three towns over, a man who paid for him is about to learn exactly where to find him.
The Debt continues in Book 2 The Doubt.