9
Easton
Neither Ryan nor Cade said anything for the first ten minutes of the drive.
That was how I knew it was bad.
Cade had picked Ryan up from the airport earlier after he flew in from Ontario. Ryan’s truck was still in Flint, which was why Cade was behind the wheel now, driving both of us to Ryan’s place.
Ryan Decker had a quiet streak most people mistook for indifference, but his silence usually had shape.
Annoyed silence. Observant silence. I’m-not-saving-you-from-your-own-bullshit silence.
Cade wasn’t much different, but his silence was Bliss-based, both hands locked around the wheel, jaw tight and eyes forward while the windshield wipers cut hard across the glass and the rain smeared the streetlights into long yellow streaks.
I sat in the back seat with my head against the headrest, one hand wrapped around my phone and dried blood caught in the creases of my split knuckles. Cade had shoved me toward the Rover while Ryan called after Bliss and Charm one more time.
Hockey House disappeared behind us.
Good.
That was what I told myself as Cade turned onto the main road and the old brick shape of the place vanished in the side mirror.
I didn’t need to be there. I hadn’t truly lived there in months, and I’d left my old room stripped down to spare hoodies and equipment because moving out had seemed easier than admitting I couldn’t sleep in the same house where every hallway knew her.
Aura had ruined Hockey House for me.
No—that wasn’t fair.
I had let her.
I had let her into the kitchen, the stairs, the back porch, the living room couch, the bathroom with the broken fan, and the laundry room where she once sat on top of the dryer in my shirt while I folded towels badly just to make her insult me.
I had let her turn my room into something that smelled like coconut lotion, her hair products, and sex.
I let her sleep in my bed after insisting she didn’t sleep over, curl into my side when she thought I was already out, then wake up mean like tenderness was a crime scene she needed to flee before I dusted for prints.
That house used to be noise, hockey, and brotherhood. Briggs yelling from the kitchen, Cade enforcing rules nobody followed, Ryan appearing out of nowhere like a tattooed judgment call, and Rider leaning against walls while hearing everything.
It used to be home.
Then Aura stayed there for five days after Luke attacked Bliss, and it became the closest thing to a life with her I had ever been stupid enough to imagine.
The memory hit so hard I closed my eyes.
Ryan twisted around in the passenger seat. “You gonna puke?”
“No.”
“Pass out?”
“No.”
“Confess to a felony?”
I turned my head enough to glare at him. “You always this comforting?”
“Only when I’m escorting a bloody defenseman away from a fight that turned into an emotional collapse.”
“I didn’t touch him.”
“Congrats. Low bar cleared.”
I looked back out the windshield.
Ryan let the silence stretch again, but my head had already gone somewhere else, back to Hockey House what felt like a million months ago.
Bliss had been recovering upstairs while Cade walked around like his skin had been replaced with live wire.
Private security stood outside, Bennett brothers came and went, and the entire house moved carefully around a girl who hated being treated like glass.
Charm and Aura stayed because Bliss needed them, sure, but I needed all three of them safe. None of the girls wanted to be alone. Fear had teeth, and everyone in that house could hear them clicking inside the walls.
Aura let me save her that once.
She was in my room when I got back from practice that night.
That should have been enough to stop me in the doorway, but the thing that really caught me was the light.
The lamp beside my bed was on low, throwing amber across the comforter, her bare legs, and the black Fury sweatshirt slipping off one shoulder like she had accidentally made herself at home in my clothes.
Aura had rules. Too many of them. No lights. No names. No getting naked. No questions that reached too close to the parts of herself she kept locked down tight.
She carried those rules into every room like weapons, yet somehow, she was sitting in mine with the door open behind me, the lamp on, her laptop balanced across her thighs, and my hoodie folded beside her like she hadn’t already stolen the sweatshirt she was wearing.
She didn’t look up when I entered, but she knew I was there.
Aura noticed everything—a shift in tone, a change in posture, a lie before it fully left someone’s mouth. If she didn’t acknowledge me entering my own room, it wasn’t because she had missed me.
She had decided I could wait.
I leaned one shoulder against the doorframe. “Comfortable?”
Her fingers kept moving across the keys. “Your mattress is less tragic than the couch.”
“You’re welcome.”
“I didn’t thank you.”
“You’re in my bed.”
“Observant.”
“In my sweatshirt.”
“It was cold.”
“There are blankets downstairs.”
“There are also men downstairs.”
My mouth twitched. “You say that like a disease.”
“In this house? It’s at least a preexisting condition.”
I stepped inside and shut the door behind me. The click was quiet, barely more than the latch settling into place, but Aura’s fingers stopped moving. Her eyes lifted to mine for the first time, sharp and dark behind the glasses sliding down her nose.
I kept my hand on the knob. “You want it open?”
Her chin lifted like the question annoyed her, but she didn’t answer immediately.
The radiator knocked inside the wall, and somewhere downstairs, Briggs laughed too loudly before immediately lowering his voice like he remembered Bliss was asleep.
The whole house had been moving that way for days, every sound cut in half, every man inside it trying not to be the reason she flinched.
“No,” Aura said finally.
I released the knob. “Then stop looking at me like I trapped you.”
“I look at everyone like that.”
“No, you look at most people like you’re deciding where to bury them. This is different.”
Her mouth curved, but it didn’t reach her eyes. “You spend a lot of time studying my face, Wade.”
“I study everything that gets into my bed.”
“Cute. Make me sound like a biohazard.”
“You broke into my room and stole my clothes. That’s evidence.”
“The door was unlocked.”
“That’s not a defense.”
“It is if I’m hot enough.”
I walked toward the dresser and tugged my damp practice shirt over my head because I was tired, sore, and not about to stand there fully dressed while she sat half-bare in my sweatshirt pretending she had the upper hand.
Her gaze dropped instantly, without anything subtle or accidental about it. She looked at my chest, my stomach, and the line of muscle disappearing beneath the waistband of my sweats, and for half a second, her whole mouth forgot how to be mean.
Then she blinked and found herself again.
“Do you need applause, or was the dramatic undressing its own reward?”
I tossed the shirt into the hamper. “You’re staring.”
“I’m making sure you don’t have a concussion. Bliss has made head trauma very trendy this week.”
The Bliss joke killed the humor too quickly.
Her face changed the second she realized it. The attitude didn’t disappear, exactly, but it shifted and thinned as her gaze moved past me toward the floor, toward nothing, toward whatever image she couldn’t stop replaying.
I pulled on a clean shirt but didn’t move closer. “Bliss asleep?”
Aura nodded once. “Finally.”
“Cade?”
“In the chair beside her like a deranged gargoyle with a pulse.”
“Sounds right.”
“Charm is downstairs folding laundry that was already folded. Briggs keeps trying to feed everyone like carbs can undo attempted murder. Rider has been silently washing the same pan for twelve minutes. Ryan is outside on the phone, and I’m ninety percent sure he’s pretending not to cry because men in this house would rather take a skate blade to the throat than admit they have feelings. ”
I leaned back against the dresser and folded my arms. “And you came up here to insult everyone privately?”
“I came up here because your room is quiet.”
There it was.
Not the full truth, but enough of one that the air changed.
Aura looked down at her laptop like she wanted to shove the words back inside and slam the screen closed. Her fingers flexed against the keyboard’s edge, and my sweatshirt had slipped farther down her shoulder, exposing smooth brown skin.
The sight hit me harder than it should have.
Aura always looked good. She knew it, weaponized it, and punished men with it for sport, but this was different.
She was in my room after midnight because downstairs was too loud with fear, wearing my sweatshirt because she wanted comfort but would rather die than call it that, keeping my lamp on and my door closed while pretending neither choice meant anything.
I pushed away from the dresser. “Shut the laptop.”
Her eyes snapped up. “Excuse me?”
“You heard me.”
“I’m studying.”
“No, you’re hiding behind a case brief and pretending it’s more interesting than the fact you’re scared.”
Her expression went flat. “Careful with those assumptions.”
I stopped at the foot of the bed and braced one hand against the frame. “No.”
“No?”
“No. Don’t careful me from my own room while you’re sitting in my bed wearing my sweatshirt because you needed somewhere quiet to fall apart without an audience.”
Her lips parted, then closed. The laptop screen cast soft blue light beneath her jaw, but the rest of her was warm shadow and stubborn pride.
“I’m not falling apart,” she said.
“Then shutting the laptop shouldn’t be hard.”
Her eyes narrowed. “You’re bossy when you’re tired.”
“I’m bossy when someone I care about is lying to my face.”
The words landed.
I saw them hit before she could cover it. Her shoulders drew back, her mouth hardened, and the woman who could cut an entire room into ribbons with one raised brow looked at me like I had stepped too close to something real she had never meant to show me.