Chapter Sixteen – Royal
Ezra comes to me during my daily workout, and based on the look he wears, I already know what’s on his mind. I know, because the same thing has been on my mind all morning. The same person, really.
Abby.
Fuck, she’s been on my mind ever since our last kill, for more reasons than one, but after hearing her screaming from a nightmare, I just can’t shake it. She’s really not the type who screams about anything, ever. That means…
That means there’s something there, something in her past. It’s not so shocking; we all have things we’d rather not think about. Me, Hawthorne, Ezra.
“Hey,” Ezra says, finding me sitting on the front edge of the bench, doing some curls. “Got a moment to talk?”
“Sure,” I say, and out of the corner of my eye, I watch as he closes the door. A private talk, one he doesn’t want Abby to overhear since she occasionally joins me for workouts.
It’s only after he approaches me on the bench that he says, “About this morning…”
“Yeah,” I harrumph. “I know.”
“Abby—”
“I know,” I say again, because I do know.
We all do. None of us are stupid. Ezra and I might not be as smart as Hawthorne, but then again, is Hawthorne even really that smart?
The dude almost got thrown into prison for what he did.
Ezra and I never got that close to the law, although the Benefactor found Ezra before he could take matters into his own hands.
Eventually? Eventually those matters were taken into his hands, way too fucking long after the smoke cleared in his life if you ask me, but the long wait was necessary for no one’s fingers to point at him for the death of the man who took Kaitlin from him.
Kaitlin, AKA his long-term high school girlfriend-slash-future fiancé.
Yeah, while I might doubt that any high school love can last that long, if anyone could’ve made it work, it would’ve been Ezra. He’s everything good a man can be. I’m proud to stand beside him. He’s become a brother to me, as has Hawthorne.
“She doesn’t want to talk about it,” he goes on.
“Can you fucking blame her? You don’t ever want to talk about Kaitlin.”
“And you don’t ever want to talk about Reign, either.”
Hearing that name makes me pause my curling and whip my head in his direction. I don’t like hearing my sister’s name out loud, but I guess I get what I get since I said Kaitlin’s name. Can’t be too mad at him for throwing it back at me.
Ezra paces the space before me. “We got closure. What if she hasn’t?”
Shit. That’s something that never occurred to me. Were her two prior kills meant as practice? Was she planning on continuing to kill to sharpen her skills before she went after the person who created that wound deep inside her?
She had to have lost someone, or maybe… fuck. Maybe a man hurt her in the past. I don’t like thinking about that, but I’d bet anything that’s what is currently weighing on Ezra.
He says, “Maybe we should, I don’t know, talk to her together and see if she’ll open up? Maybe we can get her to tell us what happened. If someone’s out there who shouldn’t be, maybe they should be our next target. It wouldn’t be the first time we took care of something a little more personal.”
Somehow, I have the feeling the only way she’ll open up—if she even does at all—is if we tell her who we lost and what we did about it. It’s a gamble, and while the guys in the house might know already about my sister, it’s another thing to talk about her with someone else, someone like Abby.
Still, I could do it. It’d be tough, but I could do it. Ezra, on the other hand… I don’t know if he’s there. I don’t know if he’ll ever be there. Sometimes the past refuses to let go. It claws at you, digs its talons into your heart, and threatens to rip you apart at seemingly random times.
In other words, the past is a bitch.
“Do you think you’d be able to?” I ask him, saying it as gently as I can. Ezra gets touchy about this. It’s the one thing that can put him in a pissy mood, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned about him in the years I’ve known him, it’s that once he’s in a mood, he stays in that mood for days.
It’s best to avoid those moods, obviously.
His shoulders rise and fall once as he says, “I don’t know, but it’s not really fair that she’s trapped here if whoever hurt her or someone she knows is still out there, living his damn life like he didn’t do anything wrong.
If I were her and the person who…” Even now, he can’t say it, and I can’t blame him.
“I know,” I say. “I know. If you want to try to talk to her later, we can. We might not get anywhere, but there’s no harm in trying, I guess. If her reaction when we all piled into her room this morning is any indication, though… she won’t be too happy.”
Ezra smiles, but the smile doesn’t quite reach his eyes. “Then she can join the club. I don’t think any of us are happy in this house.”
Ain’t that the truth? We’re all miserable here.
Well… no, wait, scratch that. We were all miserable here, content to go on with life as it’s been these past few years, up until Abby came into our lives. Lately? Things have been good. That last kill was something else, and taking her against the wall was the cherry on top of the fucking cake.
A cake I wouldn’t mind having again.
So, I guess what I’m saying is, I’m not miserable, not anymore, and I owe it to Abby. If I can help her get over something in her past, return the favor, then I’m fucking glad to do it. Even if Ezra isn’t ready to have share time with her, I am.
“I don’t know,” I say. “Lately, this house hasn’t been too bad.”
Ezra groans and rolls his eyes at me.
“And I ain’t just talking about the sex, although that was fucking fine too. I’m not saying I’m a different person here, but…” I try to think of a good way to put it without sounding like I’ve lost my fucking marbles. “There’s something about her that makes things easier.”
There, that didn’t sound too cheesy, did it?
He stops pacing, and although he currently stares off into space, I can tell my choice of words got to him. “Yeah,” he says after a while, “there is something about her, isn’t there? She’s, um, something else.”
“More than that,” I say, and though I try to fight it, I feel a smirk coming on. “She feels fucking amazing, too.”
That gets Ezra to groan again.
That time, I was totally talking about the sex.
Later that day, Ezra and I talk to Hawthorne about our plan to try to get her to open up.
He takes a little bit of convincing, but in the end, he agrees that it’s a good idea to speak with her about her past. If there’s someone out there who shouldn’t be walking the streets, it’s our duty to take out the trash.
Our trash was taken out a long time ago; it’s only fair that Abby’s trash is taken out, too.
That said, Hawthorne declines on being a part of said talk. He thinks he’ll be too awkward and ruin it, or something. Whatever. Ezra and I don’t need him to hold our hands through it. It’s just a talk. It isn’t anything crazy.
We decide to order some pizza for dinner and talk to her after. You know, after her belly is full and she’s content. Everybody’s happier after some pizza.
The three of us are in the living room, with something mindless on the TV—something about a group of strangers who are in some villa together, dating each other for weeks on end. Not my kind of show, but Abby seems to love it.
It’s only when the three of us are no longer eating that Ezra and I exchange glances from across the couch.
We sit on either side of Abby, boxing her in a bit thanks to the coffee table in front of us.
There’s no easy path to retreat and exit the conversation.
Not that we’re trying to force her to do something she doesn’t want to do, but sometimes the hardest thing a person can do is face the one thing they don’t want to.
Abby groans as she watches the TV. “Oh, no, girl, you should’ve stayed with your original guy!
Leo is just saying what you want to hear so you’ll keep him around.
He’s gonna drop you the moment some new bombshell strolls in—” It’s like she’s speaking another language, completely unaware that both Ezra and I are now staring at her.
Ezra tries to take the lead on the conversation he wants to have with her, “Uh, I was hoping we could talk, Abby, about this morning.”
Those words make her posture snap rigidly straight, and she’s measured in turning her head toward him. I can’t see her expression, but I’d bet a million bucks it ain’t a happy one. “I’d rather not,” she mutters. “Can we please just drop it already?”
“No.” This time I say it, and she whips her head in my direction.
Yep, she’s frowning, and her silver gaze is squinted to the extreme.
“We need to talk about it.” Ezra nods, and I take that as a cue to keep going.
“Whatever it is, it’s nothing to be ashamed of.
We all have things we’d rather not think about. ”
“Or dream about,” Ezra says quietly.
Abby realizes right then she’s boxed in between us, and the only way to escape this conversation is to hop over the coffee table, and given her short legs, I don’t think doing so would be too easy for her.
She’s stuck, and she knows it. “Fuck. This is why you guys got pizza, isn’t it?
Why you let me turn on Soulmate Island?”
I would’ve said, not so long ago, that the idea of throwing a bunch of strangers into a villa and keeping them there for a month and half would never result in real relationships at the end. You couldn’t find your soulmate in a few weeks.
But now… well, after meeting Abby, I think I have a different view on it, as silly as it might be. Maybe it is possible to spend some time with someone else and just know, instinctively, deep down, they’re your person.
Fuck. I really am cheesing over here. I’m down bad. I’m simping hard—and you know what? I. Don’t. Fucking. Care.