Chapter 17 A Court of Glass and Threats
A Court of Glass and Threats
I was still reeling from what he’d just said, still trying to understand what the fuck he meant by all that, when my phone went off.
Angered by the interruption, I looked at the screen and saw it was a number registered to Remi. I didn’t know a Remi.
But then I remembered the man who brought us the car. Lucien’s cousin. Lucien must’ve saved his number in my phone.
I showed him the screen, scowling. “Your cousin’s calling.”
Lucien stopped growling, and his entire body visibly relaxed as he took the phone from me, put it to his ear, and answered with a calm and irritatingly relieved voice, “Je te dois ton putain de milkshake préféré. Quoi de neuf?”
Without any idea what he was saying, or continued to say, as he spoke to Remi, I looked through the window at the view, feeling my fury refusing to abate.
I might not know Lucien that well yet, but he hadn’t struck me as the type to avoid uncomfortable topics. With him being an Alpha, it made no sense he would be.
But something about my being his Eteria set him off and made him squirm in a way that seemed uncharacteristic.
His mere reaction to the word Eteria—a tightening to his eyes and lips, a steely gaze, and rippling tension—was enough to make me fear whatever it actually meant, beyond the dry details he’d provided.
My fear drove me to impatience, though. I needed to know what he was unwilling to share.
But Lucien continued speaking in French to Remi on the phone until we eventually arrived at my apartment building.
Once we parked, Lucien abruptly hung up, leading me to suspect he’d purposely spoken to Remi for the duration of the drive to avoid talking about the whole Eteria thing. Then, without looking at me, he said, “Let’s go.”
I exited the car and followed him toward the entrance of my apartment building, my anger and frustration growing to serious proportions, before everything I felt came to a screeching halt.
First, I couldn’t see our resident homeless men. Caveat and Johnny usually loitered by the front steps, making themselves at home with their worn-out sleeping bags and patched blankets. They’d always been here in the last three years I’d lived in this building.
And yet when Lucien and I entered through the gate, they were nowhere to be found. Neither were their belongings. Their absence was rather noticeable.
Second, and more importantly, my brother was waiting with a backpack near the building entrance door.
I immediately came to a stop, staring at him as if it were the first time I’d ever seen my brother.
And it certainly felt that way. The man standing before me was tall and lanky, thinner than I remembered.
He was far too pale, with a bleak expression on his drawn face and dark bags under his bloodshot gray eyes behind thick-framed round glasses.
His hair, the same shade of brown as mine, was much longer than I remembered, too, reaching down to the middle of his back in haphazard, knotted wavy strands.
If I didn’t recognize him, I would’ve thought he was a new homeless man visiting our place.
My brother’s gaze, still razor sharp despite his current messy, exhausted state, found me immediately. His lips thinned, and he walked toward me with a straining line of worry marring his forehead. “Drew.”
His voice was raspy, as if he hadn’t used it in a long while.
Its sound was also so nostalgic, a sense of melancholy settled deep within me.
“Thayer,” I blurted in a mumble, so out of my depth, I didn’t know how to act around my older brother, the person I had once believed would always be on my side and yet who’d caused me so much pain.
A year ago, it had felt like I lost my only remaining sibling.
Seeing him now, hearing his voice, felt surreal.
Thayer raised his eyes when Lucien settled next to me, but before he could inquire about him, Lucien raised his hand and said with a friendly expression, “Nice to meet you, Mr. Colter. I’m Lucien Delterre, Drew’s friend.”
I tried not to show how tense I was as Thayer shook his hand with understandable confusion. I saw my brother take in Lucien from head to toe and back, noting his corded arms, the abs he couldn’t hide under the tight tee, and the pair of arctic-blues that could pierce one’s soul.
“Call me Thayer,” my brother now said in a slow, contemplative voice I recognized.
It was the tone he always used with me and my sisters—Willow in particular.
A tone that meant he was assessing the situation carefully and meticulously before he chose how to react.
While my sisters and I had been close in age—with only two years between Willow and me, and three years between Willow and Julianna, the youngest—Thayer was our parents’ “accident” from when they were seventeen. He was five years older than me.
He had always been patient and caring with me and my sisters when we were young.
He’d been like a third parent to us, helping us with homework, sometimes going to parents’ day at school when our parents were too busy or didn’t care to make time for it, making us lunch boxes to take to school, cleaning up after us, and everything else a parent should do, basically.
Our parents always saw him as the responsible golden child of the family.
He was the smartest out of all four siblings, starting college when he was sixteen and finishing up his bachelor’s in physics before he turned twenty.
He’d gone on and completed his master’s and PhD by the time he was twenty-five—my current age—and started working for an elite biotech company based in Seattle, which, as far as I was aware, he was still at.
That same genius golden-child brother of mine watched Lucien like a hawk as the Alpha released his hand.
Sucking in a deep breath to calm my erratic heart, I shakily dug the keys out from the duffel bag and murmured, “Let’s head inside.”
Lucien and Thayer turned to look at me. Both of them seemed to want to say something, but with almost comic timing, they both thought better of it and closed their mouths.
Tense and uncomfortable with this whole situation, I entered the building with the two following close behind.
A nagging feeling told me something was wrong. For instance, the light switch in the corridor didn’t work, and the entire building was shrouded in darkness. There was no buzzing noise of the air-conditioning motors, or the murmurs of electricity in general. It was quiet.
Too quiet.
Lucien must’ve realized that something was wrong, too, because when we reached the door to my apartment, his hand suddenly folded over mine. “I will lead,” he murmured, and I ignored the little jolt of heat that I felt when he gently pried the keys from my hold, his palm brushing against mine.
The heat was gone a second later, and my heartbeat quickened for drastically different reasons. An ominous feeling crawled into my stomach, making me feel a little ill, and my anxiety caused my entire body to shake like a leaf.
Wordlessly, Lucien stepped forward, slid the key into the lock, and pushed the door open.
The moment he did, however, my nerves multiplied and my blood rushed out of my head, making me feel dizzy.
My apartment was trashed.
Completely, utterly trashed.
Sheets of paper were scattered all over the place.
The couch and sofa had been aggressively torn, the cushion stuffing spilling out of them not unlike Mack Page’s guts had when Lucien disemboweled him.
Glasses and plates were shattered all over the kitchen floor, spices spilled all over the counter, as if someone had pushed them away too hard.
Then there was my workstation. My wooden desk was no more; its legs were folded into splinters, as if something huge had sat on top of it, and the surface, along with the drawers, was carved out, as if whoever broke into my apartment was trying to find some hidden things inside the wood.
The deeper I walked into the apartment, the more my shakiness grew.
Pictures I’d hung on the walls were completely torn and defiled.
The bedroom seemed as though a hurricane had passed through, with all my clothes spilling out of the open closet, most of them completely messed with, as if someone had taken a knife and sliced everything in their way.
The same went for my bed; the mattress was half on the floor, half on the bed frame, completely torn just like everything else, while the wooden bed frame itself suffered the same fate as my wooden desk: crumbled to the floor, jagged splinters causing it to look like a spike trap.
The only place that seemed to be untouched was the restroom.
Though untouched might be stretching it; the cabinet doors were open, with the towels and my toiletries spilled and despoiled.
But the toilet seat itself was intact, and so were the sink and the shower.
Though to be fair, breaking marble was much tougher than ruining wooden furniture.
“Drew.”
As though in a dream, I turned around to look at Lucien, who watched me with open worry. He searched my gaze before he said, “We need to see if something was taken.”
I opened my mouth to speak, but no words came out. My vocal cords defied my silent commands.
Seeing my struggle, Lucien put a hand on my shoulder and squeezed for a short moment before he turned around and headed back to the trashed living room.
It felt as though I were gliding through a bad, disastrous dream, as I walked back into the living room, too, and took in the damage to my place. Sure, this apartment hadn’t been perfect. It had always felt temporary. A temporary home, without feeling like home at all.
But it didn’t deserve this. Not at all.
And it was still my place. The one place that belonged to me. Seeing it abused like this made me feel sickly violated, so much so that I stumbled over the mess back to the toilet and retched.