Chapter 37
Archer
I’m grinning as I pull my cell phone from my pocket and hit speed dial. After giving Juniper’s workplace another glance, I head for the coffee shop down the street to warm up on this cool morning.
“What?” Torin demands, half-asleep.
“She wants to watch a movie and eat Chinese food tonight. And, uh, we need to clean up. She wants to do it at our apartment. Tell Callum once he’s back from the house.
” It’s his turn to stay at the house. As long as one of us is there, at least some of the time, Callum’s dad and Torin’s mom won’t think we’ve run and hurt Lottie to get us to come back.
“She?”
A bell rings as I push the coffee shop door open, the smell of coffee, hazelnut, and pastries making my stomach rumble. “Juniper. Who the fuck do you think I’m talking about?”
The sound of fabric rustling fills my ears. Torin must be getting up. “As friends?”
There’s a hopeful note in Torin’s voice.
I’m smiling like an idiot as I tell him. “If it were as friends, she wouldn’t have told me to call her June before she went into work.”
“She told you to call her June?”
“Yup.”
Torin’s silence is heavy. Heavy in the way that I don’t just know, I feel his excitement that we might have a future with Juniper—June—after all, stretching down the phone line.
Calling her June is a big deal. People she trusts call her June; people she does not trust, and maybe doesn’t like at all, she’s Juniper.
“What can I get you?” the blonde college-aged barista asks with a smile.
“Give me a second,” I tell Torin over the phone. “I’m ordering some food.” Lowering my phone, I scan the menu above her head and give my order.
After I’ve walked Juniper—June—to work, I usually grab a coffee and a breakfast sandwich, then wander for a bit or head back to the apartment or the house until it’s time to come back to the hotel.
“A cappuccino and ham and cheese toasted sandwich,” I tell the barista, fishing my wallet from my back pocket. “And I’m eating here.”
Once I’ve paid, I take a seat when she says she’ll bring it over.
Maybe I could grab June a sandwich and a hot drink from here and suggest I drive her home after work instead of taking the bus.
Bus rides are not my favorite. I’ve gotten far too used to the space and the privacy of driving everywhere, but the bus journey home takes more out of June, especially after being on her feet all day, than it takes out of me.
“You still there?” I ask Torin, since he’s been quiet for a while.
“I’ll head back to the house and watch Veronica while you hang out with Juniper tonight,” he says.
“She specifically said your name as well.”
“She doesn’t want me there.”
“You realize there’s a point where you have to stop loudly and repeatedly kicking your own ass, right?” I ask him, and mouth thanks at the server when she sets my drink and sandwich down on my table. “The loudness is the part that pisses me off the most.”
But that isn’t true. Grow up surrounded by poison, courtesy of a toxic mom and dad, and it isn’t long before you start believing you’re poison too. That’s Torin.
“What did she say?” he asks.
“I thought you weren’t interested in coming, given that—”
“Tell me,” he snaps.
Smiling, I take a sip of my coffee and repeat the conversation I had with June before she went to work.
He knows what we talked about the night I stayed over at her place already.
I filled him in when I strolled into our apartment yesterday morning, and he took one look at me, guessed what we’d been up to, and I swear he wanted to be me.
“When did you threaten to kill the guy?” he asks, reminding me that I might have left out the part where I threatened to kill Jack. I wasn’t proud of myself for doing that, so I kept it to myself. Now, I’m willing to admit it. Mainly because I haven’t stopped smiling since I left June’s apartment.
“That’s your first question?” I ask dryly.
“Answer. The. Damn. Question.”
I grin. “When you were moping, and Callum was distracted buying the building, I took the first chance to go over and choke the guy out for touching our mate.”
“But the choking didn’t happen?”
I take a bite of my sandwich, chew, and swallow. “No, it did not happen. June… June has an incredible ability to collect people who want to protect her. He told me some home truths I needed to hear, and he defended her.”
How could I not like the guy?
“Her neighbor was threatening to knock me out with a bat,” Torin says, voice soft with amusement. “I believed her.”
“If it was Lucia, believe her. She’s from a big Italian family where if anyone dares to hurt someone they love, they will kill you. She seems to have adopted June.”
“I’m glad,” Torin says with a sigh. “She’s doing what we didn’t. Protecting our mate.”
I lift my eyebrow. “Again? Can we go one conversation without playing the blame game?”
“I can’t help it, okay?” he snaps, frustrated. “You didn’t call her a whore.”
My good mood dims. “I did something worse. I treated her as if she were nothing. But she’s giving us another chance, Torin.
She thinks we’re worthy of that, and I don’t intend to fuck things up.
And you can’t keep tiptoeing around her, afraid that whatever you say will upset her and she’ll run. That’s no way to live.”
When he falls silent, I pick up my sandwich to eat it before it gets cold.
“Where’d you get the money?” he asks when I’ve nearly finished my sandwich and my coffee.
“Where’d you think?”
“You called it blood money. I thought you weren’t going to touch it.”
Yeah, me too.
I wasn’t expecting to like Jack. I was even less prepared to recognize a failing business when I saw one.
Then I remembered the money. For years, Callum’s dad paid me to spy on his son, but I never felt right spending it.
I knew I should do something with it, but what?
Start a charity? Donate it? It had been easier to ignore it, so I’d ignored it.
I looked into Jack. It wasn’t hard. A quick tap of the name of the hardware store into my cell phone's search engine brought up the history of the shop, the man who could never do enough for his community, his short fight with cancer, and his eventual death.
According to the new general manager, Jack had taken over helping people out in the apartment building as best he could after his dad died. It made sense that the son would be like his dad.
Writing the check had come easily, so had posting it through his door.
“Jack will do something useful with the money,” I say, pondering my past. “I thought that money would change my life. I could get off the street and build a new life for myself, but it wasn’t the money that did that.
It was meeting you, Callum, and Lottie. The money can be Jack’s fresh start. The start of his new life.”
“You sappy bastard.”
“From the guy two seconds away from writing love poems and sliding them under June’s door, you’re one to talk.”
“Fuck off,” he says without heat.
I grin and finish my coffee.
“Are you sure she said my name?” Torin asks.
For a guy who walks around like he owns the planet sometimes, with walls so high, I sometimes forget that wall conceals a surprisingly soft heart.
“I’m sure.”
“I’m no good for her, Archer,” he says so quietly I have to strain to hear him over the loud rattle of the coffee machine and the conversations from the other tables.
“You fucked up. We all fucked up. But we’re making things right. You’re not the poison your parents are. If you were,” I say, lowering my voice to add, “then you would have joined Asylum, and you wouldn’t have thought once or even twice about how sick and messed up that shit is.”
“I hated them,” he admits. “I wonder sometimes if I hadn’t hated my parents for fucking up my childhood so much, would I have gone along with what they wanted?”
“No one can answer that. You’d have to go back in time and have parents who weren’t toxic pieces of shit to know that.” I ponder my conversation with June. “Making amends is important.”
“Juniper said that.”
“She did.” It’s a sign there’s still hope for us. That we haven’t lost her forever.
“I’ll talk to her. Tonight after the movie, I’ll talk to her. Maybe it’s not too late.”
Who knows what will happen after that?
June’s stuff isn’t at the house anymore. A few days ago, Archer told us what Veronica had done to June’s book, then he went back to the house and moved all of her stuff out of it so Veronica couldn’t destroy anything else.
Now, all her stuff is in a place that no one knows about except us.
We say our goodbyes, and I drain the last of my coffee and leave the coffee shop. Since my coffee and sandwich were both good, I make a mental note to come back here later and get June something hot to drink and something to eat before, hopefully, she agrees to let me drive her back home.
But for now, I’m content to take my time heading back to the apartment to help Torin pick up the crap off the floor. Every last one of us is a slob, and I’d rather June didn’t see how much of a slob we all can be.
4:10.
“She’s usually out by now,” I tell Torin, who came with me to the hotel to pick up June.
I glance at my cell phone for the third time.
“Maybe they asked her to work late?” he suggests.
“She’d have mentioned it before, and she has our numbers now. She’d have texted or called.”
People have been coming and going for a while now.
Maids, other staff from the hotel, as well as guests.
I was parking my car outside the hotel at four with a hot coffee and a toasted sandwich for June in the passenger seat.
I’ve been waiting for her near the entrance of the hotel, the way I always do, and there’s still no sign of her.
“She lied when she wanted to go to the pawnbroker and didn’t want you to follow,” Torin says. “Could she have gone there again? Maybe to buy something else back?”
I shake my head. “I told her how pawnshops like that operate. She would have mentioned if she had something else to buy back, if only because she was scared the guy would sell it before she could buy it back.”
We wait for a while longer, but as the minutes tick by, there’s still no sign of June.
I pull my cell phone from my pocket and glance at the time. 4:30.
A tiny line forms between Torin’s brows. “Tell me I’m being paranoid in thinking something is wrong.”
I call June. She keeps her bag with her phone in the staff room when she works, so I’m not too worried when it rings out. Her boss could have surprised her with a later than usual shift. After tucking my phone back in my pocket, I turn to Torin. “Let's go ask if anyone has seen her.”
In the hotel, we ask five employees if they know Juniper before we find someone who does. Another woman in a maid’s uniform looks worried as she approaches. “The front desk said you were looking for June?”
I nod. “We’re supposed to meet up after she finishes work at four, but she hasn’t come out yet.”
The woman’s frown deepens. “She finished early today, and the boss isn’t happy because she left her cart in the hallway and didn’t clock out. She didn’t finish cleaning all the rooms on her floor either.”
I share a worried glance with Torin.
“What time did she leave?”
She shrugs. “I don’t know. I didn’t see her leave, but the supervisor was looking for her at maybe two? Some guests wanted to check in early, and June usually gets the rooms on her floor cleaned fast. But she wasn’t there.”
My fear ramps up. “What floor was that?”
“Fifth.”
The woman fishes a gold bracelet with tiny emerald stones from her pocket. “Can you give her this when you see her? I’ve seen her wearing it before, so I recognized it.”
One look at the bracelet she hands me, and fear sets in. I close my palm around the bracelet that means too much to Juniper for her to have dropped it accidentally and not realized it was missing. “Where did the supervisor find it?”
“In the room she was cleaning.”
“Ava?” someone calls out to her, and the maid glances over her shoulder. “Sorry, I have to go back to work.”
“Thanks,” I say, and she rushes off.
Torin is frowning at the bracelet in my hand. He recognizes it too. It’s definitely June’s.
“Is it even worth going up to the fifth floor to check?” he asks.
“Probably not, but I still want to.”
“Same. Let’s go.” With the bracelet tucked in my pocket for safekeeping, we ride the elevator to the fifth floor.
As expected, there’s nothing out of the ordinary on the fifth floor. Someone must have moved Juniper’s cart that Ava said she’d left in the hallway. All the doors are closed, and raised voices and laughter drift from the hotel rooms.
“Any chance she might still be here?” Torin asks.
“I don’t know.” I’m torn about what to do. Knock on doors until someone calls security to throw us out, or head back to the apartment and hope she had an errand is back there waiting for us.
“Let’s go check out the apartment,” I eventually say. “If she’s not there, something is wrong, and we can figure out what else to do.”