CHAPTER 17
FINIAN
“I fucking hate you!” I roar the second the office door slams shut behind us. The sound bounces off the walls. “You stupid motherfucker!”
Wolf doesn’t rise to it. Just like always, he’s cool and calm. He just drags a hand across the center of his chest, like something deep inside his ribcage aches. “I didn’t expect to feel like this.”
“Oh, like what? A piece of shit?” Amos snaps from across the room, rolling his eyes. He paces from one side of the room to the other, like he’s trying to outrun his own fury. His glare could cut steel.
I wanted to go back into that bathroom, take her into my arms, and hug her close. Windy is too important to us to do this to her, but we have to if Wolf is to inherit Luscious from his father.
The moment we left the bathroom, the adrenaline that had been driving us evaporated.
The need to be in the middle of the chaos—the lights, bodies, and noise—all vanished like smoke.
We threw ourselves into the crowd tonight to forget what happened last weekend at Tesoro, to drown the memory of her crestfallen expression in music and motion.
Nothing helped, though.
Nothing dulled the raw guilt clawing inside me for what we did.
The second she stepped into the club, everything shifted.
I knew the moment she entered, even without seeing her.
I felt it—the pull, that awareness of the one that means the most to you—and I told Wolf she was here.
I shouldn’t have. I really should’ve kept it to myself.
The moment he knew, he acted like a damn caveman, dragging some unsuspecting omega into the mess we created with Windy.
And, like a follower, I followed him.
I let him drag me into the depths of hell.
Now the weight of everything we did tonight sits heavily on my chest like a boulder. My fists clench, nails digging into my palms. I suck in a shaky breath, remembering how I met Windy's vacant eyes before walking out, leaving her alone with her tears.
Amos stops pacing and slams his fist against the wall. “We are a bunch of bastards!”
I squeeze my eyes shut, but it doesn’t stop the image from burning behind them. I see her on the bathroom floor, shaking and breaking, and me standing there useless, the taste of guilt and whiskey thick in my throat.
“I want to kill you for it,” I say to Wolf, my voice low, shaking with the force of everything I’m holding back. “You had to take it there. You just had to push it. You had to make me—”
My voice fractures.
Wolf’s jaw tightens. “I didn’t make you do a damn thing, Finian. You did it all on your own.”
“The fuck you didn’t!” I snap, stepping toward him threateningly. “You pushed. You provoked. You wanted to see how far we could go before she snapped.”
“She did, too,” Amos says quietly, brimming with anger, and his words land like a blow.
Silence falls, thick with regret. I rake my hand through my hair, pacing because standing still feels impossible. I’ll always be on edge now.
“She’s in that bathroom, falling apart right now because of us. Because of what we did to her tonight. I can’t fix that. I can’t undo what you made me do. I can’t—” My voice breaks again, and I swallow hard to force the words out. “I can’t stand the look she had on her face.”
Wolf finally meets my eyes. His expression is stripped of all the arrogance he usually wears. He looks raw. “I know.”
“No,” I say, shaking my head. “You don’t.
You watched her when I was kissing that omega.
You saw the devastation in her eyes, yet you did nothing.
You told me to kiss that omega until you said to stop, or else you were going to take the funding away from my business.
You know I depend on your backing to keep my practice open. ”
Amos sinks onto the edge of Wolf’s desk, burying his face in his hands. “We broke her.”
The words hang there, brutal and true. None of us knows how to put her back together. And the shitty part is, we can’t put her back together. We have to continue breaking her until she decides she’s had enough.
Something tells me that she’s not going to realize how much she can take until it’s too late for all of us. She’s stubborn, hard-headed. She goes after what she wants without fear of the repercussions.
Wolf stands there, silent and as still as a stone, like he’s carved out of something unbreakable. But I can see the truth. I can see the tension in him. The way his shoulders are locked, and the way his jaw keeps flexing like he’s grinding down every word he wants to say.
Then something in him snaps.
Not loudly.
Not dramatically.
Quietly.
Fatally.
“Fuck!” He yells, then bends forward and puts his face in his hands. “I know I fucked up.”
His voice is low and rough, not like the Wolf that everyone else sees. He paces once, twice, before he stops and slams his palm against the wall. The sound cracks through the room like a shot. Amo and I both freeze. Wolf never raises his voice. Not like this. Not with us.
He turns toward us, and for the first time since I’ve known him, he looks … completely undone. His eyes are bright with something he’s trying so hard to swallow down. He’s breathing unevenly, chest rising and falling way too fast.
“You don’t think I hate myself?” he snaps, but the anger isn’t aimed at us; it’s aimed inward. It’s sharp and vicious. “You think I’m not going to replay that in my head every single second of every single day? Every choice I made that led her to be on that bathroom floor?”
His voice cracks on the end. Wolf’s voice never cracks.
He presses his hand to his chest, right over his sternum, like something really hurts him. “I felt her break,” he whispers. “I felt it like it was a part of me, like someone reached right into my very body and tore something out.”
Wolf shakes his head violently, pacing in fast, erratic bursts. His hands tremble so badly that he has to clutch them together. “I thought—” He stops, breath shuddering. “If we provoked her, maybe she’d protect herself and not get her heart broken.”
He laughs, a short, broken sound. “Instead, we hurt her. Worse than she ever hurt us out there. I became the one thing I swore I’d never be … my father.”
He collapses onto the edge of his desk, elbows digging into his knees, head dropping into his hands. His shoulders tremble—first a quiver, then a long, racking shudder that guts me to witness.
Then, they shake a second time. A third. A fourth. Before too long, he’s sobbing into his hands as he breaks down in front of us, his brothers.
Wolf doesn’t cry.
Wolf doesn’t. He isn’t supposed to break.
Wolf doesn’t fall apart.
But he is.
Right now.
Right in front of us, where he feels safe.
Suddenly, my anger feels small compared to the wreckage inside of Wolf.
“I didn’t …” He chokes up, sobbing some more. “I didn’t expect to feel like this,” he says again, his voice muffled and raw. “I didn’t expect it to matter this much. I didn’t expect her to matter this much. I figured we could simply reject her, and it would be okay.”
He lifts his head, eyes red-rimmed and expression stripped bare.
“But she does. I don’t know how to fix it, and the shitty part is, we’re too invested to fix this.
I wish I could allow everything I worked hard for to slip through my fingers without a care in the world.
But I can’t do that. I can’t allow it all to go away.
Who would I be without Luscious? Luscious has been my life for years. ”
The room goes silent.
The room goes silent. Not the heavy, suffocating silence from before—this silence is different. It feels fragile. Human. It’s the quiet that settles just before something changes forever, charged with uncertainty rather than the weight of guilt.
“We can still go after her,” I say, taking a step toward them both. “Maybe we can try to …”
“Try to what?” Amos snarks. “Try to explain why we’re doing what we’re doing? Tell her, ‘Oh, you weren’t important enough to pick over someone’s inheritance. Sorry, babe.’”
“When you say it like that, it does sound bad,” I retort, feeling all of my options dry up into nothing.
“It is that bad. There’s no other way around it.” Wolf sniffs, trying to stop his mental breakdown from furthering. But I can still see the tears brimming in his eyes. He wants to lose himself in it all.
I’m right there with him. I want to lose myself and never find my way out again. Without Windy, I don’t know what we’re going to do. We can’t mate with someone else. Now that we’ve had her, no other omega feels right.
She’s it for us.
Totally and completely.
I wish there were something we could do, something that could make it possible for us to be with her.