Chapter 9
Chapter nine
LIAM
I circle the letter B on my keyboard with my fingertip. I shouldn’t have let him drive away last night. He was hurt.
The fight had been ugly. It’s hockey, which is little more than a blood sport on ice. Pierce and I watch every game. The fights are fun. They are satisfying on a primal level. It’s like putting a pacifier in all your alpha instincts.
Except when Beckett is part of the fight.
I think Pierce gets off on it. Watching his teddy bear packmate utterly destroy a wall of alphas coming at him is more than satisfying for Pierce, bordering on sexual.
But I can’t. I just can’t watch someone I love get hurt. Not again.
I give the B key an affectionate tap or two and push away from my desk.
I hear Pierce’s whistle from down the hall.
A floorboard squeaks as I move from my office into the living room, heading for the kitchen.
This is an older house, built before the concept of “open floor plan” and “great rooms” really caught on.
Beckett hated it. Pierce argued it was closer to the rink, so it made more sense than the open, airy new-build in the gated community where a bunch of other players had homes.
An easy commute wasn’t the real reason he pushed for this house so hard. There weren’t enough places to hide in an open floor plan house.
Yet another thing we’ve been keeping from Beckett.
Not that we’re keeping our shitty childhood and the near-constant physical and emotional abuse from him.
Not really. But it’s fucking trauma. Sometimes working through it is worse.
It’s not like you can fix watching your best friends get beaten bloody by parents more interested in drugs than their kids by reading a book and queuing up a self-help podcast.
It’s fine, though, because Pierce probably didn’t know that was the reason either. But I could always see it in him. Since the day we met when we were like three, Pierce had always needed an exit at best, or a place to hide at worst.
His parents were drug dealers.
Mine weren’t much better, but they didn’t care enough to beat me.
But Reed? His house had been an oasis right up until his mother died.
And now we live in a house where it’s easy to hide and keep secrets.
I turn into the kitchen. Pierce has his head in the fridge. I check Beckett’s location on my phone. He’s still at the hotel.
“Let’s get it over with,” Pierce says, not bothering to pull himself out of the fridge.
I don’t respond. There’s no point in having this argument again.
Pierce resurfaces with a carrot and a slice of American cheese.
He folds the slice in half, and then in half again, and again, until it’s a stack of tiny squares.
He’ll pull off one square at a time. That was a Reed thing.
His asshole dad couldn’t be bothered to unwrap the cheese when making him sandwiches for school.
Which, frankly, was better than Pierce’s pack, who couldn’t even be bothered to buy food in the first place.
It was almost ten years ago, and Reed is still a part of our lives. And we can never speak his name.
“You’re not going to bitch me out today?” Pierce peels off two tiny slices of cheese and pops them into his mouth.
I lean against the wall, hands behind my back.
Pierce is tall, not taller than Beckett, but his attitude gives him an extra foot in height.
He’s wearing his hair super short these days, making him look polished rather than the scruffiness that was his main personality trait when we were younger.
He looks like he should be wearing suits, not ratty gym clothes.
“Ah, silent treatment. You know how I hate that.” He takes a bite of his carrot. He hates baby carrots, mostly because I think regular carrots afford him opportunities to make dick jokes.
The gym is closed on Thursday afternoons.
We’ll open back up after dinner, but Thursdays are our old pro night.
We don’t usually do any personal training.
We just let the muscle heads and muscle mommies do their thing.
It’s not that they don’t like beginners or lightweights, but having a night where they can geek out without scaring the normies has been popular. And profitable.
Pierce turns his back on me to rummage in the fridge again.
He leaves the cheese wrapper right on the counter.
It’s a taunt. He knows it. I know it. His childhood trauma manifests in paranoia and a unique flavor of agoraphobia.
Me? I got the OCD control issues. I keep my eyes on him and not the cheese wrapper. It’s not easy.
He drums his fingers on the door, and I know he’s not really seeing the contents of the fridge. I look down at my shoes to ignore the fucking cheese wrapper.
“Do you know where he went last night?”
Ah, I win the standoff, and that’s probably not a good thing.
“Location sharing puts him at the Ritz downtown.” I put him out of some of his misery.
“He has a concussion.”
“I know.”
“So, why’d you let him leave?”
An expected response, but it still hurts.
“We…”
“We made a decision, and we are not changing that. We have too much to lose now. He has too much to lose.” There’s no emotion in Pierce’s voice.
“And you’re willing to risk losing him over it all?”
Pierce still won’t face me. I don’t need to see his face to read him, not after everything we’ve been through. All this posturing, the lack of eye contact, shit, even the snacking, is masking fear. The truth and the lies are about to fuck us royally in equal measure.
“You’ll find who sent it. Has to be Reed’s father. Only Randal and his buddies know.”
I run my hands through my hair. He doesn’t get it. Our time is up.
“And how am I going to do that, Pierce? I can track an IP address,” I pull the plain but crinkled white envelope out of my back pocket and throw it, like the accusation it is, on the counter. “This was dropped in the mailbox next to the post office three blocks from here. That I cannot track.”
He doesn’t turn to look at it.
“If we tell Beckett…”
“What’s Beckett going to do about it? The only reasonable thing, right? Kick us to the curb.”
“If we tell Beckett, we can make a decision as a pack,” I press.
“We go. That is the only decision.”
I shake my head, the anger simmering.
“First…”
“Oh, fuck off.” He throws up his hands. I crack half a smile. He hates it when I have a list. Because he knows I come to the table with logic and footnotes. He stalks out of the room. I follow, of course. Even in our own home, his eyes scan the room, pausing at each exit.
“First, Beckett loves you, loves me. He’s not going to pack up his gym bag and run off.”
“No? Where is he right now?”
I pinch the bridge of my nose. “Bad example.”
“Fine. Second thing?”
He gives up so fast because he knows I’m right. Despite storming out of here last night, Beckett isn’t a cut-and-run kind of alpha.
“Second, if this is a blackmail ploy, we tell Beckett and there’s nothing to blackmail us about.”
“Okay, now I’m the one who gets to ask you if you really are that dumb.” He puts his hands on his hips. I pinch my nose again. I hate when he does that. It’s so fucking cute. “We tell Beckett, and then whoever this is goes to the press. And that kind of press the team can’t avoid.
For months, Beckett has been on eggshells.
There was this whole PR push to fix the team’s image.
Send all the players out on dates, get photos of them all over town.
Good for businesses, good for the team. It was the exact kind of thing Beckett hates.
He would much rather do outreach with kids or animals.
He practically pioneered the team’s holiday toy drive.
Pierce has a point here. We’ve done a lot of questionable things over the years to ensure Beckett’s career. Which, goddamn it, gave Pierce another point. If we were going to come clean, we’d have to come clean about all of it.
“Exactly,” Pierce says, satisfied he read agreement in my face.
“What’s your solution then?” I sit on the back of the couch and hang my head. He’s not going to say it again, not seriously. “We go” isn’t an option. Not anymore.
“I don’t know,” Now Pierce is pinching his nose.
We sit there in miserable silence for far too long. Beckett saved us, and he doesn’t even know it. And we’re about to ruin everything around him.
“I know you have money,” he says softly. It isn’t an accusation, not really, just acknowledging yet another dirty secret. I’ve been stashing money into a secret account for years for this exact reason.
Pierce is the decisive one. I’m the planner. And Beckett? He’s the one we both can’t live without.
He claps his hands once and cracks his neck. “Right. That’s what we’ll do. Burn the letter. When he makes his next move, we’ll just pay to make it go away.”
I shrug with all the confidence I can muster. Snatching his keys off the sideboard, he flips them around his index finger and lets them hit his palm with a satisfying clang of metal.
“Beckett will be home tonight. Tomorrow, maybe. Everything will be fine.”
“No, you fucking asshole, go apologize!” I shout as he steps out the door and shuts it. “Jesus Christ,” I mutter to no one.