Chapter 35
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CALEB
“You should be sleeping.”
She jolts in my arms, the room too dark to see anything but her fluttering lashes at the angle I’m in beneath her, moonlight creeping in through the curtains as Coop sleeps behind her, his face more serene than I’ve ever seen it before, as though just being this close to our Dove soothes all the jagged parts of him.
I know because that’s exactly how I feel right now as her fingers rub little circles around the tattoos on my bare chest.
I reach over and switch on her lamp, my eyes taking a second to adjust to the light. I sigh, sated when my gaze meets hers, and she smiles up at me.
I wrap my hand around hers and squeeze it, bringing it up to plant a soft kiss across her knuckles. Laying her arm back on my chest, I rub my thumb over the raised warrior wound on her cheek, the scar small but jagged.
“You could get this removed. They have ways now.” She snaps her head away from me, her hand flying up to cover her scar, as though she is guarding something precious.
“Tell me, Dove.” I order, losing the battle to be soft with her, the bubble of anger simmering inside me when she keeps things from me.
“When I remember that night, when you were taken from me…” She stutters a little, a harsh panting breath clawing at her throat, her mind seeming to reel over how to say it.
“It’s the only reminder I had left of you guys.
As the years passed, the memories of you dimmed.
The damage to my skin was all I had to remind myself that you were real. ”
My heart aches at her admission as I coax her face towards me with a finger hooked under her chin.
I plant a tentative kiss on the raised scar.
There is a misplaced apology in the connection, for the part I played in her getting it and for being one of the reasons she still has it.
To carry around a daily reminder of what happened just to wade through the shit for the smallest scrap of comfort.
I should have done better by her.
As though we’ve opened something up in her, Ebony continues to talk, the sorrow heavy in every panting breath.
“I didn’t know what else to do. They would have killed you both.” She wipes away the tear that has escaped, her voice meek as she says it. “I’d rather have lived with you hating me and known that you were both alive out there somewhere, than have you being dead and discarded in some wood chipper.”
“I think our anger was always a smokescreen for the loss we felt—the loss of you and the future we thought we could have.” I try to settle her, knowing she needs my softness right now.
She doesn’t respond with words, but I can feel the thump of her heart relax and how she holds onto me a little tighter, and that’s a good enough response for me.
Our Dove doesn’t realise how easy it is to love her; even blinded by the need for revenge, somewhere in me, I think I always knew I loved the bones of her.
She falls back into sleep as I gaze down at her.
I don’t know when it shifted, when our feelings for her had morphed into something more than the binding friendship we had been living with.
But that night we found her wandering in the forest, it took us an hour to calm her down.
She wouldn’t tell us what her shit stain of a foster father had done to her at first, although the mottled bruising decorating her skin was enough of an indication.
The kiss - our first, knocked me for six, knowing she likely wasn’t in the right frame of mind, we tried to stop it.
But I could see the pain etched into her features as we began to pull away.
She climbed into my lap, pulling Cooper close and she whispered, “make me forget, please, Caleb. I need you and Coop to make me forget.”
I could never deny our Dove a thing, not a damn thing, and we all knew it.
I hadn’t allowed myself to explore my feelings for her until that moment.
Coop was smitten, he had been since we found her swimming in her river, but he never let her know it.
Maybe on some level, she always had though, because with those wide imploring violet-flecked grey eyes, she looked at us as though we were all she ever needed.
We could fix the parts of her those other men had tried so callously to break.
One taste of Ebony would never be enough, and I can’t be sorry for enacting her revenge after what we shared.
I couldn’t watch her walk back into that house, back to the danger.
My father had beaten me to the brink of death enough for me to know that when that rage descends, sometimes they go too far when lost to the madness.
The thought of her never coming back to us—I couldn’t risk it.
We left her there, in our barn, in the early hours of the morning, dusk still a way off as the dew clung to the grass, and the sombre stillness of a sleeping town still lingered in the frigid air.
Cooper and I had briefly discussed our plan around the makeshift pit fire as she slept, safely wrapped in a blanket as sated rumbles left her parted lips.
The Turner house in all its beauty was set alone in the quiet lane, half of the land technically in Hells Haven, the other set in Widows Walk.
Ebony liked to say her bedroom was a town away from her foster father’s as she wished it with all her heart.
We did what we needed to do to save her from that life, and we’d do it again in a heartbeat.
“Don’t. Don’t. Hate me.” Her voice is a barely-there whisper, the faintest whimper clogging her throat as she dreams. Her fingers grip against my skin, her nails leaving crescent half-moons in my flesh, and the urge to settle her is almost too strong to ignore.
“Caleb. Please.” My heart lurches in my chest as my name falls from her lips.
The love I’ve always felt for her swallowing the darkness that began to spread the moment I watched her standing there that day in the rain from the back of that police car.
Little does she know, I couldn’t hate her if I tried.
And believe me, I’ve tried—I even did a good job at convincing myself I didn’t need her for a while there.
But being here beside her, drinking in her intoxicating sweet peaches and vanilla scent, the idea of hating her feels like an impossible feat.
I trail my fingers through a curl of her hair that has escaped her haphazardly-wrapped bun, letting the pad of my thumb linger as it skates along her soft jawline.
Glancing up at the hand-painted mural that decorates her wall, the same collection of images that adorn each of our bodies, I realise that doing what she did, was the lesser of two evils.
That maybe Cooper had always been right and she loved us just as much as we loved her.
That what looked like betrayal, was actually the only way Ebony could guarantee we walked away with our lives.