Chapter 43

“What?” I asked, bracing myself for bad news. I was just on the phone with Jarret, so there was no way the city got attacked while we were away. Then again, maybe he hadn’t known.

“Can I talk to you for a minute?” she asked, walking past me and expecting me to follow. Since I had nothing better to do, I did. She went into the backyard and I stood next to her. The sky was darkening quickly. Sunset was still a few hours away, but storm clouds were rolling across the sky. The thickest ones we’ve seen so far.

When Dovie just stood there, staring up at the sky, I said, “So… What? Is everything all right at home? Did Monday call? Abyss?”

She waved that all away. “They’re both fine and you know it,” she said on a smile. “I’d like to see something go after Abyss when you and Shade aren’t there to rein her in. There’d be a blood bath.”

“She’d love it,” I agreed.

The smile drifted off Dovie’s face. “It’s been different here,” she said. “The rules I live my life by don’t quite apply. The things that I know for certain aren’t true. It’s not a bad thing. It’s nice to see variety. Even this kind…” she gestures toward the houses beyond the fence.

My shoulders were starting to tense up. Dovie didn’t do reverent very easily. She was easy going, she liked to joke around and smile and make everyone happy. When she got serious, it was because she saw something that she couldn’t ignore. My gut was telling me what she was going to say, but my head was in denial.

Several minutes went past without us speaking, even though the tension in the air was its own conversation.

“Asire saw you naked, by the way,” Dovie eventually told me.

“Damn it,” I said, dropping my head so that I looked at the ground. I didn’t need Dovie noticing my embarrassment.

Dovie snorted. “Don’t even think about it. She told us when Reggie forced it out of her because she was acting weird. She’s decided that it was an accident and to ignore it, but I do not believe for even a second that you didn’t want her to see you. At least a little bit.”

“What!” I demanded.

“Please,” Dovie groaned. “Don’t play that game with me. You may not have been fully aware of it, but you wanted her to see you naked. You wanted to see if she was attracted to you. Otherwise you’d have remembered your clothes or put on the dirty ones.” She shook her head.

“They were wet,” I said.

She rolled her eyes. “That wouldn’t have stopped you normally. Or you’d have been smart and woken her up and asked her to grab your suitcase for you. There are so many solutions, none of which involve you parading around her bedroom naked. Unless you wanted her to see.”

“I’m not that conceited,” I said.

Dovie smiled. “It’s not conceit, Loki. You’re well over six feet tall and have more muscle that looks better on you than most men could dream of. Your face ain’t bad, but your body is gorgeous.”

“Dovie,” I groaned because she was basically my sister.

“Chill out,” Dovie said, holding her hands up. “I’m just stating a fact. Ask any girl in the Family.”

I wanted to hit my head on something hard enough to knock myself out.

“And you know it,” Dovie said. “So you gave her a chance to see you because you wanted to know her reaction. You wanna know what it was?”

More than I was willing to admit. “No,” I said firmly.

“She figured out that she wants to fuck you. Maybe not that extreme, but it’s the gist. She’s into you, Loki. And she’s not into anybody,” Dovie said, finally turning around so that we were facing each other. Her eyes were dead serious and her face was very calm. Very smooth.

“What?” I asked. “What do you mean by that?”

Dovie raised her eyebrows. “I’ve watched her. When someone’s been through so much and lived with people who’ve been through so much… You learn to see the signs that other people might miss. Have you ever noticed that she smoothly slides away from anyone who might brush up against her? Or how she lets Reggie deal with all the muscular men with too much testosterone? Not saying that she can’t handle herself around them because she can. Believe me. But she lets other people do it. Or, and this might be the most telling, she doesn’t let anyone boss her around?”

I didn’t say anything. I hadn’t noticed the first example, but the other two I had.

Dovie shrugged. “Our Family is made up of fucked up people, Loki. There’s only so much damage a person can take and Asire’s taken a lot. I can see it in her every time she walks in a room. And based on how bland you're looking right about now, you know precisely what I’m talking about. Did she tell you?”

I looked at the snow.

“So yeah. You know better than anyone that that damage does something to people. To their insides and how they tick. The way they change to deal with the world around them. Asire? She doesn’t trust easily. She doesn’t let anyone tell her what to do unless she has already decided to do something. And she isn’t interested in sex. Or she wasn’t. Until you showed up.”

Guilt ate at me even more. Of course Asire wouldn’t be interested in sex. My mind knew that, but everything else? She was interested in me and that’s all that mattered, it seemed. I hadn’t even thought about how this might turn her world upside down. I also hadn’t wondered if she’d had sex after what had been done to her. I guess some part of me just assumed she had.

How wrong I apparently was.

Dovie shrugged. “So yeah, that’s her end of it. Yours?”

“Dovie,” I warned.

“You’re just as into her as she is you,” Dovie said, ignoring the tone of my voice.

Panic flared in my chest. The guilt and anger of everything that I didn’t want dogging me. If no one else had noticed, then I hadn’t done anything wrong. If no one else commented, then I could pretend nothing happened, but now it was out there. I could practically feel Eve’s sadness and disapproval for the way I’d behaved since getting to the city. For how I’d betrayed her.

“I’ve spent almost no time with her,” Dovie was saying. “But I can see how she would attract your attention. I bet she hasn’t even noticed.”

I thought back to upstairs in her room. Somehow, I thought she noticed. I thought she was more than well aware of what was going on in my head.

Dovie opened her mouth and I got ready for her disapproval. Asire was an Orphan, it would never work. Besides, what kind of man replaces his mate after only four years? What kind of man gets a new mate at all? It would bring shame onto our Family if I even attempted to pursue—

“You’re going to try to get her Orphaning reversed,” Dovie said, cutting into my thoughts.

I reeled back from her like she’d slapped me.

Dovie shrugged. “I know you. After meeting her and seeing her with Billy and Regory? You wouldn’t do anything else,” Dovie said. “You like to fix things, Loki. You like to take care of people who need your help. Billy and Regory love Asire and Asire loves them. This hurts them all. You want to fix it.”

“It would be nearly impossible—”

“Don’t even,” Dovie said. “You’ve driven across the country to pick people up, taken in total strangers when you were but a kid, took in me, and forced a man at your parents’ company to help you with everything. Your whole life has been doing the impossible. So don’t even. Don’t deny you’ve been thinking about trying with her, either.”

I couldn’t. Because I had been thinking about it.

Dovie nodded. Tears gathered on her lashes. “I think you should.”

“What?” I asked.

“I think you should help her. This whole City of Orphans thing? It’s incredibly unfair. I’ve spent a lot of time with Reggie and she…doesn’t deserve this. None of them deserve this. Some of them are difficult, yes, but this…isn’t fair. We can’t help most of them, but Asire? I think we could get her out of here. We know where her grandparents and father are. We can get her out of here. I believe that we can.”

The Poole Family and Gerard Thomas (her father) all lived in Arizona. They didn’t hold Phoenix because there weren’t that many of them. They held a suburb about thirty minutes out, though. It had some ridiculous name or other. After Asire was taken by Morlyn, Gerard had moved back to Arizona. They were all in the same city.

It would be easy to find them.

I shook my head and moved away.

“It doesn’t matter what you say now,” Dovie told me. “You already decided to do it the second you thought about it. Don’t you remember on the way here, I told you I knew what would happen?”

“Yeah,” I said gruffly.

“I was right and wrong. I knew you’d take Asire out of the city if you could and you’ll do your damnedest to make it happen. I didn’t know that you would…wake up for the first time in four years.”

“No!” I said.

“It’s okay, Loki,” Dovie said. “This is good.”

“No!” I said again. How could she still be talking? How could she think that? She saw me with Eve. Saw how perfect the two of us were together. She shouldn’t be talking about her like…

Oh god. My stomach revolted, warning me that the sandwich was about to come back up. I whipped around to go back in the house and leave her out in the snow with her incorrect thoughts and her misconceptions of how my life would turn out after this. I needed to get away.

Dovie shot forward and grabbed my arm, her nails biting into me through my sweater. “Don’t run away!” she yelled. “You can either face all your demons now and with me or alone later. And I’m more persistent than silence, do you understand?”

I tried to shake her off, but she wouldn’t move.

“You’re finally alive, Loki,” she said. “The past four years, you’ve been going to work and coming home. You’ve been taking care of us and going to bed. You’ve been living, but you haven’t been alive. It’s like you were going through the motions. You love us and that was enough to keep you alive, but not enough to fix you.”

“I don’t need to be fixed,” I growled.

“Yes you do! Something terrible happened and you refuse to acknowledge it, but it did happen. You lost your mate. It’s okay to be fucked up about it, but you haven’t tried to heal. You want to be that giant wound that you were the second she died.”

“You don’t understand any of this,” I said, calmly, because it was true. No one could understand losing a mate unless they’d lost one. And even then…it was so different for every couple. “I moved out of the house I had with her and got a new bed, but still every time I walk in, I know she’s not there. Every time I wake up I can feel the emptiness where she used to be. Do you wake up with that?”

“Loki,” she said. “This is the healthiest I’ve seen you in so long. Don’t throw it away.”

“I’m supposed to be with Asire, now?” I asked, bitterly. “Is that it?” Anger had started to take over me. How dare Dovie try to push me into something that would never work? “Why? Because she’s attractive. That’s all I’m supposed to care about right. She’s pretty so it’s okay if I cheat on my mate?”

“Eve’s dead,” Dovie said coldly. “It’s not cheating.”

The sting of the words was worse than a slap across the face.

A little nugget of worry that I’d been ignoring for days finally broke free and found its way to my mouth. “She’ll just die!” I shouted, not caring who heard me in the house. “Don’t you understand that? I can’t be with her without letting Eve go and if I let her go I’ll lose them both! She’s too wild! She went off into a vampire clan’s territory on her own, went to fight a pack of werewolves, leaving us behind! She’s reckless and she’ll die! I can’t live through that again! I can’t betray Eve like that! I won’t.”

“You need to listen to me!” Dovie demanded, tightening that grip on my arm until I felt her nails bite through my clothing. “I know you loved Eve. We all loved her. But she was weak. She needed us. She was a tracker who could barely fight. She was sweet as hell, but she couldn’t make it without us. Asire… Asire isn’t like that. Eve died because she was dependent on us. Asire has been alone for seven years. Yeah, living with the Orphans, but most of them don’t seem to care about her. She’s been on her own since Billy left.

“Do you remember that story Billy told us of her and Asire getting the crap beaten out of them and laughing on the barn floor while waiting for Regory to come get them? Billy loves us. But we aren’t that girl that she went through hell with. We aren’t the girl that rescued her from that hell. We aren’t that girl who laughed with her on the barn room floor because the only other option was to cry. The point being, Eve was careful and she still died. Asire does what needs to be done. She might be reckless, she might do something we disagree with, but she will survive.”

My heart was pounding. Dovie didn’t get it. Didn’t understand. Asire got into trouble. I’ve seen her engage in fights only because she had to, but they always seemed to find her. Always her. Because she was Asire Thomas. Infamous even after all these years on her own. One day a fight would find her that she couldn’t win.

If I got her out of the city, I’d just have to worry about losing a Family member.

If I pursued this desire to be close to her? I’d lose everything and more. I shouldn’t have survived Eve’s death. I wouldn’t survive losing another mate. I didn’t want another mate. Eve had been… Eve. And it nearly killed me.