Page 85 of The Last Promise You Made

My jaw worked overtime as waves of regret and sadness flew through me. Gia had been right in that this letter made it seem like Rayvn was running from family. From a dark demon and his son. Worse, the story she’d written thrust me right back to lying twined with her on a blanket in the hollow with the trees shading us and the creek bubbling next to us.

The story she’d woven was full of those magical times when we’d been tucked away from the world, and I’d told her the stories my siblings and I had created in our youth. Stories of pirates and fairies and discovering gold. Even back then, she’d been good at spinning our coarse childhood adventures into fairy tales I could almost see, creating new versions. But in all of them, Ravyn had played the villain’s daughter, saved by the handsome prince. I’d thought she was trying to speak of the abuse she’d suffered as a kid but wasn’t quite ready to talk about, and I’d loved her more for having survived it. For being there, strong and beautiful, facing the world with me. Now, it just added another wound to my already beat-up soul, knowing she didn’t feel safe enough to tell me the truth.

Gia raised a brow. “This is the only file that isn’t encrypted, Ryder. She wanted you to see this. She left you a clue to unlock it.”

“Except, I have no idea what she means,” I said right as Enrique said, “I don’t think you should get your hopes up. It doesn’t prove she’s part of the Lovatos or that Hatley has the key. Hell, this could just be some damn fairy tale she wrote for her kid.”

“Addy,” I groused. “Her name is Addy.”

Enrique’s eyes met mine across the counter, a standoff that neither of us broke until Gia brought me back to her with a gentle hand on my shoulder.

“No one knew Ravyn as well as you, Ryder. What do you think? Is it a coded message? Or is it a fairy tale?”

Before she’d left, I thought I knew her as well as I knew myself, even with the secrets of her childhood. I’d thought her past didn’t matter because I could see the person she truly was. The Ravyn I’d once believed in would have wanted to help others. She would have wanted to save the world if she could. But when she’d left, taking what was ours with her, I thought I’d been duped.

Knowing now that she’d been scared and on the run, it shifted my vision of her again, blending it into some combined version of my rose-colored-glasses version of her and the reality where she was a woman fearing for her life.

“Say her name,” Gia said softly.

I swallowed, and it was my brother who spoke instead of me. “Maybe it’s just Ravyn, as that wasn’t her real name but the one we knew her as,” Maddox suggested.

Gia scoffed. “I doubt it’s as simple as Ravyn.”

But she still brought up one of the files and typed Ravyn’s name into the password box. When it was rejected, she tried typing in different iterations, with capitals and without them, spelling it in different ways. Nothing worked.

Gia looked at me with that cautious look back in her eyes. “Did you have a nickname for her?”

After she asked the question, I realized her caution was all for me, because she didn’t want to hurt me. Didn’t want memories of Ravyn to hurt me. Gia cared enough to look out for me. What did that say? What did I want it to say? Especially when thinking of Ravyn’s nickname shoved me back in time to where I was tangled with her in bed in the apartment above the barn where I’d lived when we’d first met.

She’d laughed at the nickname I’d tried out before I’d ever tried to make it our child’s name, saying, I could never be Arwen, Ryder. She’s an elf full of light, and I’m full of dark. I’m much more likely to be a soldier, wielding a sword than a spell. If I were anyone from that ridiculous trilogy, I’d be Eowyn, bringing the Witch-King down.

I’d insisted she wasn’t dark, that she was my light. But when she’d found out she was pregnant, she’d brought it up again. She’d told me the Witch-King’s darkness was in her, had infected her, and that she wasn’t sure she could be a good mother because of it. I’d promised her we’d fight the darkness together. As a family. It had been one of the last promises I’d made to her, and it hadn’t been until after she’d left that I’d realized she hadn’t promised me back.

A hand landed on my shoulder, and I turned my head to meet my brother’s concerned gaze. “Ry?”

I scrubbed my face. “Try My Lady Eowyn of Rohan.”

Silence settled over the room. My brother covered his mouth, Enrique coughed into the coffee cup, and Gia’s eyes went wide.

“Fuck you all. You think I wanted to say that out loud? Just try it,” I bit out.

Gia’s lips twisted upward as her fingers flew over the keys.

The screen came back, red letters denying access. “Let me try a few different versions.”

I moved away from her, opened the fridge, and took out a beer. I needed something stronger. Whiskey. A whole bottle of it. I wanted to head over to McFlannigan’s, sit on the corner stool I considered mine, and get so drunk I fell off the damn thing. But those days were now behind me. I couldn’t just drown my memories and regrets in alcohol—not if I wanted to be there for Addy. So, instead of giving in to that yearning, I twisted the cap off the damn beer and took a swig.

“Anyone want one?”

Enrique shook his head. “Not while I’m on duty.”

Maddox muttered, “I’m good.”

Gia didn’t respond at all. Did she not like beer? Was tequila or whiskey her drink of choice? She didn’t seem like a wine snob, but I knew even less about her than I had about Ravyn. And yet, I was drawn to this spitfire by a lure stronger than even the immediate, undeniable one I’d felt toward my ex the moment she’d walked into the ranch office for an interview.

Hadn’t I learned the hard way that when people told you they had darkness following them and they didn’t know how to stay, you needed to listen? Gia definitely had secrets—things she did for her job that she’d never be able to tell anyone. And she didn’t stay anywhere for long. She flitted around the globe for her work. So, any notion that might be lingering at the back of my mind about making her mine was ludicrous.

I’d downed half the beer by the time Gia gave a sigh of frustration and pushed the computer away. “Nothing. But I’m not giving up. I’ll give all of this to Rory and see what she can do with it.”

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