Page 70 of From the Ashes

He meets my eyes, and I nod down at Camilla, silently telling him that she needs him. She needs all of us, and that breaks him out of his thoughts.

When he wraps his arms around our other side, a torrent of sobs escape Camilla, and my chest aches at the sound. Her tears do something to me. They have the power to bring me to my knees, and the only thing that keeps us standing is the other three bodies holding us up.

It takes two hours to get the cemetery cleaned up enough to call in the cleanup crew, and Camilla has made one too many halfhearted jokes about the moms that clean the house before their cleaner arrives.

But we’re all tense.

Her eyes are haunted as she helps Wyatt drag a body from the tree line, but it’s not the dead bodies that did it.

It’s the man who is still very much alive.

Not for long, I think to myself.

“You should head out,” Noah says, his blue eyes softer than I’ve seen them for a long time. He’s been training to take over his family for almost as long as Camilla has hers, and there comes a time when that much weight takes over your life.

“There’s still more to do.” Crew shakes his head from where he’s tapping furiously on his phone. He’s been leaning against that tree almost since we finally dragged ourselves away from Camilla, but every now and then, I notice him look up, and his eyes flick to each of us to make sure we’re safe.

This is the closest we’ve ever come to losing everything we’ve worked for, and I have a feeling we’ll all be extra wary for a while.

“You’re all dead on your feet, and Camilla looks about ready to drop. You know she won’t stop until you all do,” Noah argues. When he walked through those trees, I wasn’t surprised to see him. Before Camilla crashed into our lives, Noah was as close to a friend as we had in the families, and the fact he showed up is more than enough to prove his loyalty to us.

Crew’s eyes move to Camilla immediately, and his brows tug together. She and Wyatt drop the body, and she leans against a headstone to catch her breath. We’ve decimated this resting place in every possible way already, so leaning against some stranger’s grave seems like a small offense at this point.

He looks toward the hill where Kaos is talking to the cleanup crew, explaining exactly what we need done and within what time frame. The sun will be rising in an hour, and we need to have all traces of this mess cleared by then.

Kovu is where he’s been since we broke away from the hug, watching every single move Camilla makes. The reminder of the past he’s tried so desperately to forget has ghosts I haven’t seen in years in his eyes.

Nightmares always plagued him until his little lamb came along, but I’m not sure even she’s going to be able to keep them at bay after seeing Joel again. He’s never spoken much about what his parents and that asshole did to him as a kid, but the scars that litter his skin are more than enough evidence, as well as the broken bones that never fully healed.

When Crew first brought him home covered in their blood, the wild look in his eyes even scared me. I was twelve at the time and had been around criminals my whole life, but the look in this kid’s eyes was the most terrifying thing I’d ever seen.

Crew took him to this tiny doctor’s clinic and used the little money we had spare at the time to get him properly looked at. He was so cagey he didn’t sleep for the first week he was with us, and when he finally did, he would wake up from nightmares I never wanted to understand.

It took years to get to a point where he wasn’t a threat to me or Kaos at night, and it’s only been since Camilla came along that we’ve seen a huge change in him, and I just hope he’s not going to let this setback ruin everything he’s worked so hard for.

“Let’s go home,” Crew finally says, and I let out a breath I didn’t realize I was holding. We all need some sleep so we can regroup in the morning.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

CAMILLA

Inever understood the expression “bone-tired” until right now.

Every single inch of my body screams with exhaustion, and the memories of what I shared with Crew and Bishop just hours ago are just that, a distant memory.

It feels like weeks have passed, not hours, as we pull into the garage of the compound.

Bishop drove, seeing as he wasn’t hit over the head at any point tonight and isn’t currently having any kind of existential crisis.

Crew sat in the passenger seat, never looking up from his phone, but the tension in his shoulders made it obvious he’s battling his own demons right now.

And that left me sandwiched between Kaos and Kovu. The former stared out the window the whole drive, but his hand never lifted from my thigh, and I’ve lapped up every second of his steady presence. While the latter is barely holding on, Kovu vibrates with emotion, and although his hand hasn’t let go of mine, he’s not here with me.

He’s trapped in a memory I have no understanding or knowledge of.

Everything has moved so fast between the five of us that I now realize how little I know about each of them beyond what lies on the surface.

When the car comes to a stop, no one makes a move to get out. I need a shower. I need to eat something. And I really fucking need some sleep. But I also need to make sure they’re okay.

---