Page 2 of When Kings Fall

I sat down beside him on the couch and told Lev. “She just needs time for the shock of it to wear off. It’s raw now. It’s why we insisted you don’t bombard her with messages and fight to contact her.”

“Or, worse, actually show up at her door,” Colt added.

“Exactly,” I said.

Levi sighed heavily then pulled his phone from his pocket, scrolled for a moment, and handed it to me. “These are all the draft texts I wanted to send her, but stopped myself from doing since we agreed to give her space.”

I took them in, Colt reading over my shoulder too.

Levi: I’m so sorry it came out like that.

Levi: It’s not as bad as you think.

Levi: I mean, I know it’s bad, I can actually recognize that, but I meant it wasn’t done for a bad reason. I didn’t do it to isolate you or anything. It wasn’t like that.

Levi: I truly am sorry, Wildflower.

Levi: What can I do to make it better?

Levi: I can’t stand the thought of losing you.

Levi: We can work through this. However you need, on your terms.

Levi: I care about you so much, we all do. Please don’t leave.

“Aww, oh my God,” Colt said.

I handed the phone back to Levi, still stunned that he’d actually shown it to us, put his vulnerability on display like that.

It just went to show how much he was hurting, and how much he needed us to understand that, to understand he needed us so badly right now.

The thing with Levi Knight was, when he was hurting, he needed a distraction.

Well, in his case, a focus.

And we had one.

Not a good one, a really fucking bad one.

Royce Humphrey and his mercenaries were coming for Brianna.

“Lev, it’s actually best that she’s distanced herself from us right now. If not, we’d have to tell her about Royce, and that would cause major panic, considering the brutal history there. So, I need you to focus up and put the rest on hold at the moment, so we can deal with this. And then once it’s done, if she still hasn’t reached out, we’ll go to her, all three of us together, and talk it out. We’ll fix it.”

“We will, Lev,” Colt uttered, bolstering my words to him.

It took him a moment to absorb it all.

And then he nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, I can do that.” He rose to his feet. “I can find Royce.”

“Good, and then we’ll run him and his mercenaries into the ground.”

“They won’t get near her,” Levi growled, vehemently. “I’ll rip them apart before it can ever come to that.”

We all would.

Estranged right now or not, she was ours.

And nobody threatened what was ours.

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