Page 61 of Lucky or Knot
Of course, I noticed he’d left out the part where I told him I loved him. Apparently he did want us to forget about that.
Fuck it. I could wallow in my rejected misery later on. Right now I had Raven, with no disasters hanging over us and all the danger in the rearview.
“Yeah, let’s go home. Come home with me? It’s not fancy. You’ll hate it.”
Raven squeezed my hand again, and it went straight to my stupid, aching heart. “I won’t hate it. Yes.”
We picked our way through the rubble of the club until we reached Blake and Declan, talking in undervoices by the front door.
“Thank you for showing up and evening the odds,” I said, as they looked up at our approach. “What are you doing here, anyway?”
Blake grimaced. “He figured out I was hiding something before I had a chance to confess, and then I had to tell him all of it. We had someone keeping an eye on Audacity. Your exit from the premises was hard to miss. And of course we followed along, because I wasn’t about to get left out of this. Oh. I never made it to your apartment to drop off your stuff.”
He dug around in his jacket pocket and produced my phone, keys, and wallet. I took them, freshly aware of having no pockets of my own, and of the air currents brushing my free-hanging balls. Good thing shifters didn’t have a lot of modesty—our clothes didn’t shift with us, after all.
“I know it was Blake who came up with the idea of getting you into Cunningham’s little soirée,” Declan said with a sigh. “If you’re wondering if we’re about to have another alphachallenge.”
Thank the gods for Declan’s common sense. It wasn’t usually the most prominent alpha trait—case in point, literally everything I’d done recently.
“He was the brains of the operation,” I agreed.
“That’s a very kind way of putting it,” Declan grumbled. “I’d have said the idiot-in-chief.”
Blake turned on him and began to argue, and I chose that moment to pull Raven away.
“Someone’s waiting to take you home,” Declan called after us, and then immediately, “If you think there’s a better description for setting up a friend to go into a rival hotel and pose as a fucking circus tiger, then I’d be glad to—”
The club’s door slamming shut behind us cut him off, although Blake’s reply, a little higher pitched and a whole lot louder, filtered through.
One of Declan’s guys ushered us to a car very much like the one we’d stolen from Cunningham, and he didn’t even comment on my naked ass on his leather seats.
Raven and I thanked him, but otherwise sat silently in the back during the fifteen minutes it took to get to my apartment complex. We didn’t even touch. My hand that wasn’t getting blood all over my wallet and phone rested on the seat near him in the hope that he’d take the bait, but he’d folded his own carefully in his lap. And then turned his head to stare out at the passing lights of Vegas, giving me his rumpled hair and a tantalizing glimpse of his long neck to gaze at.
If Declan’s driver thought where I lived was a dump, he was too polite to say so, merely hopping out to open Raven’s door while I climbed out the other side.
Raven followed me up the stairs, down the long breezeway, and through my door without comment. Finally, I shut it behind us and flicked on the light. Raven glanced aroundat the shabby couch and shabbier carpeting, the cheap, chipped fake wood coffee table and TV stand, a couple of dirty coffee mugs here and there.
And then he swayed, put his hands over his face, and burst into tears.
Chapter 20
Raven standing in my own apartment, myden, all battered and sobbing, pushed every button I had and a few I hadn’t even been aware of.
Maybe I should’ve expected this, what with his months of playing mind games and being used by a total fucking asshole like Cunningham, plus the stress of sneaking around and trying to escape, plus whatever Cunningham had done to him over the last few days, plus escaping and getting shot at and falling twenty stories, seeing me broken and nearly dead, driving the getaway car and making the deal with Louie and watching me and Cunningham fight…
Yeah, it actually showed his remarkable resilience that he hadn’t cracked long before this. But the breaking of tension could be a real bitch, and honestly, I might’ve been having my own freakout if I hadn’t already burned that out healing every single part of my body in the most agonizing possible way.
He might not want mine and Cunningham’s blood all over him, but no power on Earth could’ve kept me from wrapping my arms around him, pressing his head to my chest, and holding him tight.
Raven huddled there, shaking violently enough that I was afraid he might’ve shattered into pieces all over the floor if I hadn’t been keeping him together, enclosing him in my big body, kissing his hair, not saying a damn thing—because the only words that came to mind wereI love you, and that didn’t seem likely to comfort him much.
But at last, as he started to wind down, I felt like I had to break the silence. “I know my apartment’s a mess, but I didn’t think it was that bad,” I tried.
A weak, watery, choking laugh that ended on a sob was probably all I deserved for that joke.
“Come on,” I tried again. “Let’s get in the shower. I can’t match whatever amenities they have at Endless Sky, but there’s always lots of hot water in this place, at least.”
He stumbled as I started to move, so I slipped an arm under his knees and carried him. When had I last scrubbed the shower? Shit. It got pretty clean from all the hot water and soap running down over it all the time, yeah? Although there might be traces of glitter.
