Page 76 of Hayden's Haven
“I should be asking you that. No one’s seen you since yesterday.”
“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking.”
“Care to share?”
“Maybe I should go.” He got up to leave.
“We don’t have to talk,” she said, knowing she sounded desperate, but she was. She didn’t know how to help Hayden, but letting him walk out that door, alone, wasn’t the answer.
He grabbed her coat off the hook on the wall and held it open for her. She slid her arms in, relieved that wherever he was going, she was going with him.
They walked for an hour, before Hayden finally reached for her hand. She was so cold, and he was always so warm.
“Did you ask Anna?” he said.
“Anna? Oh, about the bridge. I’ve been preoccupied with everything else.”
He swung her around, pushed back the hood of her coat, and slid her hair to the side. The cut on her forehead was not fully healed. The skin had come together, but the area was still red and tender. Just like it would be on a human.
“Damien was right,” he said out of the blue. “My loyalty is split. I know what I should do, but I can’t. Drake’s my brother, and no one seems to understand that.” He stopped on the edge of the river. Chunks of ice flowed downstream. If the temperature continued to remain low, the river would ice over completely in the next few days. “Will you come with me if I have to leave?”
“What do you mean ‘have to leave’?”
“If I disobey Damien, he’ll want me to leave. He can’t have shifters disobeying him. Dissension of any sort, especially from his second, is dangerous. It spreads through a pack fast. Even if Damien doesn’t force me to leave, I still have to go. I don’t want to cause him or the pack any problems.”
“There was a time I felt guilty for everything bad that happened to me,” she said suddenly. She hadn’t planned this speech, but sometimes the heart recognized pain, especially pain it’s been through. “I felt as if I wasn’t good enough, nice enough, strong enough. Then I realized none of what was wrong between Vance and me was my doing, except for letting myself get involved with him in the first place. My parents forced me into that relationship, and I didn’t know how to walk away. I should have run from him, from them, from the pack. But I was young and scared of being a lone wolf.”
He growled. “You were pressured. There’s nothing to forgive in your case, no amends to make. You were the victim and you fought to survive. But what happened between me and Drake. . . I couldn’t save Drake just as I couldn’t save Reina. Both times I saw what was happening, but I acted too slowly to save them. Drake was a sweet boy when he was younger, before Logan took him. I failed to protect Drake from my uncle, and now because of my failures, everyone expects me to kill Drake.”
“You were only twelve, a child yourself, when Logan took Drake, Hayden. There was nothing you could have done.”
“There were a million things I could have done. I should have kept sneaking over there—”
“You tried and you were punished. Every time. Then your remaining family threatened. You did all you could possibly do. You have to accept that.”
“I could have had someone else give him messages from me.”
“You’re looking for ways to prove your guilt because you felt helpless—you still feel helpless—to save your brother from an impossible situation. That’s what this is.”
Hayden thrust his hands through his hair.
“If I’d been stronger, I would have found a way of ending my uncle earlier.”
He wasn’t hearing her. “A twelve-year-old against an alpha? You need to let go of the guilt, Hayden. Let go of the past. You can’t change it, and Drake’s not the brother you protected as a kid. He’s a grown shifter, responsible for thousands of deaths. At some point you will have to put the brother you knew to rest in your heart so we can eliminate Drake, the alpha who’s about to kill thousands maybe millions of humans. That is the shifter who Damien’s asking you to fight, not the ten-year-old brother you love.”
“I can’t separate him in my head. Drake will always be my younger brother, the kid I didn’t help, the kid who still needs help and whom I’m failing to help.”
Mila took a deep breath. “Then Damien needs to find another to challenge him. Maybe Callen or Frank.”
“It doesn’t work that way. They’re not from the pack. They can’t challenge. They’d be stopped at the border.”
“But you can challenge? Even though you killed the prior alpha?”
“Yes. Pack rules.”
“Then do it.”
“Excuse me?”
