Page 55 of These Monstrous Ties
His eyes linger on the cut on my thigh, but he doesn’t ask about it.
He yanks me to my feet, pats me dry with a towel, and puts me in a white robe. Then he sits me down on a leather chair in a hotel room, and he starts to pace in front of me.
One of his guards comes in and offers me a glass of water. I want to throw it back in his face. I want to scream at the top of my lungs. But instead, I take the water and drain it, then set the glass on the coffee table.
The guard looks to Jamie, who gives him a curt nod, and then he leaves.
Jamie stops pacing.
He’s grown up. When we were separated, he had been a boy. Eight years old. Now, he’s a man. Broad-shouldered, muscular, still dressed in that hoodie and dark jeans. His jaw had angled out, his neck is corded with muscle.
“How did you find me?” I ask him. I want to scream at him, but I don’t have the strength. I can’t get to my feet. Humiliation washes over me in waves. From the way he found me to the way he had scrubbed me clean as if I were impure. To the fact that Lucifer left me. He had broken me and then he had left me.
Jamie tilts his head up to glance at the ceiling. The hotel has to be a five-star one. I’ve seen it before, beyond a hill past my apartment. But I’ve never wondered about it. I met clients in my home or theirs, but I didn’t do hotels. I wanted the profits. I needed them. Besides, most of my clients couldn’t afford both a hotel and my services. They had to pick one, which was fine with me.
What I don’t understand about this place is that…Jamie seems to own it.
“I searched for you,” he finally says, chest heaving as he stares at me.Glaresat me. “I searched for you for a long, long time, Sid. Where the fuck have you been?”
And that propels me to my feet. I leap at him, my finger poking into his chest. “Where the fuck haveyoubeen?” I growl, anger lighting my veins. “Where the fuck have you been, Jamie? You were supposed to look out for me! You were my big brother! Where the fuck have you been? How did you find me?”
He catches my wrist in his hand and lowers it between us. “Don’t do that.”
“Don’t do what?” I hiss. I’m nineteen now, and he’s twenty-three. But in that moment, I feel like his kid sister again, five years old and screaming his name as social services pulled us apart. We never came back together.
Not until now.
“Don’t blame me,” he says, shaking his head. He’s still holding my wrist in his hand. “Don’t do that.” His expression seems…anguished. Some of the anger in my chest melts away. It turns into grief. “Where were you, Sid? All this time?”
I close my eyes. He pulls me closer to him, and when I meet his gaze again, we’re close enough to share breath. “I was moved here, right after we were…right after we were separated. Then I…” I swallow, wondering how the fuck to sum up fourteen brutal years in one sentence. “I bounced around. Last year, when I turned eighteen, dropped out of high school and moved out. Got my own place.”
His eyes darken. “I’ve been looking for you,” he says quietly.
“I’ve been here,” I answer him. It isn’t exactly true. I’d moved from Raleigh to Alexandria when I moved out of my last foster parent’s house. A house I’d only stayed at for six months before I dropped out of school. They’d wanted the extra money they’d get from the government for giving me a closet-sized room to stay in. I barely remember their names. “How did you find me?” I ask again.
But it isn’t what I really want to know. What I really want to know is something deeper. Where is Lucifer? What happened to me in the night? There was no sign of the party when we had left, but I’d seen the fire pit on our way out of the park, surprisingly burned down to nothing. It hadn’t been a dream. The cut on my leg…
But my entire body still aches, as if I’ve been run over by a truck. There are bruises all over me.
“I need to know what happened last night,” I finally whisper. “What happened to me?” I swallow down the lump in my throat. “Why were you withthem?”
He lets go of my wrist and I think he’s going to turn away from me. I think he’s going to leave me again. But instead, he wraps his arms around me, and pulls me into his hard chest.
I resist, at first, stiffening under his touch. I don’t rest my head against him. Not at first. His scent swirls around me, fresh laundry and cologne, but something else too. Something like smoke. Bonfire smoke. From the night before.
When did he find out it was me? How long had he watched me while I was unconscious?
A sob creeps its way into my throat and I give in, resting against his shoulder, letting him hold me up.
“What happened to me?” I ask again. “What happened to me, Jamie?”
He tightens his hold on me, pulling me closer, trying to keep me from falling apart.
“I’m so sorry,” he says against my hair. “I’m so sorry I didn’t find you sooner.”
I know that whatever happened, it’s going to be hard to hear. Maybe I don’t want to know. I’m not sure I’ll ever want to know.
Chapter Eighteen
