Right again, but the farm job was behind. Embry was going to work late, and I already knew I couldn’t fucking wait that long.
I left Nash and stomped to my car, aware he was going to follow me—annoyedhe was going to follow me and drowning in irony. This was how Juana felt each and every day. A prisoner in her own fucking life when Embry and my brothers had risked so much to save her from that fate.
Do better. A thought that had me slowing at the junction that would take me to Joe Carter’s farm instead of passing through the green lights. Horns honked behind me. Didn’t give a fuck. I sat in my own little world until Nash rolled up beside me and knocked on the window.
I opened it.
He flipped his visor, his kind eyes full of concern, but I waved it away.
“How soon can we find Juana a new bodyguard?”
22
MATEO
Nash agreed to find out in return for me going home and staying there so he didn’t have to waste time worrying about me.
So home I went. To my empty house, save the moody cat, and quiet phone, missing Embry, missing my kids, and even missing Juana, as despite her unneeded apology, I’d pissed her off enough to go radio silent, leaving the brothers shadowing her to let me know she’d made it home from the school run.
I shut my front door behind me, the noise like sealing a tomb, and drifted to the couch. I felt like smoking, and not cigarettes, but I’d been bullied into promising I wouldn’t so I’d heal faster—I’d healbetter, but as wise as everyone around me seemed to be these days, they probably hadn’t considered how fractured the organ in my skull was without my casual weed addiction propping it up.
Rubi would get it. So would Nash. So wouldEmbry, but for them to understand, I’d have to tell them, and I hadn’t. So I raided the edible stash I’d procured for Saint and gobbled a few.
Then, like a fucking idiot, I lay down on the sofa and waited for them to cure me.
Didn’t happen. I figured I’d sleep, but I didn’t. I thought and thought and thought, every glimmer that popped into my mind an untethered trail of nonsense that brought me a hundred new things to worry about and zero solutions. By the time it grew dark, Juana had taken my kids and emigrated to Australia with her hot new bodyguard, and Embry?
He had a girlfriend and he liked fucking her more than he liked fucking me.
He’s never fucked you.
I sat up, my phone slipping from my chest and thunking to the floor, taking with it the text message I belatedly remembered sending Embry on the endless drive home from the hospital. Six hours of pain and motion sickness that had felt like six weeks.
Six.
The same number of years Embry had been in my life, maybe, if I’d counted right, but my brain skipped away from thinking about it before I could check, dancing back to the fudged words of that message.
thatthing u were goin 2 say... mayB we can xxx
Then, I’d been totally sure he’d been talking about fucking. Now, I was sure of nothing except that I couldn’t feel my legs and my eyeballs seemed too far from my skull for me to see anything clearly.
Fucking edibles.
I needed to call Saint a cunt.
Reached for my phone.
Fell off the couch and stayed on the carpet, tapping into Embry’s message thread instead, finding texts that were two hours old when my phone had been on my chest the whole time I’d been home.
Fucking edibles.
I rubbed my face, flinching at the tidiness I found there. I’d forgotten Alexei’s assault on my appearance and wondered if it was why I didn’t feel like myself and why I couldn’t remember how I’d felt before he’d taken a blade to my beard.
My phone buzzed.
I jumped and knew I needed to get up and eat something before the overdose of THC came out of me the same way it had gone in.
Fucking hell. I hadn’t whitied from skunk since I was a teenager. Since before Liliana had been born. Cos I’d been a person then too, and I’d had nothing to worry about except avoiding beat feds and my pisshead old man.