Chapter 13
Ultimately, Lana’s men didn’t show up again. But Diego did. Everyone had managed to fall asleep at a certain point in the night, which Lana later said wasn’t smart in the slightest and was ready to yell at someone for not staying awake to be the lookout but Diego’s appearance cut her angry rants short. He was haggard. As bad as Drake and Erik looked, he was even worse. Alessia hadn’t seen him physically since the day they were captured and the imprisonment had taken a vast and terrifying toll on him.
“Holy shit,” Erik said, coming forward to catch the stumbling mess that was Diego into his arms and bring him over to lie by the fire.
“We don’t have food or water,” Alessia said, thinking aloud. Diego was skinny. He needed nourishment. He needed medicine and food and water and rest. They could only offer one of those and maybe not even that if Lana’s angry rantings had their way.
“Where are the others?” she demanded, coming forward to grab Diego by the fraying collar of his shirt. The others had been allowed to shower and even change clothes, but he still wore the shirt and pants he’d been in when they first met. The rags had begun to smell and rot. They left him alone to die wherever they’d kept him.
“Give him a minute to breathe,” Alessia said, coming forward and putting a hand on Lana’s shoulder that she quickly shrugged off.
“He’s breathing just fine,” Lana said. “I want to know where my friends are.”
“Don’t know,” Diego grunted out, sounding like a feral animal and Alessia’s heart clenched. She hadn’t spoken with him too much before but now he sounded nothing like a human should, let alone what she remembered him sounding like. He had been broken down and hurt badly. She barely knew him but felt terrible for him.
“You better start knowing,” Lana said, coming forward to grab him more forcibly.
Drake was the one to put his hands on her this time and shove her back. “Calm down. Let the kid have a minute.”
“Oh, please,” Lana said. “You were first in line when it came to fucking with the wolf shifters. Don’t blame Mr. Acceptance now because your girlfriend is watching. I want to know what happened to our people.”
“Your people,” Drake corrected with a snap and sharpness.
“They were your people once too.”
“Maybe I forgot that when you locked me up in a cell.”
“Knock it off,” Erik said, coming forward and pushing Lana back to put himself between her and Diego. “Let the guy sit down and take a fucking breath.”
“He’s a—”
“I don’t care. Shut up and give him a chance to take a minute. He’s a person.”
Erik led Diego over to the place he’d carved out as his own and let him sit gently. He kept his hands on Diego’s back and helped him sit upright. Alessia wondered if he felt a little bit responsible for the whole situation since he was the one who first contacted Diego and asked him to get involved. Alessia was responsible too. She got them both involved. She stepped over to give Diego a reassuring squeeze of his shoulder. She couldn’t offer anything else. They didn’t have food or water or medicine. But she could give him a place to rest.
“Lie back,” Alessia said, whispering quietly and close to his ear. “Just lie back and rest for a bit. The sun won’t be up for a while.”
Diego didn’t need telling twice as he lay back and let out the most satisfying sigh ever heard as he let himself melt into the ground. Alessia wondered how long it had been since he truly slept. She wished she could offer him something better than the forest ground but she knew even that was softer and more comforting than the dark concrete room they’d likely kept him in.
His eyes closed and he seemed to fall asleep right then and there. Alessia turned to look at Erik who met her eyes and something passed between them. It was a pact. They wouldn’t leave Diego alone. He nodded. He’d take the first watch, turning to glare at Lana who watched them both with crossed arms and a huffy glare. Alessia nodded and stood. She had business of her own to take care of as she turned to look at Drake.
He waited for her stare and looked like a deer caught in headlights. She sighed. She was tired—no, she was incredibly exhausted. She was frustrated. She felt useless. And now, she’d been at least somewhat lied to, well, she hadn’t been lied to but Drake liked keeping things, didn’t like talking, kept his past in his past and wanted to keep it hidden from view when it came to Alessia. He wanted her to see the parts of him that he wanted in view. Plenty of people were guilty of that when it came to relationships (if this even was a relationship) but other people also didn’t have such harrowing pasts as him.
She glared at him and nodded to the gathering of trees, beginning to walk there without looking back to see if he was following. He would follow after like a puppy about to be reprimanded. Maybe it wasn’t fair to take out all her frustrations on him. But he was also the person she wanted to trust more than anyone else in the world and here she was, unable to do just that.
They walked into the woods, a place that, only hours ago had been the place where they reacquainted themselves with each other and their bodies. Now it was a place where she planned to ream him a new one, depending on how well the conversation went.
“We need to talk,” she said, turning and crossing her arms, facing him.
He had a small, sheepish smile, and for once, she didn’t find a thing about it that was cute or endearing. He had, quite frankly, pissed her off. She took a breath and held tight to her own crossed arms. His smile faded as his eyes found the ground. The man who had commanded a lecture hall when she first met him was gone now. What had replaced him was a man who was nervous and scared and entirely submissive.
“Are you breaking up with me already?” he asked in jest but she didn’t smile.
“We’d have to be together for that to happen, wouldn’t we?” she said sharply, trying to hurt him. She was seconds away from seeing red. Later, she might regret her words but right now, she just wanted to make him hurt as much as she felt betrayed.
He shut up quickly.
“I like you,” she said, honestly, sounding a little more immature than she meant to but she needed to follow her instincts on this. “But you need to be honest with me.”
“Honest with you?”
“You’re cagey,” she said, shrugging. “You don’t want to talk about anything, you don’t want to let me in. Any time Lana even gets close to revealing something about your past, you shut the whole thing down.”
“Well, would you want someone spilling your darkest secrets in the worst way possible?” he asked.
“No, but it would be a different story if you followed up with the truth. You shut conversations down and then that’s that. It certainly gives the feel that you’re not being honest.”
He sighed and paced forward a little bit. He put his hands on his hips and stared out into the darkness of the woods around them. She watched as he chewed on the corner of his lip and seemed to be doing mental calculations in his head of just how dangerous it would be to tell her the truth, how damaging it would be to their future. She didn’t care at this point. If it turned out he was a serial killer, she wanted to know now.
“What do you want to know?” he asked.
“Have you ever killed anyone?”
“Yes.”
The danger, of course, with hearing things she wasn’t sure she wanted to know—there was no way to unhear it. There was no way to dig that little bit of info out of her ears and remove it from her brain. It would be there forever. Drake was a murderer. That wasn’t exactly news. She’d suspected it. But hearing it spoken to her in such a blunt way hurt.
There were more questions she wanted to ask. She wanted to know just how many people he killed, how sadistic he was when he took to hurting people. These were more details she wasn’t sure she wanted to know the answers to, but they were questions burning at the back of her brain, nonetheless.
She opened her mouth to ask more, to let Pandora’s Box spill out and ruin whatever could have been with Drake. But someone desperately calling her name cut her off first. Erik yelled for her, and Drake. Without a second thought, they ran back to camp.