Angel Blackwood (21 page)

Talon storms into the
bedroom and I sense the anger and hostility coming from him. He
glares at me and speaks in a deathly even tone.

“Hurt her again
and I’ll make sure Alpha gives me permission to end you. Blood or
not, you touch our mate that way again and I
will
make
sure she rejects you… That’s if you haven’t already just changed
her mind about wanting us.”

He leans
against the windowsill and lets out a
deep breath, leaning his elbows on his knees, hair falling to cover
his face. He always looks so untidy, but apparently girls liked
that shit, calling it rugged. Whatever the fuck that
means.

“Start talking! Tell me
how we’re going to fix this shit. I think we’ve gone too far. I
know you don’t mean half the shit you say to her, so tell me how
we’re going to fix it?” Talon says, looking up at me.

I’m usually the
problem solver, the one with all the answers
, but that’s when I’ve had to fix Talon’s fuck ups. I
don’t fuck up, but I know that this time… I’ve fucked up big
time.

“I don’t
know,
” I say truthfully. I can
tell by the look on Talon’s face that he wasn’t expecting that
answer from me.

I sit next
t
o him on the windowsill
resting my head in my hands. “I don’t know what to do.”

“You need to make things
better between the two of you. Apologise and make it better,” he
says.

“Did you see how scared
she was?”

I sit up and look at Talon. He
nods his head.

“How am I gonna get her
to talk to me when she’s so afraid of me? How can she ever forgive
me for what I did? What I’ve done,” I whisper, looking down at the
floor.

“H
ow will she ever
forgive us for the way
we’ve
been treating
her?” Talon says, resting his head against the window behind him
and squeezing his eyes shut.

“We fucked up,”
w
e say
simultaneously.

“She deserves better than
us, Ty… So much better. She deserves to be happy,” Talon
says.

I
know where he’s going with this and
I’ve thought about it before myself, but it hurts too much to say
it out loud.

“You think her second chance
mate will be better than us?” I ask him.

“Look at what we’ve done! What
we’ve put her through!” Talon spits out angrily, standing up and
moving to the other side of the room where he starts to pace.

“You think Alpha wil forgive us
for what we’ve put her through?” he doesn’t give me a chance to
answer.

“No, he’s going
to ba
nish us the minute he
finds out. Either way we are fucking screwed!”

“I know
alright! Don’t fucking talk to me like that
, Talon. We’re both to blame and there’s no use
arguing about it. It won’t change anything. Kate was around when
Angel wasn’t and now…God, Talon. I love Kate. I love Angel too, I
love her too fucking much and I know she’s our mate, but I’m… I’m
afraid to lose Kate. Don’t you understand how hard this is for me?”
I keep my voice down hoping Angel can’t hear.

“Hard for you? This is
pretty fucking hard for me too, bro! I care about Lucy, we’re in
the same fucking boat. I’ve loved Angel from the moment I wrapped
my arms around her that first day, but she’s so fucking closed off,
she keeps so much shit from us. How are we supposed to trust her?”
Talon flops backwards onto the bed with a loud curse.

“We need to keep our
space from her until we can figure out what’s best for all of us. I
don’t want to hurt Kate and I know you don’t want to hurt Lucy-” he
interrupts me.

“I don’t want to hurt
Angel either, Ty,” he says.

“W
e won’t. Let’s keep
an eye on her from afar, just until we know what’s best for all of
us, and until we can figure out what we truly want.

“And what are
we supposed to do about Ni
xon,
they’re always together?” He says with a low growl.

“I don’t know the history
between the two of them, but there’s something there. Alpha said
that he was from Point Bright too, so she must have gotten her
father to accept him into the pack. I’m not sure what their
relationship is though, they’re really friendly, but I don’t think
it goes any further.”

Talon lets out a deep growl, I
watch his hands as they turn into fists.

“I don’t want her
touching him, I don’t care what their relationship is. I don’t like
it.”

“Keep an eye on
her
, but don’t get too close.
We’ve got some serious thinking to do, man. I don’t want her to
hurt any more than what we’ve already caused her,” I say standing
and looking out the window.

“Don’t think
it’s going to be that easy
,
man. Someone is
going
to get hurt. We haven’t even thought
of how we can even start to explain this shit to Alpha,” Talon
says, standing up and walking out of the bedroom.

I tiptoe into the
bathroom noticing Angel’s room is pitch black. This causes a pain
in my heart thinking about how much I’ve upset her, she usually
sleeps with the curtains open allowing the moonlight in. I hear her
hiccups and snivelling and realize she’s still crying. I want to
climb in bed with her and hold her tight. Take away her pain and
promise her I won’t ever hurt her again, telling her that I’ll be
with her and never leave her side. I’d tell her I love her and only
her, but all that would be a lie because during the time Angel put
so much distance between us, I met and fell in love with another
beautiful soul named Kate. I never thought I could love someone
that wasn’t Angel this much, but I do. The distance Angel put
between us only pushed me closer to Kate, the only problem is that
neither girl knows who I really am and the secret I hide. I don’t
think either will stick around and wanna be with me once I show
them who I really am; when they see I’m not so perfect after all. I
think Angel is already starting to see the real person behind
everything she thought I was before. She has begun to get a better
idea of who I really am.

I slide down
onto the bathroom floor and wait till her snivelling and
crying dies down completely, until
I’m positively sure she’s asleep. Creeping into the dark room, I’m
able to immediately spot the small bundle in the middle of the bed.
I pull the blankets from over her head and find her soundly
sleeping with her hands curled under her chin; her pillow with damp
patches from where her tears fell.

She’s so fucking
beautiful.

I pull the
covers down slowly to inspect the spots where I hurt her. Lifting
her sleeve, I find a bruise marring he
r pale skin and I’m certain there’s a matching bruise on
her other arm.

“I’m so fucking sorry,
sweetheart.”

I feel the tears falling,
watching them drop onto her skin. I press soft kisses to her upper
arm where the bruise lies, and catch the faint smell of an
unfamiliar scent as I brush my nose against her upper
arm.

Moving my nose
along h
er shoulder and towards
her neckline, the scent is weak and that’s most probably why Talon
didn’t catch it. I have a much stronger sense of smell than he
does. The scent is definitely male… A male from another
pack.

I move my face
away from her neck and
look
down at my sleeping beauty. How can something so pure and innocent
looking, be so cunning and manipulative?

TALON
POV

“What the hell
are we gonna do?” I mumble
to
my wolf throwing a rock into the lake.

“
Who are you
talking to out here?”

I jump and
nearly fall over the dock and into the water when I hear Lucy’s
voice. She walks closer giggling to herself
and shaking her head.

“Fuck, Luce, you gave me
such a fright.” Despite my wolf’s protests, I wrap an arm over her
shoulder and bring her into my side. I can’t help but feel
disappointed when the scent that catches my nose isn’t
Angel’s.

“What did you
mean by, “
What the hell are
you gonna do?
” She mimics in a
deep voice.

Lucy is aware that Angel
is my mate, she knows the history and what went down and I guess
she’s under the impression that I’ll reject Angel. She was there
when I needed someone to talk to and I suppose that’s the reason
why we’re so close. Tyler had started seeing Kate and wasn’t around
much and Lucy and I have been friends for a long time, always
friends though. The girl is wild and she’s the type I usually go
for, that’s exactly why I kept the relationship platonic, but after
Angel’s attack and after things started changing, Lucy was the one
I turned to. I woke up the next morning after one drunken night in
Lucy’s bed and just like that we moved from friends to dating. It
happened so fast and whenever I needed to get my mind away from
thinking about Angel, I turned to Lucy.

I was going
through so much, blaming my brother and
myself for allowing someone to hurt Angel so brutally.
We tried to be there for her, but it was as if she was afraid to be
around us. She closed herself off and continued to move back and
forth every weekend to Point Bright. Alpha’s orders also prevented
us from asking questions about the incident and trying to find out
who had hurt her. He didn’t want to cause her anymore pain in
bringing up the subject; I think he was afraid that if we found out
who whipped her we would beat him to it and kill the fucker
first.

“I will find
the person responsible for hurting our mate and
I will rip him to shreds,”
my wolf, Jett, growls.

“You and me
both!”
I think
back.

Tyler and I
were under the impression that
Angel was going to move to Point Bright indefinitely once
she graduated, that was one of the main reasons I started dating
Lucy exclusively. I needed to move on and be with someone that
wanted me just as much as I wanted them, but that all changed when
Angel came back that night and I found out she was my
mate.

I regret all
the terrible things I’ve said to her and all the terrible things I
have done
, but I needed to
make her feel how much it hurts when you see the one you love with
someone else. I couldn’t stop myself as the hurtful words flew out
of my mouth, I couldn’t control lashing out at her. The memories of
her promising to leave her ex and be with us, and then never
following through entered my mind.

Every single
time she went back to Point Bright to be with
her boyfriend, then coming back smelling like him
felt like a knife to the heart. I don’t want to hurt her, but I
constantly keep doing it. I notice her doing stupid little things
and it just sets me and my wolf off. Every time I see her with
Nixon, every time I see her touching him, I want to release my wolf
and let him do the damage he keeps promising me he will, but I know
it will only cause an uproar in the pack and Angel will never
forgive me for taking away her only friend.

“Uh
hello? Talon, I’m talking to you!”
Lucy waves her hands in front of my face, clearing my thoughts
suddenly.

“
Sorry, I’ve
just have a lot on my mind,” I mutter, as I look back at the lake
and the moons reflection shining off of it.

“You mean
you’ve had a lot of
Angel
on your mind,”
she says, in a snarky tone. I whip my head back to her and glare as
my wolf takes over my words.

“You better
quit with the attitude, she’s done nothing to you.
Show her respect, she’s the Alpha’s
daughter.”

Lucy quickly
looks down at the ground in re
spect letting off a little whine. Her eyes are fixated on
the wooden boards of the dock beneath us as she speaks, “I’m sorry,
honey. I didn’t mean to be disrespectful… I just miss you. We’ve
hardly spent any time together and you haven’t been over to my
place since… well…” she looks up and moves closer to me. “…since
she arrived.”

I run my hand over my jaw and
let out a deep breath.

“I’ve been
busy
, Lucy. Alpha has us doing
more duties now that he’s out of town more often trying to keep the
rogues from entering the allied packs. I have more responsibilities
now.”

I step away
from her
. Her whining and
begging is a major turn off and right now I just need
distance.

She nods her
head. “I get that,” s
he drones
on, but I know she doesn’t get it at all. My brother and I have to
work hard for our place in the pack. Her parents are part of this
pack and she was born into it, therefore she is accepted through
default. Alpha accepted my uncle, Tyler and I with the condition
that we make sure our loyalty is shown. As long as we do, we will
always have a place and be welcome into his pack. We are loyal to
this pack, we love this pack as if we were born into it and I would
never do anything that would make Alpha question my allegiance
because he’s been so good to us. I fear that that will all change
once he finds out how Tyler and I have been treating his
daughter.