Page 116 of Drown My Sorrow

Ezy lifts it up and looks at it. “There are footprints leading to the water. And coming out.”

I nod. I’d seen that. The Raines coming out of the ocean and Daane walking to it? Meeting on the shore? I pick up the second card. The present. “I feel such foreboding about this card. Something is happening. Perhaps something we can’t see yet. I feel like I need to warn people about it.”

Ezy picks up the last card. “I know who this is.”

“You do?” I ask in surprise.

“Sure, this is Kelly’s cousin, Bailey. He looks the same as Raider, but he’s got tattoos. Raider has no tattoos.”

I stare down at the card in Ezy’s hands. “Raider and Bailey?”

“Mm, you’ll meet them at some point, I’m sure. But I don’t know what these things mean.” He points around the card to the kings, death, and the woman with the moon.

“I don’t either, but I don’t think it has anything to do with us, anyway. It’s a future vision.”

Ezy sets the card down and turns to me. “If there was one word to describe my flaws and weaknesses, it would be control.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, I need to have control. When we go anywhere, I’m the one who books the hotels, I book how we travel, what we eat and where. I plan everything down to all the details I can control.”

“Why?”

“Because…” He stops, his cheeks turning red. “Because I had no control. They controlled everything. My entire life. What I wore, where I slept, who I could speak with. Until I was twenty-one, my parents tortured me with their need to make me into their little drone. So my flaw is control.”

He shifts uneasily.

“I need to,” he shakes his head as if this entire conversation is excruciatingly painful, “and when we found you and the bonds. I just lost it. It was like standing there in a ballroom again while my mother told me I have to marry a girl who hadn’t even turned eighteen yet so I could further their business contracts. It was just so overwhelming, and it made me act like a moron, and that is no excuse for what I did!” He looks at me in panic. “I’m not making excuses, I’m just…I want you to know me. So you know when I apologise, I mean it.”

He takes a deep breath and turns so his knees are touching mine.

“I am sorry for the way I treated you. For blocking your email, for being an obnoxious asshole when the guys brought us home, for trying to put the Daane in jail, and for not getting them out the second you were upset. From the bottom of my heart, I’m sorry.”

I swallow thickly and nod, itching to pull my hands back. He seems to sense it and pulls his back instead.

There is one thing I’m curious about. “Those emails that we exchanged-”

“Yeah?” Ezy looks up, his expression tightening.

“Did you mean them? Were they real?”

I’m scared to ask, scared to know the answer. But I have to. It’s been eating at me since I met him, since he vanished. And after last night, I need to know if the guy I fell in love with really existed.

“Every single word. Those conversations I had with you were some of the most honest conversations I’ve ever had with anyone in my life. I think that’s why I was so devastated when you didn’t show up. My feelings got hurt, and instead of trying to figure out why, I just decided to run. But everything I said was true and real.”

“Even the fear of bugs?”

Ezy laughs, and I’m instantly and irrevocably entranced by him. “Especially the fear of bugs.”

“I didn’t give permission for Keagan to read your emails. But the Daane seem to have a questionable understanding of boundaries.” I say it as not an apology but an explanation.

“Not true at all,” Beau says, wandering across the room and perching on Ezy’s lap. “I understand that everything that has to do with you is in my boundary.”

We both ignore the momentary stiffening of the alpha before he relaxes and, to my surprise, slips his arms around Beau’s waist.

If his opinion and behaviour can change.

Can mine?

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