Page 122 of Knot Playing Fair 2

The words burned like hot coals on their way out, leaving me hollow inside... but with an odd kind of sick relief once they’d finally been set free.

Three sets of eyes landed on me like lead weights, but Nat was the one who rounded on me, stomping over to loom above me on the couch. He looked...incandescently angry, and I wasn’t sure why.

“Youshoved us behind youin the alley when the van pulled up.” His voice was low and choked. “You took aknife woundtrying to fight them off. You picked the lock on a fifty-year-old door in the pitch dark with a piece of rusty wire, so we could get free after they took Luca away at gunpoint. You staggered after me with an injured leg and critical blood loss, and you fuckingshot a guy who was about to shoot me!”

Mia sucked in a shocked breath that almost sounded like a sob. Her hands flew up to cover her mouth.

“Byron, you savedbothof us,” Nat finished, an audible tremor beneath the words.

I didn’t want to hear this. I didn’t deserve anyone talking about me like this. I couldn’t seem to move, though. Not except my hands, which were shaking as badly as Nat’s voice. When had that happened?

“It’s true,” Luca said quietly, meeting my eyes with a determined air. “Every word. It’s all true. I know it makes me a bad person, because I should wish that you’d never been taken. That way you’d have been safe. You wouldn’t have gotten hurt. But... I don’t know what I’d have done if you hadn’t been there, Byron.Bothof you, really.”

I tried to draw breath to deflect, and I couldn’t. My lungs weren’t working... someone had welded hot metal around my ribcage. Something perilously close to panic flooded me as I fought for breath, only managing a sort of choked hitching noise. Mortification flooded me.

I did not do this kind of shit. I did not lose my cool. I did not show my disgusting weakness like this.

“Oh,Byron,” Mia said, her voice thick with tears.

She and Luca reached me at the same moment, bracketing me from either side—soft omega arms wrapping around me. The band around my chest snapped, but what emerged was a strained sort of keening noise.

Mia’s hand cradled the back of my head, drawing me down until my face rested against the crook of her shoulder. I should have resisted, but I was too weak. I buried my nose in the scent of elderflower and tried not to acknowledge the dampness squeezing from the corners of my eyes, as the hitching of my chest grew worse.

“It’s all right, Nat,” Mia said softly, the words vibrating against my cheek. “Come here. I already told you—you’re a part of this, too.”

For a moment, I struggled to make sense of what she was saying... until the weight of a third body dipped the couch on Mia’s far side, and a larger hand settled on my shoulder, squeezing it with a grounding pressure.

“I don’t know how this is supposed to work, or what the end result is supposed to look like,” Nat said, sounding suspiciously congested himself. “But I’m willing to try if the rest of you are.”

I squeezed my eyes more tightly shut, surrounded and held up by three people... trying to convince myself that it was safe to lean on the support they were offering.

FIFTY-ONE

Mia

THE FOLLOWING WEEKfelt like floating in limbo. The restaurant was open for lunch service on Christmas Eve, but closed on Christmas Day. The guys hadn’t been kidding about not doing much of anything for the holiday.

Or, rather, theydidhave a tradition, but it wasn’t any sort of a personal or pack thing. Bright and early on Christmas morning, they all filled up their vehicles with practical, professionally wrapped gifts and drove across the river to the Hope Project. There, they opened the place up for any of the kids who didn’t have a stable home life, giving out warm coats and socks, gift cards, and other sundry items that might be useful to a teenager living on the edge.

A depressing number of kids showed up to take advantage of the project’s generosity.

Nat and I had gone with the others in a show of solidarity, contributing eight dozen festively decorated Christmas cookies that he and I had whipped up the previous evening. Those, too, did not lack for takers.

I felt bad that I hadn’t managed to shop for gifts for the others... although, in my defense, therehadbeen a few other things going on lately. I did, however, insist on making a big, traditional Christmas dinner. Also, somewhat ironically, thetrashy alphomic romance novel I’d picked out for Emiel from an online bookstore had showed up the previous day, packaged innocently in a brown padded envelope.

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