Page 18 of Mated to the Kingpin

My stomach clenches. The world tilts. Salt bites behind my eyes.

“I should have forced him to wear the belt. I should never have picked him up that night. I should have—” He cuts himself off, looking away like the sky might forgive what he cannot.

“You were twenty-three” I manage. “You were barely an adult, both of you.”

“I was his best friend,” he spits. “I’m a fucking werewolf, for fuck’s sake. I was stronger, smarter, faster. I was supposed to protect him.”

“That doesn’t make you a god,” I whisper. “You were just a boy doing his best.”

He turns to me slowly, and what I see in his face makes my throat close. It’s despair, and something worse: resignation.

His voice drops. “That’s the night I stopped being a boy, Claire.”

A bat zigzags past above us, its shadow flickering against low clouds that press like heavy cotton across the canopy. For a moment, the clearing pulses with the press of memory and heat.

Tears spill down my cheeks without permission.

“I was still in the hospital when your dad came by,” he says. “Told me I’d done enough to hurt you and your family. He said that if I tried to come to the funeral or see you, he’d press charges. Or worse.”

My hand is shaking at my side.

“I didn’t know,” I whisper. My voice is threadbare, weak. “All this time... I thought you didn’t care.”

His lips curve into something broken. “I cared so much I let myself rot.”

“You let me rot too,” I snap, the words ripping from my chest before I can stop them. “You let me sit there with nothing but silence and funeral songs and a box of ashes that used to be my brother. With parents who made his death a political performance.”

His breath catches, but I barrel forward, unable to stop the flood breaking loose inside me. The pain is too sharp, too old, too wild.

“You were supposed to be there for me, Liam. Even if you hated me. Even if looking at me reminded you of him. You were supposed to show up.”

“I couldn’t,” he croaks, jaw clenched like he’s swallowing down glass. “Claire?—”

“Yes, you could,” I say, louder now, trembling as I speak. “You could’ve figured out a way. You could’ve met me somewhere or sent a damn text message, or a goddamn carrier pigeon. Instead, it was like you both died that night.” My voice cracks hard on the last word.

Liam exhales sharply, like the accusation steals the wind from him. He looks away, one hand gripping the back of his neck so tightly I see the muscles flex along his forearm.

“I wanted to see you.”

“Then why didn’t you?!”

“Because I was drowning!” he bursts out, his voice rough, shaking at the edges. “Because every time I closed my eyes I saw his grin before the crash, or the way his body looked after. Because I had his blood under my nails and in my fucking teeth. And then your dad tells me I’ve ruined everything, and I believed him. I didn’t deserve to stand beside you after that.” He turns to face me fully again, and for once, there’s no hardness to hide behind. Just something stripped bare, wounded.

“And because I was being pulled deeper into the family,” he continues lowly, like each word costs him. “Into the criminal side. For me, the O’Reilly name isn’t just a birthright, but a fucking crown of thorns. My father made me underboss three days after we buried Seth. Said it was time I stopped running from commands and learned to rule.”

I stare at him, stunned as the weight of those words drags silence between us.

“I didn’t want to drag you into it,” he says after a beat. “You still lived in the light. You still had pieces of your innocence left. And I... I had nothing but rot and teeth.”

Something twists violently in my chest. Part of me—stupid, still soft—understands. Part of me wants to reach across the space between us and pull him back from wherever he’s been drifting these last ten years.

But most of me is splintered. Split down the seam of heartbreak he left behind.

“No,” I whisper. “You don’t get to say that. You don’t get to decide what I could or couldn’t handle. You didn’t protect me, Liam. You abandoned me.”

He flinches. I see it. The truth slices him open the same way it split me a decade ago.

“You were my friend,” I say, my voice shaking. “Beyond the crush, beyond all the stupid fairy-tale shit in my diary—before any of it—I thought we were friends. And friends don’t disappear without saying goodbye.”

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