SIX MONTHS_(A Seven Series Novel Book 2)

Chapter 29


You don’t officially hit rock bottom until you’ve lost it all. I’d spent years despising my mother, and after I’d been given a fresh start, I wanted to mend the rift between us by trying to understand why she chose the life she did. Why she left Rose and me with our grandma after Dad died, and why she never once showed any interest in turning her life around. Tracking her whereabouts wasn’t difficult because there were only two places in town where she stayed.
This motel housed drug addicts. Every so often, the cops would organize a bust to make a public example, but it never stopped anyone from dealing and using.
My mom resembled nothing of the woman I once knew. Her body was frail and she didn’t look over ninety pounds. Her once beautiful blond hair was now thinning and dry. She had track marks all up her arms and in other places on her bruised body. Two of her teeth were missing and she behaved erratically—talking to herself and twitching, as if incapable of sitting still. I tried sobering her up with coffee, and she kept asking if I had any cash she could borrow. I wanted to buy her groceries and new clothes. I wanted to make her better again so she’d leave this life and stop using.
But you can’t make a user clean.
Mom made a call and thirty minutes later, someone brought her drugs. She had plenty of prescription drugs in the bathroom—either stolen or bought—but they weren’t enough.
I cried. I’d never imagined it was possible to feel so much empathy for a woman who had abandoned me. I mostly cried for the woman and mother she could have been but chose not to be. I cried because deep down, I just wanted to feel my mother’s arms around me and know her love.
Then things went from bad to worse.
She refused to talk about the past and seeing me must have made her shoot up more than normal. I went into the bathroom and broke down, ready to finally walk away for good. But it was so hard. All I’d ever wanted was for my mom to love me. I just wanted to be good enough for her. How could I walk away from the person who gave me life?
That was when it hit me how much our lives ran parallel. But I had something my mom never had.
Hope.
That single word was all encompassing. It bled into our lives as something that divided us—a concept she turned away from. It proved that despite our similarities, we were on different paths because of the choices we’d made.
When I finally emerged from the bathroom, my mom was lying on the bed, arms stretched wide. Her eyes were rolled back and vomit slid down the side of her hollow cheek as she convulsed.
I tried everything to resuscitate her. Despite my efforts, my mother died in my arms. The paramedics didn’t go above the call of duty to save a junkie—nothing beyond a few chest compressions.
What made the situation unbearable was that I told them I didn’t know her. I didn’t want the burden of having to pay for her funeral or cremation.
Exposed for what I was, guilt consumed me. I had sunk so low that I sent my own mother to an unmarked grave to save me the expense. After they took her body away, I spent the next three days in her room, overcome with grief. What kind of person had I become? She’d abandoned me and in the end, I had abandoned her. Loving someone is being selfless, and what exactly had I done in our relationship to demonstrate that I was anything but my mother’s daughter?
I took another swig of whiskey from the bottle, wiping my wet cheeks while sitting on the bathroom floor and staring at a pile of pills on my lap. I’d always been the strong one who kept going when the world went to hell. People looked at my bright hair and smile and never knew the life I led or the painful past I had survived. No one ever wants to look that deep. But it didn’t matter because I didn’t want anyone’s pity; the challenges life had thrown at me had only made me want to fight harder to overcome them.
All I’d ever desired was respect. I didn’t want to be judged for where I came from, but where I was going.
“Oh, Reno.” I wept as memories assailed me. “I wish I could do it all over again. I didn’t deserve you.”
Truly, I didn’t. Part of me wished he cared about me as much as I did him, but he could never love a human. I’d learned a lot in my short stint in the Breed world—most looked upon humans as third-class citizens. I was just a curiosity to him, and men like Reno didn’t pine over women who left them for another man. They got over it and moved on. They sought out gregarious, flirtatious women who had their lives together and balances in check. I, on the other hand, was Romance Novel Girl, living in a fantasy world.
“I always knew those books would be the death of me,” I murmured.
My long legs stretched out wide in front of me. My jean shorts disappeared beneath my oversized black shirt, which was heavy between my legs from a pile of multicolored pills. I wanted to see what my mother had chosen over me, so I’d spent the last hour staring at the tiny pills and tossing them into the toilet one at a time.
It was therapeutic.
“April! Open the door right now!” a man’s voice demanded from outside. Not outside the bathroom door, but even farther. Whoever it was hammered on the door several times while I took another swig from the bottle.
I hadn’t truly grieved her loss, and this was my night to get it all out of my system before I moved on. It wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be. I didn’t have the heart to call Rose and tell her our mom was dead, although she probably would have just hung up. But the memory of the woman who gave life to me lying lifeless in my arms shattered me.
I tossed a pill into the toilet and spouted off another reason why I hated her. But I was honestly running out of reasons. The main ones had already been addressed, and now I was left with some of the good memories, which made it harder to let go.
A loud crash sounded in the other room and I drunkenly lifted my eyes. The bathroom door swung open in front of me and hit the wall with a thud.
“Hi, Trevor.”
His eyes were wide and staring at the pills in my lap.
“Babe, what did you do?” he breathed, moving quickly until he was kneeling on the floor.
“You’re so handsome, Trev.”
He gripped my jaw and forced my mouth open. The next thing I knew, Trevor shoved his finger down my throat and forced me to gag.
“Stop it!” My words were garbled.
But his hand wrapped around the back of my neck and he pushed his finger in deeper. I bit his knuckle and shook my head until he let go.
“April, how many? How long ago?”
“You’re crowding my space,” I argued.
“Get out,” a man’s voice commanded.
“What is this, a party?” I ran my fingers through Trevor’s perfect hair.
A few pills scattered across the floor and when I glanced up, Reno filled the doorway.
“Why is he here? He’s not really here, is he?”
Trevor grabbed my wrist and shouted, “How many did you take?”
Then he was gone.
Reno had yanked him back and had taken his place. His hands cupped my cheeks and he examined my eyes. Then he felt my pulse. Reno held up a few pills and studied them. “Did you swallow any of these, April? Answer my question or I’m going to force you to throw up and take you to the ER where they’re going to pump some vile shit into your stomach.”
“I’m…”
He glanced in the toilet and then looked at Trevor over his shoulder. “Leave us alone and shut the door.”
“Are you crazy? Call an ambulance!”
“She didn’t take these,” Reno said decidedly, brown eyes still on mine. “Did you?”
I shook my head. He knew me too well. As drunk as I was, I didn’t have it in me to cross that line.
“Two minutes,” Trevor growled.
The door closed and Reno took a seat in front of me, moving the bottle aside and taking handfuls of the pills and tossing them in the toilet, which was already full of them.
“My mother’s dead,” I said in a broken voice. No more tears were left to spill, but my heart burned with raw anguish. I’d never felt so gutted—so lost.
Reno leaned in and kissed me softly on the cheek. God, I’d missed him more than I thought. He smelled so good—like pine trees—and I wanted to rewind and do it all over. I’d ruined what we had and there was no erasing my past. I hated hindsight—I wished I could back a truck over it.
“I’m sorry,” he breathed against my skin. “But what is this about? Where’s the girl who has it all together? Where did she go?”
My head rolled to the side and I looked away. “I turned my mother into an addict because I was a stupid kid. I should have been a better daughter.”
He brushed my hair away from my face and leaned in so close that my leg had somehow wrapped around his waist.
“You told me when your mother started doing heavy drugs. Juvie. But did she drink before then?”
I didn’t answer and he gripped my shoulders.
“Dammit, April. Let me in.”
“Yes. She’d hit the bottle now and again but was never a user. Maybe some weed—I don’t remember.”
“You don’t get it. She was already an addict. She just traded out the booze for something stronger. It wasn’t you that drove her to f*ck up her life the way she did. She couldn’t cope with her problems and tried to dull them away. Maybe she had a messed-up childhood or something dark you never knew about her. Don’t blame yourself for what that woman did to you. You’re entitled to a night of hitting the bottle after all that you’ve been through, and I’m cool with that. I’ll sit here and have a drink with you. I’ve been through some rough shit in my life and hit some pretty low points; those who have been there know what it’s about. Those who haven’t, judge. I’m not here to judge you, April. You’ve got some personal demons you need to battle and I want you to win. Do what you need to do in order to deal with this and get past it. But don’t shut me out.”
“I wish I hadn’t screwed things up with us.”
“Yeah, well. People f*ck up. Doesn’t mean you go through life punishing yourself for it,” he said in bristly words, brushing the last few pills away from me. “I’m not perfect by a mile. I got a toolbox full of issues and I’m not a big talker, so that shit mostly stays locked up.”
I lifted my eyes. “You’re not a big talker? Everything you say to me changes my life in ways that you don’t even realize. You fix me with your kindness.”
His eyes melted and he held my left hand, brushing his thumb over the top knuckles. I studied his features and admired the man before me. His eyes were coffee brown and not wide, but narrow and kind. And his masculine nose and jaw didn’t seem to stand out as much as those carved lines in his cheeks or the tiny scar on his lip that used to be mine. He had recently shaved and I touched his smooth chin, pinching the tip and feeling a pang of guilt that made me let go.
“Don’t,” he said, capturing my wrist and bringing it back up to his face. “Keep doing that.”
I outlined his thin mouth and scratched my fingers along his short sideburns, noticing how attractive his widow’s peak looked on him. When I pinched his earlobe, he smiled, deepening those lines in his face. What a handsome man Reno was when he smiled.
“I have a confession,” he said, and I got the feeling by the way he was averting his eyes that it wasn’t something he wanted to admit.
“You regret having slept with a human?”
Reno reluctantly reached in his pocket and opened his fingers. I glanced down at his hand and saw a familiar red item settling in the crease of his palm.
“My cherry earring,” I said, nonplussed. I lost it months ago and they were my favorite pair that I wore to work. “How—”
“Six months ago, you drove by the house with Lexi and I was outside playing horseshoes. I thought I was hallucinating when I saw you step out of the car. Damn, I couldn’t even speak when you looked at me with those hazel eyes. You were like an angel fleeing from a devil when you ran to your car and sped off. I found this on the driveway and…”
“What?”
He tucked it back in his pocket and lowered his eyes. “I’ve carried it with me ever since. A good luck charm I never leave home without. Ever. Austin caught me off guard once with an emergency and halfway down the road, I turned back around to get it.”
Holy smokes. “Some luck,” I muttered.
“Yeah,” he said with a dazed smile, gently cupping my face with his warm hands and centering his eyes on mine. “Brought you back to me, and I’d say that’s pretty damn lucky. I don’t think you’re aware of one important detail, and I’m going to clear the air so there’s no confusion. You’re my girl and I’m putting my claim on you. Maybe I still need to earn it, and that’s fine, but you’re not walking out of this room without knowing what you mean to me. You’ve got my heart. You’ve got my loyalty. You’ve got everything a man can give a woman, including my love. Yeah, that’s right, princess. Love. The first time I saw your eyes, my chest squeezed so damn tight I couldn’t breathe. But what sealed the deal was the first night we slept together. And I don’t mean the sex, but lying next to you in bed and talking. The same feeling I get when I’m on my bike and thundering ninety on an open stretch of road, I get when I’m with you. I feel alive when you’re in my arms, and that’s a helluva thing for a man like me to admit. Trevor was wrong when he called you submissive, and he knows it. When life keeps kicking a man down and he gets right back up, that’s strength. You’re just finding your way in this world and keeping your chin high, and that’s what attracts me. You’re a proud woman and I love you because you ain’t perfect. I’ve never felt like this, and I’m not about to screw it up by letting you go.”
“You don’t mean that.”
Please God, let him mean that! my inner voice screamed with giddy excitement. I didn’t want to imagine that he was just messing with my head. It would kill me, because I still had strong feelings for him I couldn’t erase. Reno was a man I wanted to know everything about, who not only made me feel safe, but happy. Nothing I told him about my past shocked him, and it made me want to open up to someone for the first time. Even Trevor didn’t know all the details of the baggage I carried around.
“I say what I mean. How ’bout that?”
“You don’t think I’m broken?”
His forehead touched mine. “We’re all broken. Don’t you see that? We’re just pieces of ourselves, trying to fit with someone else to become whole. You and I fit.”
“I don’t want anyone talking down to me because I’m a human.”
“And I won’t let any man utter an unkind word to you without my fist breaking every bone in his face,” he said in chilling words. “You have my word on that.”
“Don’t you want to ask me about Maddox?”
“Not really. I’m not your judge and jury.” Then he looked up in my eyes, just a breath away. “I do want to know what happened between you and Sanchez.” His eyes became a smoldering inferno.
“He’s dead now and it doesn’t matter. Nothing happened.”
“Nothing between us, April. No secrets. I can’t be with a woman who has shadows in her life she won’t let me see.”
I licked my lips and lowered my eyes to his mouth. “I owed him, as you know. We were at the warehouse and part of the payment he wanted was for me to take off my shirt. Nothing happened. He just stared at me and… you know. I was scared to say no to him because we were alone and he had a knife.”
His eyes closed as if he were processing it and every muscle in his face hardened. “You’ll never be alone, princess. I’m going to protect you. No scumbag will ever treat you like that again,” he promised, softly kissing the corner of my mouth.
God, the way his lips moved across my jaw. Some of the alcohol buzz was dissipating and I felt intoxicated with bliss.
“Tell me something about you,” I asked of him. I had to know more than just the man I saw, but a glimmer of who he once was. “Something no one else knows. Tell me about your shadows, Reno.”
His eyes closed heavily before he spoke. “I lost my faith in humanity when I served in the war.”
I spoke cautiously. “What happened?”
“Second World War. We liberated the camps and I’ve never seen anything so goddamn horrific before or since. The bodies stacked on top of one another, the women crying… I can’t… I still can’t talk about it. I’ve buried brothers who were just kids themselves, but nothing compares to all the innocents who died. Those children… All these years later, and that’s the one thing that gives me nightmares.”
This strong man fought his emotions as his lips thinned into a mixed expression of anger and pain. His eyes opened and glittered with tears, and I was finally beginning to see his shadows. Maybe Shifter men didn’t allow themselves to feel sorrow or weakness, but it dwelled beneath the surface just as hot and alive as lava beneath a volcano.
I brushed my fingers through his hair. “It’s okay, sweetie. You don’t have talk about it. I understand. Sometimes just knowing something is more meaningful than the details. Maybe war veterans don’t feel like heroes, but you are. It wasn’t even your battle to fight as a Shifter, but you did what you thought was just. That’s admirable. That’s the kind of quality that makes you such a good man.”
His eyes opened and were glittering with pain. I gently touched his hand, realizing my soldier carried his battle scars inside. Maybe words couldn’t comfort a man who suffered from emotional trauma, so all I offered him was a kiss in the palm of his hand. “I can’t begin to imagine all you’ve seen in your life.”
His rich brown eyes settled on mine. “Darkness was all there was until I first saw you. I see a future when we’re together. I feel it in my gut that this is right.”
“I won’t live as long as you will,” I reminded him.
“We can argue about why it won’t work out, or we can make it work. You decide.”
With his lips pressed to my neck, I closed my eyes and let a little more hope back into my life. I wasn’t falling for Reno. I fell for him the day he fixed up my trailer. That’s when I saw the kind of man he was, and it had nothing to do with the things he purchased but rather the sentiment behind his actions. Reno had a generous heart and wanted to take care of a girl without any expectations, just to give her a little piece of happiness in this world. War may have robbed him of his faith in humanity, but he had restored mine.
“Grab your things. I’m taking you home,” he said in a voice that left no doubt.
I wrapped my arms around his neck.
“Didn’t you hear me?”
I placed my mouth against his ear and said in a private voice, “You’re my thing, Reno. My very best thing.”
His arms were everywhere, embracing me and bringing me home. “Wolves mate for life, princess. You up for that?”
“I’m not a wolf.”
“No, you’re not. You’re an angel.” Reno lifted me off the cold tile, securing me in his strong arms as my legs hung down. “Tonight, you’re sleeping in my arms and we’re going to do some spooning. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to have a poster of Billy Joel staring at us.”
A flurry of laughter flew out of my mouth. I kissed the tip of his nose and looked down at him in awe. When he smiled, he looked charming and boyish, and now I knew why Trevor was reminded of the actors he’d seen in the movies. I finally realized that I’d found my storybook romance. Reno didn’t have a white steed or a princely title, but he had my heart.
I’d been so fixated on having a home that I’d never realized how a person could be the very thing I was searching for. Reno was home, and I was finally ready to go.