He shook his head no.
“Cade, Lucas and I need this,” I said, but really I needed it. I needed him to leave, to leave me with my thoughts and my feelings, and to get a moment to sort through all of them. Love would shatter me, and I think I knew that this was exactly where it was headed. I rubbed at the scrape on my neck that was left from our activities the night before.
We’d done that.
And how was I to know that I could survive when my best friend lay in a hospital bed not surviving what we’d both fought so hard for.
Sobriety meant making healthy choices, even when they felt like the most painful ones.
“I don’t trust myself with you, Cade. I need this. I need time,” I whispered.
His stare was full of frustration. “I’m not good at waiting, Izzy.”
I rolled my lips between my teeth, not sure I could hold out much longer away from him anyway.
He sighed and ran a hand through his thick hair. “Do you have anyone you can call to be here with you?”
“Other than security for no good reason?” I pointed at some of the men in suits. What could I say? I couldn’t bring myself to call my family. Delilah would be concerned. They’d worry, and their worry would bring the weighted guilt of what I’d already done to them. “I’m fine here on my own. I’d like Lucas to have his privacy.”
“It’s still good to have support,” he pointed out.
I wondered if he believed that, if he ever had support. “Would you call your family if they worried constantly about you relapsing?”
He tilted his head like he was considering it. “Sure. Bastian would be there.”
I gulped as he said his brother’s name. Sebastian Armanelli. It should have brought a lot more fear than it did. “You love your brother?”
He smiled like he knew the real question I was asking. “I will always love my brother, dollface. And I stand by everything he’s done and does, even all the mistakes he’s made. Just like I’m sure your brothers and sister would do for you. Family doesn’t shrink from your mistakes and disappear; they just sink their roots in deeper to get you out.”
I bit my lip because I wanted to believe what he was saying, because I wanted to think that my family didn’t want to rid themselves of their bad wolf, but I couldn’t. Instead, I just shrugged.
“Ah, it’s something that’s learned, Izzy. We’ll have you figure it out one day.” Cade motioned to the food. “Now, sit and eat your sandwich.”
I sighed. Even if I was hungry, eating anything right now felt ridiculous. “I wish he’d wake up to eat with me. He loves subs. Or that they’d at least let me in to see him.”
“They will soon enough. Now eat. I made it a priority to feed you on that retreat. You’ll have to do it on your own now while you make me wait to be a part of your life for God only knows what reason that is today.”
I grumbled that he might be waiting a long time and then asked, “Why is it a priority that I eat?”
“We can’t give Gerald the satisfaction of you losing your ass, now, can we?”
It was an insult or a joke or maybe a compliment. Either way, he got the first smile pulled from me that day as I listened to him and sat down.
Before he left, the man strode up to me and tipped my face up to his. “It’ll be okay, baby doll. I promise.”
Then he kissed my forehead and walked over to the nurse’s station.
Cade wasn’t a god. He wasn’t a doctor. He wasn’t even a nurse. Yet I believed him. Maybe because I wanted to or maybe because amongst the men in our world, Cade really was a higher power of some sort.
Further proof of it showed when, not a minute later, a nurse came to usher me back to Lucas’s room and I saw Cade standing down the hallway, giving us a final nod like he’d orchestrated getting me into his room.
I didn’t have time to read into it. I was focused on Lucas as I hurried into the sterile, overly clean room. The white curtain was pulled back and the monitors were beeping as my big lug of a friend lay there, quiet, peaceful, and without a smile on his ever-happy face.
Lucas looked like he was resting, and I hoped he felt like it too. I hoped he was putting his demons to bed as he slept in between the world of life and the one of death.
Crying for him wouldn’t do him any good, but I did it anyway. Then I tucked in his sheets just right and rearranged his tray table to make sure the tissues were set up there with a cup of water for when he woke. I ordered food that wasn’t perishable, and I turned the TV on low and found BRAVO.
“Look, Lucas, it’s your favorite housewife. Kyle’s about to host another extravagant party. I swear, one day, they’ll realize none of the parties matter. It’s about who you spend your time with instead, huh?”
I hated that tears were running down my face again.
“I used to think it was all about a guy and the parties I went to with him. Can you believe that? Then, he left me and I realized his love was gone and I hadn’t taken the time to figure out how to love myself. Or how to love my family and the people who were really there for me, you know?”
It was a good reminder that I needed to go see them. That I needed to hug the ones I loved and cherish them every single second of every single day. They deserved that and so much more from me. Self-loathing after addiction was a bitch to get over, especially when I could recall the way they all cried for me, how my mother’s face broke when she saw me high. It’s funny how blackout gone I could be but the hardest glimpses of my reality were still etched in stone.
Now I just wanted to make them proud, do something better for the world than be an addict. The world deserved the good, not the bad, especially my family.
“Lucas, I found out some information, and I’m going to find out more. I’m going to show you we can be more than just this. You get that we can, right? We don’t have to fall back into the same patterns. We’re stronger.”
Maybe I was telling myself, maybe I was close to relapsing, maybe all this stress and emotion wasn’t good for me.
Or maybe I was right.
Without great risk, there’s no great reward, right?
I left the hospital quietly, rounding a corner and leaving Cade’s security behind. I didn’t want a tail or anyone to witness that I was going to dig and dig deep into the Albanians. I had a new mission.
One I was going to take care of on my own.
25
Cade
I was well aware that Lucas wouldn’t be coming into the office, but Izzy flat out didn’t show. I’d called my security for the last time Sunday night, and they’d confirmed her whereabouts. I’d received no update other than that she was safe. So I’d tried not to check my security on her.
Truth be told, I had fucking facial recognition notifications set up everywhere for her, I could hack her computer or her phone, and I contemplated doing all of it.
But she’d asked for time. She wanted privacy for her and her friend. I tried to understand it. I tried to give her that.
She deserved that after I saw the way she held her friend, after I saw the look of terror on her face. Babying her wouldn’t help. She didn’t want it anyway. She needed and wanted to feel like I trusted her to handle it.
I did. I had to. Or at least I was going to try to.
Except now she hadn’t shown up to work, and it was half past her normal start time.
I grumbled to my brother on the phone about it.
“Wait. You went to the hospital to drop off candy canes?” my brother asked again.
“You want me to hang up on you or finish the story?” I shoved away from my desk and wondered what the hell I was doing in a corporate office anyway. I could be at home where I had five screens set up instead of four and be getting much more done.
Especially considering all I was doing was walking out my damn office door to check to see if she’d shown up.
“Well, did you call her?”
“No.” I wasn’t going to either. I was becoming a goddamn stalker. I’d checked the fucking hospital records just to make sure I could ease the pain in her eyes instead of having her wait for the nurses to give her the update. Let’s be honest, those nurses weren’t giving updates fast enough in my opinion, anyway.
She needed time to digest her feelings for me, and I probably needed the same.
Bastian snickered over the phone, and then I heard him repeat everything to his wife.
“Why are you telling Morina about the candy canes?” I asked, my voice laced with anger. He was purposely trying to piss me off.
“Because you got it bad. Haven’t you been following Izzy around for years?” Then he muffled the phone again to tell Morina that indeed it was Izzy. I hated that everyone knew her from her undercover work, and now she was working directly under me, making my life a living hell.