Chapter 44: Dead of Wynter: Chapter 43

Everett’s body still vibrates with anger twenty minutes after the words leave Storm’s mouth and I dragged him away to cool down. We can’t be at each other’s throats. That’s what they want. They want to divide us because we’re easier to take down one at a time than we are all at once. I don’t need to be involved in the darker sides of Frost to know that, it’s a basic business maneuver, one I’ve used myself a time or two.

I’m sitting on Everett’s lap on the lounge across the room from where Storm still has his head in his hands. The evidence of his earlier outburst is still scattered across the room, but I can’t move right now, not while Everett is holding on by a thread. I keep thinking if I hold him a little tighter, if I kiss him a few more times, maybe it will settle the barely contained rage beating through his body, but it doesn’t.

“Can I ask you something?” I whisper.

“Anything,” he replies immediately.

“Why do you call me dove? I’ve never asked, but I’ve always been curious.” I’ve ached to ask this question for fourteen years, ever since the first time he called me it and my heart burst from the nickname the boy I had a crush on gave me.

A small smile tugs at his lips and some of the tension he’s holding fades away beneath me. “When I was a kid, my mother and I used to go to this park in the afternoons after school to avoid my dad. He was only ever home for a few hours, and we tried to stay out of the apartment for as long as we could. And every day we saw this family of doves. They were so peaceful to watch, and even though there was a playground there, I used to find myself sitting beside my mom watching them. You bring me that same peace, and the same happiness I felt when I was a kid watching the doves with my mom.” He smiles sadly and my heart bursts with love for the man holding me.

I blink back tears of joy as I gather his face in my hands and lean down to capture his lips with mine. This kiss is slow and gentle, but full of emotion. For the first time since he’s been back I’m not hurried in my movements, just needing to feel his lips on mine, his tongue dancing with my own, as we say all the words through the movement.

Footsteps in the hallway make us part, but I rest my forehead on his, not ready for the moment to be broken. There’s so much I need to say to Everett, but I’m not sure I have the words, and I think he feels the same. He’s still avoiding telling me why he left, and I’m starting to think I may not want to know.

The door opens and Rayne and Tommy trudge in. They’re still in their tactical gear, black combat boots and a mixture of blood and dirt covering their faces, but I don’t flinch. Somehow this isn’t the most disturbing thing I’ve seen tonight. “Make sure you shower before you go see Emerson,” I say. She isn’t as fragile as he thinks she is, but she worries about him. Every time he walks out the front door she’s worried, and him coming home covered in the blood of our enemies probably isn’t going to do much to ease that concern.

His eyes meet mine briefly before looking to Everett, and then Storm. “What the fuck happened?”

“Another package was delivered,” Storm mutters from behind the desk, finally looking up at the rest of us.

Tommy moves straight to the other side of the room and perches on the arm of one of the seats, and a moment later he’s got his knife out dragging it across his forearm. I remember the first time I watched him do this with horror, but after a while it was almost mesmerizing. He never presses hard enough to draw blood, or at least not when he’s been around me, but just enough for a bite of pain.

Rayne’s eyes widen and his eyes dart to the box still open on the desk. I’m not really sure what we do with this kind of thing, and honestly, I don’t think I want to know. As involved as I want to be, I still think there are things I’m better off not knowing. “What’s in it?”

Everett’s body stills beneath me again, the calm I had managed to push on him gone in an instant, but it’s Storm who answers. “My mistakes.”

I sigh and climb off Everett to cross the room to where Storm is sitting. “You need to snap out of this self-pitying bullshit. You made a mistake, but we’re your family, we’re not going to hold it against you forever.”

“I might,” Everett mumbles and I roll my eyes.

“Do I want to look?” Rayne asks.

“They know about what Craig did to me,” I tell him.

“Craig, as in your old security?” Tommy questions, his first words since he walked into the room.

I let out a long breath. “Without rehashing the worst day of my life, Craig hurt me pretty badly, and the Russos have photos of my injuries.”

“Photos? Who the fuck took photos of your injuries?” Rayne’s eyes meet mine with a blaze of fury behind them, and rather than responding I look at Storm, waiting for him to explain himself, but he doesn’t.

“You had photos taken of our sister’s beaten ass?” Rayne growls.

“As collateral if Craig’s family ever came knocking.”

“What the fuck happened with Craig?” Tommy growls and I let my head drop back as I take deep breaths to calm my racing heart. I never thought I would have to tell anyone what happened, and in the space of a week I’ve told more people than I have in the eight years since it happened.

“Just look in the box,” I mumble as I collapse into one of the chairs across the desk from Storm. If we’re going to talk about what our next steps are, I want to be front and center. They’re coming after me, and I deserve to be a part of the planning.

I stare at the ceiling while I wait for the two of them to check what’s in the box, and when both of them make an inhuman sound, I know they’ve seen the doll. Everything else in the box is disturbing, but it’s not a creepy doll that looks like me complete with the marks that still haunt my nightmares.

“What the fuck is this?” Tommy roars and my eyes immediately flit to him, a look of rage I’ve never seen on the already terrifying man.

Rayne takes the doll from him and he looks to me, pain and regret clear on his face. “You don’t want to know,” he mumbles to Tommy.

“Okay, enough about the package. They’re coming after me because I was the one that made the threat at the funeral, which at least means we know who they’re going to keep coming for. My question is, what are we going to do next? We obviously have a rat. There’s no other explanation for how anyone knows Everett’s nickname for me, or how they knew to clear out the warehouse. So who knew we were going to do this tonight?” I ask.

“Everyone in our ranks,” Rayne replies. “We wanted everyone on high alert for such a big operation. We needed to make sure if there was a possibility we were all taken out, that we weren’t leaving any businesses or our people as sitting ducks.”

I sigh. “Okay, new question. Everett, can you have a look at cameras in the area, maybe the highways that lead to and from the warehouse to see if we can figure out when they moved it?”

Everett finally joins the rest of us around the desk, picking up the monitors Storm threw across the room and by some miracle they turn on. When he notices my surprise, he smirks and a short, dark chuckle fills the room. “After the fourth set I had to replace I built heavy duty monitors so they could withstand Storm’s tantrums.”

I shake my head and lean back in my chair, something tells me it’s going to be a long fucking night and there’s entirely too much testosterone in this room for my liking.